Peter This week, we’re exploring the loneliness and sleep deprivation of the long-distance solo sailor. How do you survive for days on end? Not on forty winks, but barely a couple of minutes at a time. So far, some seven women have completed the Vendée Globe, the Everest of the seas, the toughest round-the-world race of them all. Joan Mulloy, a brand ambassador for Norwegian clothing giant, Helly Hansen and a mother of two from the west coast of Ireland, is determined to become the eighth woman to compete and the first to win it. We caught up with her on what, for her, seems to be a brief spell on dry land these days at her seaside home in County Mayo.

Felice Joan Mulloy, welcome to our podcast. You are a professional sailor.

Joan Well, thanks very much for having me on. And yes, I’m a professional solo sailor mainly, but offshore sailing is my area of expertise.

Peter How did you get into this? How did it start for you?

Joan I started sailing when I was about eight, just doing a junior sailing course in my local sailing club, which is Mayo Sailing Club. I’m based here on the west coast of Ireland. I learned to sail just in the summers when I was a kid, and kept it up all the way through university. I did team racing, which is a different type of sailing they do in universities mainly. Then after university, I did my first offshore race with my university sailing team, and that was in 2012. And that was my first introduction to offshore sailing, and then it grew from there.

Felice You grew up with the sea, or in the sea, because I see that your parents had a mussel farm.

Joan Yes, the sea has always been a pretty big part of our life. I mean, we’re from a coastal town here in Westport. My dad’s business was a mussel farm, so that was the sea, the tide, the weather. That was always a big part of life, really, because he’d go out to sea in the morning and come back at night, and he might be wet or cold or have fallen in, or miss the tide and had a terrible day. That maritime background was always there for us, I suppose.

He and his family had been into sailing as well. He learned to sail when he was younger, and his dad had a sailing boat when they were growing up, and they’d all gone out the weekends in the summer. So there was definitely a bit of a maritime and sailing background to the family.

Peter Why did you have the desire to sail solo?

Joan For me, the solo sailing was a little bit…well, if I tell the story properly, the whole professional sailing came to me quite slowly. I loved sailing as a hobby when I did engineering in university, and I graduated from engineering, I was working in an engineering job and doing loads and loads of offshore sailing, using up all my annual leave every year to go offshore sailing.

I went off travelling for a bit and I came back and had an opportunity to sail with a professional crew on a boat doing some races. It’s funny because I still hadn’t really twigged that it was a profession, even though I was sailing with professional sailors. And, it took somebody else offering me a job on that boat. The skipper turned around and said, ‘Would you be interested in joining the boat as a professional crew?’ I suddenly thought, oh wow, I could actually do this for a job instead of engineering. So that was a big lightbulb moment for me.

The solo sailing: when I was younger, you know, if you ask most British or Irish or European sailors, what inspired them was Ellen MacArthur, the British solo sailor. So I read her books when I was younger, and for me, her achievements in doing the Vendée Globe, which is the solo, non-stop round-the-world race, her achievements of doing that were really the pinnacle. To me that seemed as high, as hard as you could push it – to sail solo around the world.

So I suppose when I started on that career path, that was at the back of my head, but it took quite a long time for my confidence and my competence to evolve enough to be able to consider that as a real goal. So, that was definitely a process. I didn’t just step into it and say, right, that’s it, I’m going to go and be a professional solo sailor. Maybe some people do, but that wasn’t the path I took.

Peter But that’s the path you did take, as it transpired. And, your great ambition is to sail around the world solo?

Joan So my ambition, I suppose my ultimate goal, is to do the Vendée Globe race, to do the solo around-the-world race. The last couple of years, the sailing environment has looked a bit different for me because I have two young kids – they’re two and three at the moment. But that desire to do the Vendée Globe feels very inherent in me. Whereas other goals that may have fallen by the wayside, that Vendée Globe goal is still very present.

Peter A quick six weeks, you could leave the kids, can’t you?

Joan Yes, I mean that totally. But it’s with all solo sailing campaigns particularly, all professional campaigns are reliant on sponsorship and a solo campaign is reliant on sponsorship, but you’re the only person in charge. So in a solo campaign, you’re in charge of the technical performance side. You’re in charge of managing, finding your team. You’re in charge of the sponsorship. You’re in charge of safety. You’re in charge of everything. So it’s a really big undertaking to take on, so that the actual time you spend offshore is pretty easy compared to the time that you would be flying to Berlin for a networking event or driving down to Cork in the middle of the night to do a talk for somebody. There’s those are the things that I think would be challenging for us as a family right now.

