“There is a moment somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic where Pamela Lee realized this was home.”
But the route there has been anything but just sending it down the rhumbline.
Lee grew up immersed in sailing culture. With a sailing obsessed father, family summers meant campervans, dinghy trailers, tents and relentless Irish rain. Mirror dinghy racing formed the early years, followed by university team racing and work as a sailing instructor. Yet despite the sailing-heavy upbringing, professional offshore racing barely seemed imaginable.
“The infrastructure for an Olympic pathway used to be very limited in Ireland, it did not even occur to me as an opportunity. Looking back I would have loved the chance to race a 49er,” she says. Then came the Volvo Ocean Race stopover in Ireland and it completely blew her mind, but becoming an ocean race sailor would be as likely as becoming an astronaut.
So she improvised.
After university she crossed the Atlantic with friends of her brother, somewhere mid Atlantic she knew she was home. Then followed a few years in Australia, where she took every opportunity to get out on the water. She raced the Sydney Hobart a few times and earned her Yachtmaster qualification. Like many offshore sailors without institutional backing, she stitched together experience wherever she could find it.
The superyacht industry in Palma provided miles at sea, but also an early education in how difficult it could be for women to be taken seriously on deck. “To my frustration, I was always assumed to be applying for the job as stewardess or cook,” she says. “You were constantly fighting for your position on a race boat.”
Everything changed during the Covid years, getting the opportunity to pursue short-handed sailing with an Irish campaign for the Paris Olympic cycle. In the world of solo and double-handed racing, hierarchy matters less. Results matter more. Weaknesses are exposed quickly. So are strengths. “Short-handed sailing suited me,” she says. “You have to assume all the roles on the boat. Everything is on show. You show your colours.”
The campaign eventually brought her to Brittany, France – the epicenter of offshore sailing. A dense ecosystem of boatyards, sponsors, designers and professional campaigns operating at a level the English-speaking sailing world still struggles to match.
She learned French “off the deep end”, early on taking a job as shore team for an Ocean Fifty campaign, surrounded by experienced French teams and technical managers and only her school French to keep her afloat. “I never assumed people would speak English to me” she says. “You just try in French and learn the ropes. Luckily French and Irish people have a lot in common, we like each other – so that helped”, she laughs. That willingness to immerse herself completely in the culture with humor became one of the defining themes of her career.
Her breakthrough came with a women’s round-Ireland record during Covid. The project mattered not only because of the record itself, but because it removed any ambiguity about leadership. “It had to be a women’s team,” Lee explains. “No one questioned who was behind the wheel.”
The momentum from that achievement, combined with teaming up with French business partner Maxime Grimard, led to the creation of Ripple Racing with the goal of building a successful Route du Rhum campaign. But sailing is only one layer of the job.
“Running a campaign is basically like running a startup”, she says. “There is fundraising, logistics, media production, sponsorship activation, technical management and constant networking, all while competing at the sharp end of one of sailing’s most demanding classes.”
An all-consuming task, for sure. Yet looking back, some of the campaign’s most meaningful moments have not been stormy nights offshore, but seeing the impact it has had while interacting with supporters, sponsors and especially young girls on the dock.
Now, the Route du Rhum looms on the horizon.
For Lee, reaching the start line would represent far more than a sporting milestone. It would be the result of years spent building a campaign from the ground up, navigating not only oceans, but cultures, sponsorships and an industry where opportunities rarely came easily.
Yet the impact of Ripple Racing already stretches beyond results. Because when Lee succeeds in making the Route du Rhum start line, she will not arrive there alone. She will carry with her a growing generation of sailors who will be inspired to see a pathway offshore that might not be as impossible as becoming an astronaut.
For more, follow #empowHER, IG: @pamybefree
