Pamela Lee will become the first Irish sailor, male or female, to start the Route du Rhum, and she wants that fact to mean something beyond her own results.
The Class40 skipper grew up sailing small dinghies on Ireland's east coast, in County Wicklow, well away from any structured offshore racing pathway. There was no Irish culture of ocean racing to plug into. The competitive instinct was there from the Optimists and Mirrors she raced as a junior, right up to world championship level, but the ocean itself was missing.
That changed when she moved to Sydney. Drawn by the Sydney to Hobart race but without a boat of her own, she worked the docks as crew to build sea miles, eventually earning her Yachtmaster qualification before returning to Europe for seasons of IRC racing and transatlantic crossings, always as crew within a larger team.
Watching Volvo Ocean Race boats stop in Galway was the real turning point. It pushed her toward France's Figaro circuit, a professional, sponsor-funded world she entered as a boat preparer while learning French from scratch. A loaned boat let her set the Round Ireland record, her first fully self-managed project.
From there came Class40, then Ocean Fifty, and always building toward one goal. Ripple Racing, her own outfit, was founded in 2023. A Transat Jacques Vabre campaign followed, a first for an Irish sailor, and this year DFDS came on board as founding sponsor of her #EmpowHer project in Class40.
"Today, everything is focused on this one goal," Lee says. "Going from dinghies in Wicklow to the start line of the Route du Rhum is quite a leap. But that's exactly the point, to prove that almost anything is possible."
Weeks out from the start, she describes the mood as excitement building steadily, even as a mountain of finishing jobs remains. Boat prep, performance work, logistics, training: none of it lets up.
Physically, she trains three strength sessions and three cardio sessions a week, up at 6am most days before heading to the boat. Mentally, she's leaning on sport psychologists alongside her physical coaches, treating the solo Atlantic crossing less as a threat than as something to be curious about. Her solo racing résumé is still short: one race last year, two more this year, the longest lasting seven days.
Her priorities are simple. Finish safely first. A top-10 finish would be the bonus.
Lee will be one of 49 boats in the Class40 fleet, the largest in the Route du Rhum, a class that mixes amateurs and full-time professionals on the same start line, sailing everything from modern scows to older, narrower hulls, all facing the same challenge of getting across the Atlantic as fast as possible.
"I hope people will dare to step off the beaten track," she says, "and realise they too can achieve extraordinary things if they decide to. That they too can chart their own path."
"Anything is possible."