Peter So we’re talking about months, if not years of preparation?

Joan Years, yes. If you want to do around the Vendée Globe, you really need to be thinking about it maybe five, four years in advance of it. You know, it’s like an Olympic cycle – the athlete doesn’t decide the year before the Olympics they might give the 100 metres a bash.

Felice So how many races have you been in since you started your career?

Joan Somebody asked me this recently, actually. I couldn’t really tell you, because there’s been a few major races for sure. I suppose a key race that I should really mention is…as it’s a very big part of my career so far…is the Solitaire du Figaro race. So that’s a solo race that’s held in France, around the coast of France, Spain, Ireland, kind of that western Europe. And that is seen as a bit of a proving ground for the Vendée Globe. So that’s the normal pathway for skippers who want to compete in the Vendée Globe one day, as they go up through a couple of other classes, and the Figaro classes is one of those.

So I suppose when I first launched my own solo sailing campaign, that was a culmination of a few years of working in the professional sailing industry, and I knew I wanted to get into the solo side of things. So the job I had…was I was the proprietor, which is the boat captain, the person who prepares the boats, looks after the technical aspects of the boats for a team of solo sailors from the UK.

And so that gave me really good insight into seeing there with them. I was getting the boats ready for the races, I would be the first person that they met when they got back from the races, I would move the boats between races for them. So that gave me really good insight into the solo sailing world, and I suppose gave me a chance to see if I would like to do it myself. And so I did that job for a few years.

Joan Then there comes a point where you basically just have to, I suppose, like any objective, like starting a new business or starting a new job or anything, there’s just a point where there’s a big step that has to be taken. And for me, that was quitting that job with no visibility on how I was going to make money for the next month and saying, ‘Right, that’s it, I’m going to launch a solo sailing campaign. I’m going to find a sponsor, I’m going to get a boat, and I’m going to compete in the Solitaire du Figaro.’ That was my objective.

Felice Has engineering come in useful?

Joan I think the engineering has helped me. I did civil engineering. We didn’t specifically learn how to fix a sailing race boat, but I think it’s given me a mindset of problem solving, that I can approach a problem in a relaxed way. If something goes wrong in the boat, I tend to not panic because I’m like, okay, this is just a problem, it’ll have parts to it and I can break it down. I can see if I can fix the parts, and if I can’t, then I can’t. So I think that the engineering has helped with that. I suppose a bit of logical thinking and maybe knowing where to look for things.

I’ve only done one university degree, but I guess probably a lot of university degrees teach the same kind of thing. There’s definitely some specific parts, like we did study electronics in university, not a very high level, but at least it made it easier for me to dredge stuff back up when I was reading circuitry diagrams or something. I could be like, Oh yes, okay. I think I kind of remember what this was. So there’s some aspects that I think it has helped.

Peter I know you had one major problem with the start of a race, didn’t you?

Joan Yes, I did. That was my very first-ever solo race. You can imagine the years of effort, of culmination and the amount of money I had, the sponsorship money I had to raise – about between €200,000 and €300,000 to get to the start line. You’re not selling lines for a raffle, you’re trying to make a proper corporate sponsorship deal with somebody who will benefit from the exposure from your campaign, or be able to use me as a resource for talks or motivational speaking, there’s lots of different ways. So getting that, building that sponsorship campaign, all of that, had taken a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of commitment.

Joan I’d been living in France, training, a long, cold winter in Lorient. I was living in an Airbnb by myself, just doing the training, and so a lot had gone into getting to the start line of this first race. It was a big deal for me, and I suppose I felt like a lot of people had put their faith in me – sponsors, friends, coaches – and just as the as the start gun went, literally about three seconds before the start gun went, maybe a bit longer because I had enough time to radio a couple of people to ask for help, and they were giving me suggestions, but my autopilot just completely stopped working.

I was like, okay, well, I’ll just get through the start. I’ll get through the first little bit of the race, and then when things calm down a bit, I’ll have another go, see if I can fix it. And I couldn’t fix it anyway. I suppose that having said that I didn’t panic in problems, I did panic about this one because the autopilot is pretty important.

