Phil Harmer - Back to back Volvo Ocean Race winner

by Ian Thomson on 3 Jul 2015 To get into the Volvo Ocean Race is a dream of so many. To win one is exceptional. To go back to back, well that is an elite group, however, Australia’s Phil Harmer has just done that. Four attempts, two wins, not bad I say.

I sat down with Phil prior to the final in-port race to get his story and he was a satisfied man, as you could imagine. Before getting his big break, he had been sailing with two legends of the Australian offshore circuit in Matt Allen and current Sydney to Hobart champion Roger Hickman. He had also been playing around on a couple of older Volvo 60’s out of Sweden with some mates.

He was selected as part of the Young Australia campaign run by Syd Fisher and he was very quick to thank Syd and Matt for helping him to get where he is today.

Phil got his big break when he applied for the ABN Amro 2 project and got selected, however, after a couple of months he had to leave the team. Sailing back in Australia with Matt Allen on the Ichi Ban campaigns out of Sydney he met up with Matt Humphries who asked him to join Grant Wharrington’s Volvo project ‘Brunel’ which wasn’t the most successful, competing in only a few legs due to lack of funding. Phil only sailed the last legs out of Baltimore.

After the 05/6 race he went back to ABN Amro and did a 12 month sailing tour of the world including a Cowes Race Week, Middle Sea Race, a Sydney to Hobart Race where they broke the mast and then back to the Caribbean.

The following Volvo campaign was on Green Dragon with Ian Walker as his skipper. Whilst it was a good fun team and an enjoyable race, the results were not what they wanted as the boat just wasn’t good enough. Damian Foxhall, who was involved in the Green Dragon program, was employed by Frank Cammas to run the Groupama project and Phil was invited along just a couple of months after the Green Dragon project finished.

I asked him about sailing with Frank and he compared him to Ian Walker, saying they are both control freaks, but in a good way, wanting to know everything and do anything to take the win.

The transition back to Ian Walker’s team came about when they shared a car on the way back to their hotel from the prizegiving in Galway and Ian said that next time he wants to sail with a bunch of mates who he knows he can trust and sail well with.

A few months later he rang up saying he had the money for another campaign and Phil sat down with Simon ‘SIFI’ Fisher, Justin ‘Juddy’ Sinclair and Ian Walker and worked out who they wanted to sail with.

The team camaraderie on the Abu Dhabi campaign was seen as one of the key elements in their success and the fact that they are as good a mates now as when they started shows that whilst you need good sailors, you need good friendships as well to be successful in this race.

Having won the race before I asked him how this win compared to the last one and he said this one was a bit sweeter due to the one design factor and mentally you know everyone has the same gear so it comes down to the crew whereas on Groupama they simply had a rocket ship. They had done a lot of work to make a rocket ship but when it came time to race, they simply sheeted on and sailed past others.

The one design concept was accepted by pretty much everyone I spoke to. Phil believed it was essential for the race to continue bringing the budget down from the Euro 40 Million mark to Euro 15-20 million which will keep more people employed etc.

He found a few things annoying, like the AIS which meant that you could see what other boats within 15 miles were doing.

Having someone on the computer screen yelling out the hatch that someone is 0.2 knots faster was slightly annoying but felt minor changes could be made to make this work, like bringing back the stealth mode from two editions ago so people could take a chance and back themselves rather than just following the leader and tacking when others are.

When it came to family, he has two children and with his son Rebel being four and at school, it is a lot harder to fly them out these days so he flew back every stop over to see them.

He found this the hardest part of the race as he would only really get three to four days at home before having to fly back again for racing commitments. The extra stress of missing his children growing up meant that he found it key to find what makes him relax when on the boat to calm himself down, especially when the inevitable argument between crew-mates happens.

However, he felt the team did really well to squash these on the spot and get on with it and no one held a grudge.

He struggled a couple of times and in particular in the leg two he had left Cape Town weighing 96kg and with a stomach ulcer he arrived in Abu Dhabi at just 77kg so sat out leg three.

He managed to recover but was still not as strong as when he left Alicante. He saw it as an unhealthy race and saw crew rotations in the next edition as a key. On board they have their own water bottles and boys being boys, they aren’t good at taking their vitamins and keeping hydrated as they are concentrating on the racing.

The highlight for Phil was the leg one win as arriving into Cape Town first is a precursor to winning the overall in most previous races, Groupama being the exception. Other than that, arriving into Lorient knowing they had pretty much wrapped it up was a good feeling too. Cape Horn was pretty good considering they saw it this year whilst ‘sending it’.

When I spoke of future editions, he believed that there would be more boats in the next race, with three new boats being built and the current seven being refitted to race again.

With the current boats being approximately 2.5 million cheaper than a new boat, it does allow more access and with the momentum, he’s hoping to see nine or ten boats on the next start line. Having won it twice, his next goal is to run his own team. It’s a huge step up, but he and SiFi are keen to have a go and ‘eat some humble pie’ as they say everyone always thinks they can do it better.

His immediate future is on Commanche in the Trans-Atlantic starting on the 5th July.

After that, he said he would like to work with his SCA girlfriend Sara Hastreiter to put an all-girl Extreme 40 campaign together to see what it is like to run a campaign and get some practice. His motivation is also for the girls to keep the momentum as he’d hate it to be another 12 years before another girls team.

With regards to the ocean debris, he said it is definitely getting worse and it is really frustrating. In 05/6 it was all about saving the Albatross and in the last two editions their numbers are growing once again. However the wildlife numbers where pretty much non-existent except the Atlantic. The Indian Ocean was desolate except for a few dolphins coming into Abu Dhabi. Debris wise it was a lot of rope and nets whilst around the Asian regions it is plastic and Styrofoam. In the Atlantic, it was timber and they even got a pallet stuck at one stage and he was responsible to jump in at night to remove it.

Throughout the interview, you could feel that Phil was quite relaxed and very satisfied.

I’m not sure how many people can say they are a two time winner, let alone a back to back winner but I’m sure Phil will be chasing more wins in the future and maybe one day, as a skipper.