Speaking from her small boat anchored at a seaport in western France, Ambre Hasson took a moment to wonder about an alternate life, the kind she sees on social media from former colleagues at a tech company in New York City.
Hasson works on her boat as part of a total refitting ahead of the Mini Transat race. (Contributed photo)
That’s the career she left in 2020 for a water-bound adventure.
“A lot of them have houses now, a lot of them are married. They live well,” Hasson said. “I try to stay in touch, but it gets harder and harder to maintain conversation. It’s like, ‘How are you? I just got married,’ and I’m like, ‘Well, OK, cool. I just went sailing.’”
Hasson is the 2015 University of Virginia alumna we introduced in May 2024 as the techie-turned-sailor who wasn’t allowing a devastating crash to derail her dream of competing in a race across the Atlantic Ocean.
More than a year later, Hasson has finally qualified for that race: the Mini Transat, a 4,050-nautical-mile course from Les Sables-d’Olonne, France, to Guadeloupe, a Caribbean island southeast of Puerto Rico, with a lengthy stopover in the Canary Islands. The solo sail begins Sept. 21 and lasts, between the two legs, up to a month.
Hasson’s boat is one of 90 in the fleet.
“We don’t know what’s going to happen,” Hasson said, “but you can be sure I’m going to give it everything I have.”
Hasson recently spoke to UVA Today from the hull of her 21-foot vessel. While she doesn’t live on the boat full-time, her days are spent working on every detail to prepare for the race.
Last year, she “stripped it naked” with a full refit, replacing everything from the keel’s bearings to the lines that hold the sails. She’s even practiced mast-climbing in case she needs to make a quick fix at the top of her craft.
Ambre Hasson: Yes, that is me all the way at the top of my mast.
One of the things I had to learn to do before the Transat was to solo climb up my mast. I had this climbing gear, and I tried it out. There was 15, 18 knots of wind.
It wasn’t as hard as I thought, but it gave me quite a bit of confidence to know that if anything goes wrong in the middle of the Transat and I need to go up, I’ll be able to do it. So, cheers.
Sailing is Hasson’s business. And her boat, a 20-year-old vessel purchased in Finland for 50,000 euros (about $58,300), serves as her office. An economics major at UVA, Hasson has found creative ways to fund a seafaring career that teetered on the brink after the July 2023 crash.
“Two years ago,” Hasson said, “I had nothing. I had no money, no apartment, no car, no boat, like nothing. And the only image that people had of me was the girl that lost her boat. I was like, ‘How am I going to do this?’
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