If you’re a solo sailor, the autopilot is what enables you to sleep. And this was going to be a two to three day race, and I was basically faced with the decision: whether I was going retire from the race, that was one option. The other option was to continue the race and not sleep, just decide I was not going to sleep. Actually, it turned out the first option wasn’t actually a choice for me. I couldn’t…I was like, well, I just can’t retire. I’m not going to retire. I’m not going to do that. I didn’t even entertain it for a second.

And I was like, okay, well, my remaining option is that I stay awake for the rest of the race. That’s what I did. I just like, What do I need for that? Pick a quiet moment in the race I pulled all my sails up as close to me so that I could just reach down and get stuff I like, filled my pockets full of food and snacks, put my water bottles up on deck. Like prepared myself basically to be sat there steering the boat for two days.

I managed it, I did it, I steered the whole way. I had a couple of slightly sketchy moments where I did actually have to have a sleep in the middle of the second night. The race ended up being 46 hours and the middle of the second night I took a tiny sleep, a minute or two, I don’t actually know how long, but a couple of minutes I just had to close my eyes because everything was getting a bit weird. The ropes on my boat all had different personalities. They were telling me, giving me feedback on my sailing and stuff. And I was like, Okay, this has gone too far.

Peter Hallucinations, if you’re doing anything like this alone, they’re a common occurrence, aren’t they?

Joan Yes they are. That was a pretty extreme example of being tired. But even when I’ve had more sleep than that on other races, I’ve had hallucinations, which I think is a pretty common when you think to somebody is on the boat with you. The most dangerous time is if you’re downstairs asleep and you think somebody is up on deck sailing the boat, that can happen. And then you’re like, Why is the sail flapping? Why aren’t they pulling the sail? And then you go up and you’re like, Oh yes, it’s just me here. I woke up from a sleep and went up on deck and thought there was somebody else there, like a hitchhiker that I’d picked up, and he was just sitting there patiently with his rucksack, waiting for me to get to the next port.

Peter Many years ago, I interviewed a woman who flew from London to Australia in a single-engine plane, and she did it in 76 hours, stopping obviously, to refuel. But she said that often in the middle of the night and sometimes the middle of the day, she’d see someone, a friend, sitting on the end of the wing, giving her directions or saying, ‘Look at your fuel gauge now,’ or ‘Change tank,’ or whatever you said it was. She got used to it and saw it as friendly help.

Joan Yes, it’s interesting she says that because I had something really similar during that race. Well, I purposefully conjured people to be beside me; some of my really good friends who are sailors who it would be really handy if they were here right now. So I imagined them beside me, or sponsors or people like that, people that were invested in the project and who I knew would want me to succeed. I conjured them up and had them beside me and tried to imagine what they’d say. That was really useful, I found that a really useful tool because I just got a little boost from the different people.

I didn’t conjure my mum or anything because she would have been like, ‘Oh God, this is awful. You’re so tired, love.’ She’d go, ‘Just give up, go back.’

Felice As well as this, you have to stay physically fit as well, I imagine?

Joan Yes you do, and there’s a couple of interesting things about solo sailing. One of them is women compete against men. I think that kind of shows you that actually a lot of it is technique. And in the Solitaire du Figaro race that I did, all the boats are one design, so they’re all exactly the same. Men and women are sailing, they have exactly the same loads, they have the same equipment, the same gear on board. What you would find in training is that people who say women, if they’re a little bit weaker, they’d find a more kind of technique-heavy way of doing a manoeuvre, rather than a kind of muscle-heavy way of doing it. So yes, of course you have to be fit and you particularly have to have a strong core because it’s really easy to hurt your back when you’re really tired.

Felice And how important is your sailing kit?

Joan Yes, the kit you wear is really vital. I mean, I’m really lucky because I’ve had a long partnership with Helly Hansen. It’s actually a nice story, they were one of the very first people who signed up as a sponsor for me. They were probably the first long contract sponsor I got. So to me, it’s really important my relationship with them, because they had a lot of faith in me early on.

I actually went to the Irish Helly Hansen rep, just asking for if I could have a discount on some gear to do my solo sailing campaign. He’s like, ‘Leave it with me.’ And I was like, Okay, Grant. It was like fobbing off email. That’s it, I’m never going to hear from him again. And then he rang me the week after and he’s like, ‘Oh, I’ve got the UK marketing team on the phone. I was trying to get you a professional deal with them, where you get a certain amount of free kit every year, plus you get a discount.’ He’d really gone away by himself and come up with a much better deal for me.

