‘People should not judge a book by its cover’
Hannah Stodel plans to defy the doubters again by conquering sailing’s Everest, writes Tom Cary
Hannah Stodel laughs grimly at the memory of last year’s Round Britain and Ireland race. It was blowing a gale as her Class 40 neared the northernmost tip of Scotland, the boat’s hull had, unbeknown to her, sprung a leak, “completely frying” the on-board electrical system, and she had no way of communicating with the outside world. “I couldn’t even get a phone call out,” she recalls.
At one point, Stodel found herself in the tank alone, trimming electrical wire with her teeth.
“I had never hated a country so much!” she says. “It was ridiculous. I was like, ‘Is this never going to end?’ It was 2½ days of absolute pain and suffering getting around the top of Scotland.
“But what are you going to do? You’re faced with it and you’ve got two options. You can either cry about it, or you can try to fix it. I knew if I could get power to this one lead then we might be all right …”
Stodel was all right. She is, in her own words, made of “pretty tough stuff ”.
Born without her lower right arm, the 33-year-old has never let her disability hold her back.
Four times a Paralympic sailor and three times a disabled world champion, Stodel fixed the system, rounded Muckle Flugga, the most northerly lighthouse of the British Isles, where the boat was “smashed by 52-knot gusts”, and eventually made it to the finish line, where she collapsed into the arms of her manager, Alex Newton.
Stodel giggles. “I was like, ‘I’m never sailing again! I hate sailing! Offshore sailing is a terrible idea!’ But then the next day I was back out on the boat with him and it was all, ‘This is the best thing ever’. It was an emotional roller coaster.”
Stodel, who hails from West Mersea in Essex, will be back in a Class 40 today, taking part in Round the Island, the annual
mass-participation race around the Isle of Wight. But she has her sights set on bigger things. Namely, the Vendee Globe. Only seven women have ever attempted the so-called Everest of sailing; a solo, unassisted, non-stop race around the globe. Stodel hopes to become the eighth. And the first “authentic single-handed sailor”.
Stodel is comfortable poking fun at herself. The catchline for her website – “Sailing around the world, can’t open a tin!” – is typical of her humour.
She learnt the hard way. Bullied at school, her classmates, she recalls, were somehow “offended” not only by her disability but by her chosen pastime, which she took up at the age of three because both of her parents were competitive sailors. She was called “weird” and “special”.
One boy put up posters around the school referring to her as “the evil person with one arm”.
Even after she won a sports scholarship to the Royal Hospital School in Ipswich, and represented her country at junior and youth levels, Stodel encountered prejudice.
“When I set out to do my Yachtmaster [qualification] I went to a school where the instructor basically refused to teach me,” she says. “He was like, ‘No. It’s not possible’. So that was a pretty tough time.”
Stodel had the last laugh. She went on to win Yachtmaster of the Year at the Boat Show.
“In this day and age? People should not be judging a book by its cover,” she says. “You’d have thought the ‘Superhumans’ movement would have changed that by now.”
The Vendee Globe is, however, “next level”. Even she admits that. Just getting to the start line is a Herculean task. Stodel still has not secured a boat for the race, which begins in autumn 2020. And time is fast running out to bank the qualification miles needed to convince the race organisers she is capable of completing the challenge. Stodel reckons she needs to raise £500,000 this year alone just to continue her dream.
“It’s difficult, I’m not going to lie,” she says. “I’m watching some of the big players dropping out, people who have done it three or four times, and still struggling to get things in place.
“But if I don’t make this one, so be it. I’ll keep going and try to make the next one.”
Then there is the sailing itself. Three months at sea, some of the harshest, most inhospitable conditions on the planet – and