Interview: "I would call it magic." Isabelle Joschke, the deep-sea sailor

I'd much rather be out there alone than in pairs

Isabelle Joschke, born in Munich in 1977, is Germany's most successful offshore sailor. Yet until recently, few people in this country knew her name. The daughter of a French mother and a German-Austrian father, she moved to France as a child and holds both nationalities. Joschke studied Greek and Latin at the Sorbonne in Paris - and then decided to become a professional sailor.

For two years, she lived in a motorhome, travelling from regatta to regatta. Like many single-handed sailors, she started in the mini 6.50 class. In 2005 she sailed her first transat, and in 2006 she finished second in the annual ranking of the minis. This was followed by successful years on a Figaro, then Class 40 and finally an Imoca 60, with which she started the Vendée Globe in 2020.

Joschke lives in Lorient, the centre of the French offshore scene. She will be competing in the Vendée Globe again in 2024, with the same boat and the same campaign: as an ambassador for the organisation she founded, "Horizon Mixité", she is campaigning for women to show more courage and self-confidence when competing with men, both professionally and in sport. "You don't have to sail around the world alone," she says, "but seeing that a small, delicate woman has managed to do it should encourage other women. We can do more than we often give ourselves credit for." The 45-year-old goes swimming in the Atlantic in the evening. Instead of going to the gym, she trains her body awareness with Pilates and expressive dance. When she takes a holiday, she goes hiking in the mountains. No cruising? "No," she says, "the sea is my workplace, not a holiday destination."

YACHT: Isabelle, do you like being alone at sea?

Yes! I'd much rather be out there alone than in pairs.

What exactly is nice about it?

Everything, really. You feel much closer to the ocean, the weather, the wind, you feel every change more intensely. When several people are sailing together, you just chat. Alone on the ocean, however, I am very small and quiet and experience nature in all its fullness without hindrance. I love sailing because of moments like these.

Were there any moments like that at the Vendée Globe?

To be honest, not often. It's always noisy on an Imoca yacht, even when there's little wind, and I have to listen to this roaring, howling and crashing all the time. Every single noise signals something different; I have to listen to my boat in order to be able to react quickly. The Vendée Globe rarely allows you the leisure to immerse yourself in nature.

And that's fun?

Sailing alone has a second attraction, especially on racing yachts: If a problem arises, it's all down to you. And the Vendée Globe is a single sequence of problems. If the spinnaker falls into the water, for example, I can't rely on fellow sailors who are stronger than me to pull it out again. Sailing single-handed means you have to plan incredibly well in advance, going through every manoeuvre step by step in your head beforehand. And it requires a lot of trust in yourself and your own abilities. You not only experience nature out there, but also yourself in an unknown intensity.

What have you experienced with yourself?

I've been a professional sailor for 18 years and know my strengths and weaknesses pretty well, so nothing new has been added. During the long weeks in the Southern Ocean, however, I saw myself like in a magnifying mirror, and my impatience and fears grew enormously. But my will to persevere was also extreme. I would never have thought what I could endure and put up with. Anyone who sails the Vendée Globe knows afterwards who they really are - down to the last fibre.

How did you cope with day 77? You had already rounded Cape Horn, were in eleventh place as the best woman in the race after four fifths of the course - and then your keel lock broke and you had to give up.

That was the hardest blow of my career. I was so hugely disappointed, so angry! On top of that, I was sailing through a heavy storm in the South Atlantic with a keel that was swinging back and forth uncontrollably under the hull. I just wanted to get to Brazil quickly and fly home from there. A few days later, I thought: "Flying, flying home? That's not possible." So I sailed to Salvador da Bahia and when my ship was repaired after twelve days, I set off again, now out of competition. After 107 days, I reached the finish line - almost together with Samantha Davies, who had already arrived in Cape Town due to damage and had also decided to continue sailing after the repair. We wanted to finish the race, now outside of the classification. Incidentally, none of the six men who gave up due to damage did so.

Four years ago, in a single-handed race across the Atlantic, you were even in first place with your Class 40 when cracks suddenly appeared in the forecastle and water came in. Another time, on the Route du Rhum, the mast came down from above during a storm. These
You also had to abandon these two races. Do you risk too much in heavy weather?

Let's put it this way: I have a pretty good sense of what I can put myself and the boat through. And because I like to push these limits, I do particularly well in heavy weather. Sometimes it's risky, but I'm very careful never to risk too much. That would be negligent, and damage due to negligence simply cannot happen to me. The three material damages that forced me to retire had other, deeper causes; the way I was sailing, they shouldn't have happened.