So I signed with Helly Hansen back in 2018. For me, that was a really big deal. And it also essentially just eliminated any worry about kit very early on in the campaign, which was really handy because they’ve got really good offshore kit and base and you go through a lot of it. Your average sailor, even your average offshore sailor, I would probably do a full season’s worth of sailing in a couple of weeks.

The kit is really important, and partly because the sailor on the boat is a part of the resources that you have. So once you start the race, you and the boat are like the perfect little circular economy, all the resources that you have are there, they’re on board, and you are an important resource. Your energy is an important resource, and if you’re getting wet or cold or tired, that resource is being depleted. That then affects the performance of the boat and will affect your performance in the race. And essentially your safety, eventually if you keep depleting that resource. For example, that race where I had to steer for two days: I was able to just sit there on deck for two days, happy because I had good kit on, and being wet or cold was not a factor that I was worried about. All I was worried about was mentally trying to stay sharp and make good decisions.

Felice What do you do about food on the boat?

Joan Usually, in races like that I have freeze-dried food to just rehydrate, freeze-dried meals. Food is obviously really important. It’s a big morale booster as well. If you have some nice food, it really can pick things up for you. On the second Solitaire du Figaro I was super organised. The Solitaire du Figaro is four legs, and each leg is three to five days, depending on the distance and the wind.

You use an incredible number of calories. So before the race, you’re trying to build up your calorie intake per day so that you can take on board 5,000 calories a day, ideally. But the first leg, I had my food bag all carefully and my calorie-counted snacks, I had a compartment for every day and I knew I had to eat everything in each compartment to keep my calories up. Then as each leg comes through, you have a short stopover of about two or three days, in which usually you have a lot of briefings and you might have interviews, you might have safety briefings, and then you have sponsor interviews. Sometimes your family are there and you have to see people. So there’s quite a lot on. Then you go back out to sea again for the next leg, so it all becomes quite hectic. By the fourth leg, I had this one big bag of food and I remember just emptying packets of peanut M&Ms into it, and I just wrote on it, on a piece of duct tape and wrote on top, stuck it on and wrote on it Calories at any cost. Just try and eat as much as I could. So peanut M&Ms are super good for that because they’re extremely calorific.

Peter When you have the autopilot running, what does it do? It navigates for you?

Joan The autopilot has a couple of modes that you can use, so it’s reasonably intelligent. It can basically follow a given bearing that you give it, you know, due north, whatever. It’ll sail that. Or it can kind of follow the wind, so it can go at an angle to the wind and it can follow the wind around, or it can just steer a straight line irrespective of wind or direction. So they’re the three main modes. So it does a certain amount. And some new autopilots, say for the Vendée Globe and stuff, have other layers to them as well where they can learn and they can surf waves and stuff like that. So they can be pretty sophisticated, but sometimes you spend a lot of time helming if conditions are changeable.

Even if the autopilot is doing a really good job of helming, you have to be there to trim the sails and to navigate, to make decisions about when you’re going to make your next manoeuvre, your next turn. Are you going the right direction? Choosing the direction you’re going is what you spend most of your time doing. It’s always a mixture. I mean, where the autopilot, like I said, where the autopilot comes into its own is when you need to go to sleep or eat or do something different, or change a sail or do a manoeuvre up on deck.

Peter Now, how long can you sleep for at a time?

Joan Usually in say, the solitaire races. My magic number was 12 minutes, but it’s usually 10 to 15 minute naps is what most people do. And you’re aiming to just get as many of those into the day, as well, as you can. Sometimes before the races, we’d have weather briefings, so we’d have a weather expert who would help us kind of plan our routes and our strategic decisions for the race, and they would sometimes help us plan the best time to sleep.

So they might say, ‘Oh, you know, this stretch here, you’re far away from the coast. There’s no rocks. The wind should be pretty steady. It’s daytime. That’s a good time to sleep, because you’re going to have to be able to have a good watch of what’s going on around you.’

Some races we’d know, for example, the first two days you’re going to be in amongst the rocks, it’s going to be very tidal; the other boats are going to be very close to you; the racing is going to be very close quarters. Forget sleeping, you’re just going to have to make do. So it’s all about preparation. But yes, sleeping in small amounts is key. If you’re lucky, you might be able to maybe have a 12-minute nap, get up, have a look around, make some adjustments, and then have another 12-minute nap. You might be able to string a couple of them together, provided nothing is happening.

Peter Presumably you have to time them because otherwise you might fall asleep for six hours?

Joan Yes, and end up on the rocks. We have a sleep alarm, which basically sounds like a car alarm going off. A big fear is going to sleep with no alarm on…that is a big fear. Because if you accidentally fall asleep without the alarm on, you could just fall asleep and wake up wherever…on your way to America.

Felice How many boats are there in a typical race, or does that vary a lot?

Joan It varies quite a lot on the race, but I suppose most of the races I’ve done, I guess, is kind of like thirty to fifty, that kind of level.

Peter When you hopefully do the Vendée, how long can you sleep for then? Because we’re talking about, seventy days maybe. How can you possibly survive on 12 minutes?

Joan I think for the Vendée, what I’ve heard from other skippers, is you can sleep for a bit longer. It varies from person to person, but I think the high-performance guys maybe do one to two hours, that kind of thing, maybe a bit longer if they’re very lucky. Generally, you’re kind of in a mode where the desire to do well in the race is greater than the desire to sleep, if you get me. It’s not as if you don’t need it, your body obviously needs it. We’re probably doing untold damage to ourselves, but something like the Vendée, I would imagine the mindset you’ve been working so hard for that one thing. And this is a race that you might only get one chance to do. I think your desire to do it in that race, stay safe and try and be as high-performance as possible would outweigh.

Felice So when you’re not sailing and you get back to your family, can you just slip back into normal life and a normal sleep pattern?

Joan It’s usually pretty good. I know that race that I did that I was telling you about, I slept for so long. I think I got in about seven in the morning and I went back to the rental house that we were staying in and I was staying with a couple of friends who were doing the race as well. I went to sleep at about ten in the morning and I was like, ‘Oh, wake me up in a couple of hours and we’ll go down and pack the boats up.’ And when I woke up, it was 6am the next morning, so I’d slept for twenty hours, absolute dead sleep. At one stage, one of them had come in to see if I wanted some dinner and they were like, ‘Do you want any?’ And they were like, ‘No, she doesn’t.’

You might have a couple of funny nights’ sleep, but usually you can slip back into it. Actually that’s one of the things I find hardest about the Solitaire is that change between being offshore for a few days, and then you have to try and slip back into the onshore routine, and then you have to go back again in such a short time later, because I think after three days you get accustomed to what you’re doing. And basically that’s when you, you time to go offshore again. That’s a particularly gruelling aspect of that race.

Peter So going back to sponsorship, which is something that is your lifeblood, you need sponsorship. So here you are on our podcast and we’ve got 300,000 listeners around the world. There might be someone out there….

Joan Yes, well, if you know anyone who would like to sponsor the first Irish woman ever to compete in the Vendée Globe.

Peter What do they get out of it, first of all?

Joan The sponsorship part of it is actually really interesting. Well, ideally, you have a real partnership with that person or company, or it’s usually a person in a company that you strike up a relationship with. It varies hugely to what the sponsor will get from it. Like I said, sometimes it could be just pure media exposure, so they need somebody to be very high-performance, getting on the podium, getting in the newspapers, stuff like that. Then other times it might be somebody who, for example, they’ll have a company that they want to really promote for whatever reason, they want to promote women in sport internally, in the company. So that they’re if they’re promoting, if they’re supporting a woman doing a solo around the world race, then that sends a message internally that they that they want to send.

Peter And presumably with a company like Helly Hansen with your clothing, you’re giving them feedback on how they could change the clothing, get it better? If there’s something that you think doesn’t work or you have an idea, you pass that back to them? So they’re getting feedback on the stuff that they give you.

Joan Yes, absolutely. With Helly Hansen it’s a cyclical thing. Every season they’ll send me samples or I’ll give them feedback on particularly the high-end offshore kit, ‘This is what I think you should do or this is how I would change it, or this is what I found comfortable, this is uncomfortable.’ So in that kind of thing, yes, I think that helps them develop and improve their products.

Peter We find this with skiing equipment that we actually use with them, things like zips which work perfectly well in a factory don’t necessarily work in -20° or whatever it may be.