So you won't be sailing more carefully in future?

No, why should I? My risk calculation hasn't changed. I will also push and pressurise in the Southern Ocean for the next Vendée Globe. Otherwise I wouldn't even need to start.

How reliable is your inner warning sensor when you steer the boat or yourself into the red zone?

After 18 years, it works pretty well. I can rely on it to alert me in good time. The challenge for a regatta sailor, however, is that the alarm doesn't stop you too early. Unfortunately, in hindsight, if everything went well, it's not always clear how far away from the red zone you really were. For example, when a storm was approaching in the first week of the Vendée Globe, I was one of the first to take a diversion to the south. Zero risk was my motto for the start of the race. That cost me all sorts of places. I don't know whether it was worth it. But next time I would rely on my gut feeling.

Nevertheless, a few days later you sailed right into the centre of the hurricane "Theta".

Yes, that was a good thing. Before that I was in 21st place, then 15th, but unfortunately I got caught out in the South Atlantic when one side of my pushpit broke off in a wave. I spent two days and nights sawing and screwing. The repair cost me so much energy and so much sleep. When I reached the Southern Ocean, I was still exhausted - and that's when the problems really started.

Did you miss a fellow sailor?

To be honest: yes. And then I ask myself why I'm actually doing all this.

And what do you answer?

Well, nothing. There is simply no sensible reason to do this race. I just tell myself not to do it again. But just half a day later, my mood changes along with the wind - and I forget my frustration and self-doubt.

But then when you spent weeks battling with treacherous gusts and cross seas in the Southern Ocean, when one problem followed another and finally the wind gauge failed and your autopilot only steered by compass: When do you run out of strength to endure it all? Or do you use any mental tricks to keep yourself motivated?

No, I don't have any tricks like that and I don't believe in them either. Trying to think very hard about something positive, for example, even though everything is a big mess at the moment - that doesn't work. When something goes wrong, I feel sad, frustrated and angry. And that's okay. I don't try to undermine these feelings, I don't say to myself: "Oh, Isabelle, everything is actually fine." If you take yourself seriously, you can't lie to yourself, especially not at the Vendée Globe, which reveals everything that's going on inside you.

Is that also how you deal with fears?

Of course. For example, when I reached the Southern Ocean completely exhausted and knew that the longest and most difficult stage was just beginning, I had a lot of fears. But I let them be. Anyone who wants to achieve something has to learn that fears are simply part of it. I accept them, just like all the feelings that the race and the risks out there trigger in me.

Maybe that's your mental trick?

That's not a trick, but something I learnt from childhood. I often had to fight my way through, had little self-confidence, life was rather exhausting. At some point, I learnt to accept setbacks, disappointments and painful feelings as a matter of course. I know that they are part of life - and that they will pass. I don't think about how things could have been different, I simply tick off misfortunes faster than many others. Life is easier when you look ahead instead of constantly bemoaning fate.

If I may say so, that sounds a bit like a truism.

Maybe so. But it's about internalising the truism, living it without thinking about it. If you manage to deal with setbacks and accept new challenges in this way, you can get through an enormous amount. That is real resilience.

Did your perseverance carry you to the finish of the Vendée Globe?

I don't think anyone can reach the finish line in this race without this relentlessness towards oneself, without this enormous capacity for suffering and resilience. Every one of us can tell stories of how everything seems to conspire against you at times and yet you get through it anyway.

Please tell us one of your stories.

A few days before Cape Horn, I was sailing in a group of six boats. With a strong wind from astern, we sailed a jibing slalom along the forbidden ice zone; our courses crossed constantly. At night, I sailed so close to Boris Herrmann that we could see our sails in the moonlight. My anemometer was already broken, the autopilot unreliable and I was completely overtired. Nevertheless, I didn't dare to lie down for a moment, the proximity of the other ships was unsettling. When a heavy squall suddenly blew in, my ship lay flat on its side. I cranked in the cockpit until we were safely back on course. When it got light, I saw that the gennaker had been torn. I furled it, hauled myself onto the foresail in the storm, hauled it down and set a new headsail. Then I wrote to Boris: "Bye-bye, I no longer have a gennaker." I was totally disappointed, but also so exhausted that I fell asleep immediately. After two hours, I was woken up by a crunching noise: the hydraulics of the swivelling keel had broken. It took me hours to fix and lock the keel in place. On land, you would now push everything to one side and rest. But that wasn't possible, Cape Horn lay ahead and I had to get round it.