Joan Yes, a classic one that I’ve had a lot of back-and-forth on with them is the drop-seat trousers for women to go to the loo. Classically, a lot of them have a zip at the back, basically on your lower back for you to open up a flap so you can go to the loo. If you’re sitting on a boat for two days with the waves coming down the deck, that is one of the most exposed parts of you. Your lower back is just getting hammered by waves all the time. If there’s a zip there, chances are it’s going to leak. So actually their latest iteration, I wore at sea this week, they’re really good. But that’s taken a lot of back-and-forth with me, and I presume with their other ambassadors as well, working on trying to improve that, to make it good.

Peter Going to loo is something we can’t ignore. That, of course, is a problem. You’re going to take time out from sailing to go to the loo.

Joan You get very quick at it. And I mean, it’s funny because it’s just a bucket., you just bucket and chuck it – that’s what I call it. It’s not very glamorous at all if you have a lot of kit on. I remember at one stage I was counting if I go to the loo, if I don’t have a pair of drop-seat trousers on, if I just have normal salopettes on, I had to take off fourteen things to go to the toilet. It’s a like pile of stuff beside you, and you have to put them all back on again, but you do get very quick. I used to curse it because I’d always need to have a nervous wee two minutes before the start of race and I’d be like, Oh, the start line, there’s loads of boats. You really have to be on your game. And I’d be bursting for a wee, trying to really quickly take everything off, put everything back on.

Felice So what advice would you give people wanting to get into sailing?

Joan Well I’d say: great choice of sport. For me, I really think sailing is a brilliant sport. It’s something that you can really have for your whole life. Just this week, I delivered my father-in-law’s boat from the south coast of Ireland up to the west coast of Ireland, and my father-in-law had sailed it from Portugal up to the south coast a few weeks ago. He’s in his seventies, and then on the trip this week we had my nephew, who’s twelve, with us, and so they’re both doing the same kind of sailing on the same boat, getting the same enjoyment from it. So people like my father-in-law have got like a whole lifetime of enjoyment out of sailing, and it can continue on. I mean, there was competitors in the last Swan the Globe in their sixties, serious competitors – not just there for the jolly – real competitors.

So for me the lifelong sport aspect is really interesting. I suppose the wideness of the sport, as well, is interesting. If you go from say the SailGP, the super high-performance, or the America’s Cup, things like that. You’ve got things from that to expedition yachts going up to Greenland or doing the Northwest Passage, so I think  there’s a great breadth of experience to be had from the sport. I’m a racer, so I love racing and that’s often the context I think about sailing in, is racing. So if somebody wants to get into sailing, if they want to get into yacht racing, what I would say is go to your local sailing club and try and make connections. And I always say that if you can consistently turn up every week to go sailing with somebody, that will pay dividends.

So if, for example, I own a boat in the local sailing club and Pete wants to get into sailing and trying to find a crew to go out racing every Tuesday night is tricky, you need eight people. You need them all to turn up at the same time and be available every week for twelve weeks, it’s no joke. If Pete turns up and says, ‘I don’t know what to do, but I’ve got a pair of wellies and I’ve got a life jacket and I’ll be here every single Tuesday until September.’ Then you’re like, ‘Great, I’m going to teach Pete how to do xyz because I know he’s going to be there.’ You can’t underestimate the value of that. You don’t need any skill for just turning up, being enthusiastic.

Felice Is your husband a sailor as well?

Joan He is more an expedition type sailor. He’s not really a racer, although he knows how to race. He’s a bit more of an adventurer, he likes kayaking and he’d go off and do very long kayaks or expedition trips, things like that.

Peter He’d have to, to be with you.

Joan Yes.

Felice What age would you take your children sailing, or have you done so already?

Joan Yes, we’ve taken them on some trips. We talk about this quite a lot actually, and ask other families for advice. I think really to be able to relax on a sailing trip with them, I’d like them both to be able to swim. And we have little sailing dinghies here at home that we…you know, my son is only three, but we’ll tie the a long rope to the end of the dinghy and like, push it out into the fjord. We live in a fjord. We’ll push him out into the fjord and pull him back in again. You know, just to get them used to the sensation of of being at sea and being in a boat. That’s it really. You know, we’re not going to we’re not going to push anything on them…yet.

Peter Going back to the Vendée one last time, how do you get a boat for that? I mean, this costs a fortune and these sort of boats we’re talking about.