Weren't you beginning to fear for yourself and your ship?

Not really. I'm more afraid when something threatens me up ahead, bad weather or some other danger. But when I'm in the middle of it, I just function.

Were there conditions in the Southern Ocean that you had never experienced before?

Everything was new: the vastness, the swell, especially the wind - it was so unpredictable, often increasing or decreasing by 10 or 15 knots. I always had the feeling that I had set the wrong sail. But changing a headsail on your own or reefing the main takes so much time and energy. You're weighing things up for hours. Because if I set a smaller headsail, for example, the wind was guaranteed to drop. So I left the gennaker up - and the wind immediately picked up. It was psychological terror for almost the entire Southern Ocean.

After all this, why do you want to start again in 2024 for the next Vendée Globe?

At some point in the Southern Ocean, I had the feeling that I was no longer on earth, but somewhere else. My GPS claimed that I was here or there - but I had no idea whether that was true. Everything familiar is gone, there is nothing fixed anywhere, everything is in motion and flows into each other - the water, the clouds, even time. And I'm in the middle of it all, alone for months. I think the intensity with which I experienced nature and myself there is the reason why I no longer took the associated hardships so seriously after my return.

Is it an addiction?

I would rather call it magic. In the Southern Ocean, we experience moments that nobody knows about on land.

What exactly are these moments?

There are moments when I am overwhelmed by the feeling of how small man is and how powerful nature is. We are not the centre of the universe. We have no significance in a wilderness where nothing has changed for thousands of years. We are only temporary visitors. Apart from us sailors, there is no one down there, no humans. Only albatrosses, gliding cool and unperturbed over the crests of the waves. For me, the south, with its loneliness and unspoilt nature, but also with its pitfalls and dangers, is a unique existential experience

Has your view of life on land changed?

Oh yes, I've become calmer, more relaxed, my pace of life has slowed down. I've done things with other people more often than before. And I enjoy the little everyday habits much more.

Do women sail differently to men?

Oh, are we coming to the sweeping judgements now?

Go ahead.

So, I'll give it a go for offshore sailing. For a long time, I set out to sail like the men, especially during my time in the Figaro class. Gender didn't play a role there, neither in regattas nor in training. We always trained together at the Pôle Finistère, the cadre centre of the French offshore scene. However, I can't crank the winch as quickly as a man or manoeuvre sail bags in the foredeck. As long as I tried to sail like the boys, I was constantly tired, all summer long. At some point I realised: As a woman, you also have to go your own way. For me, it started with Pilates instead of fitness training. It gives me much more energy every day. Other women joined, including Samantha Davies, and now men are also involved.

And at sea, what do women do differently?

My impression is that women are more careful, often much more meticulous, especially when sailing single-handed. They simply can't allow a problem to arise that they need a lot of energy to solve. Men can afford to just go for it. We, on the other hand, have to plan every manoeuvre far more meticulously in advance. In Figaro, we women have developed many tricks for this and exchanged them with each other. Men also know such tricks, but they don't take them so seriously and improvise more.

Are there also differences that have nothing to do with muscle strength?

My impression is that women have more capacity for suffering, they endure longer. They just don't show it as clearly. And another thing: I think it's easier for us to accept when we feel weak and tired. We've known this since puberty, for a few days every month, and we know that it will pass. Especially when sailing long distances, it helps to be familiar with such emotional fluctuations. Men, on the other hand, often put themselves under pressure, they think they always have to be strong on board. This can be observed particularly well on the Vendée Globe: I am strong, I don't show my problems. I find this attitude ridiculous. With Boris, a new openness has come into the class, he was so uninhibited in talking about himself during the last race, I really liked that.

If all your impressions about the strengths of women are correct, why aren't there more successful female skippers in offshore sailing?

Unfortunately, there are many reasons why this is not the case. One of them is a lack of self-confidence. When men are on board, women like to huddle in a corner of the cockpit and say to themselves: "Oh, oh, I don't know if I can do this." But of course they could do it! Look at me: I'm a woman, I'm 1.60 metres tall, I weigh 55 kilos - and I've sailed an 18-metre racing yacht around the world on my own. The only thing that surprises me is that more women haven't done it before. For 30 years, until 2020, only seven women in total took part in a Vendée Globe. Then, for the 2020/21 Vendée Globe, six women started at once. The proportion of women is also growing in the Minis and Figaros. So, among surgeons and conductors, we will probably remain exotic for a while yet for some unknown reason. In the offshore scene, however, our time is over and we are now joining in, even at the top.