Joan Yes, millions. If you wanted to buy an old second-hand boat, you’re talking about maybe €800,000. If you want to build a new boat that’s going to win the race, you’re talking €5 million, maybe. So it’s big budget game, you know, to do a learner Vendée campaign is maybe €4 million. It’s a serious investment for everybody all around. The boats usually hold their value quite well, so you can often sell it on at the end of your campaign. So sometimes people do the racehorse syndicate model for the boat, and then it gets sold on. That’s what I did with one of my Figaros. For me anyway, I’m very lucky, the sponsors I’ve had and the sponsors I want to get are ones that you have a genuine connection with – people who believe in what you’re trying to do and understand you as a person, and why you’re doing it. Then I believe you’re much more able to deliver for them.

There’s a balance between being desperately just wanting to achieve your goals and taking any money anyone will give you. And being authentic, you do have to be authentic to yourself because essentially, at the end of the day, you can’t pretend to be somebody you’re not. You know, like if the National Rifle Association turned around tomorrow and said to me, we will sponsor your Vendée Globe, I would say, ‘Well, thank you very much, but,  I’m busy that day.’ It has to be a good fit.

I’m really lucky. The first sponsor, the main sponsor I had, was Bord Iasaigh Mhara, – they’re the Irish Seafood Agency. And they were promoting a certain brand at the time, Taste the Atlantic. And because I’m from a mussel farming family, I understand exactly what they were trying to do with the brand, and I was essentially promoting my family business as part of this brand, so that was easy for everyone. I was speaking the language of the campaign. I understood what they were talking about and I understood where it was going.

The next big sponsor I had was Grace O’Malley whiskey. So Grace O’Malley was an Irish pirate queen from whom I am descended. So that was another dream sponsorship meeting where I walked into the meeting and they said, ‘We want a woman with a boat to promote our whiskey.’ And I said, ‘Well, I want a sponsor to go on my boat.’ So, I’m really lucky in that I’ve had two amazing sponsorship arrangements where it’s just worked and it’s been natural, I can completely be myself. That’s what they wanted.

Felice How do you see yourself in the next five years? What are your ambitions?

Joan Well, at the moment I’m part of a really interesting project called The Famous Project, and that is actually an all-female team. We’re trying to make an attempt at the Trophy Jules Verne, which is the outright round-the-world sailing record. So winter 2025 is our time window to try and do that record. So that means this year and last year I’ve been doing a lot more racing as a team, because we’ve been training as a team towards this goal. So that’s racing on a hundred-foot trimaran, very big boat with other people, and it’s racing to beat a record.

Peter How many people are you talking about on the boat. How big a crew?

Joan The team, we actually haven’t trained on the hundred-foot trimaran yet; we’ve only been training on a smaller boat. This type of boat has never been sailed by an all-female crew before, so nobody really knows what the number is. Something between eight and ten.

Peter The existing record you’re trying to beat?

Joan Just under forty-one days. It’s a really tight record. The existing record will be really hard to beat.

Felice When you go away for long periods, who looks after your kids? Your husband?

Joan Their father, the other fifty percent of their parents! We are really lucky to have a big support system network around us. You know, my husband, like I said, knew what he was getting in for. So he knew that this was going to be in his future. But we have my parents and his parents very close by, and my sisters-in-law and my sister, we have we have a lot of help nearby. So and that that’s a really important part, I think, of balancing motherhood and any sport: you want to be able to commit yourself fully. I can walk out the door, give them all a kiss goodbye and walk out the door and I don’t think about it again. You know, I’m not worrying about is someone going to remember to pick them up from creche or has somebody done the laundry? You know, I don’t think about that.

Felice If people want to know more about you, do you have a website?

Joan Yes, I do have a website. It’s JoanMulloy.com – it’s not very inspiring website, though. I am on Instagram, which is probably what I’m best at. So @JoanMulloyRacing on Instagram and I’m @JoanMulloyRacing on Facebook.

Felice Spell your name?

Joan Yes, it’s a very specific spelling of Mulloy. You can’t spell it wrong; my grandfather will turn his grave.

Peter Thank you very much indeed, Joan, for coming on the show and we look forward to following your career.

Joan Thanks a million, guys. Yes, it was great to chat. Thank you very much.

Felice That’s all for now. If you’ve enjoyed the show, please share this episode with at least one other person! Do also subscribe on Spotify, i-Tunes or any of the many podcast providers – where you can give us a rating. You can subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or any of the many podcast platforms. You can also find us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. We’d love you to sign up for our regular emails to [email protected]. By the way, we’re no. 7 in the Top 20 Midlife Travel Podcasts.

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