The road to recovery

The Daily Sail talks to Emma Richards about leg 1 of Around Alone

Having the crumpled up unfurled genniker floating around in the bilge led to Richards' next disaster. "When the wind slowly died down again to 25 knots and I wanted to get the genniker back up but 25 knots is too much to put it up from scratch. You need less wind to get it up in that state. So then I thought I'll get the code 5 up instead, which is obviously a bigger lighter genniker." Smart move? Not.

"That was my next big mistake. Because of course the wind soon went back up to 30 knots and I went to get that in and I managed to furl it up and everything, but I still had full main going downwind and just after I'd furled it we went into a full broach and then the top of furl blew out and it started ballooning at the top."

Richards managed to get get Pindar back under control and sailing downwind again but even so with the hour glass at the top the sail blew straight over the side. "I did the full trawl and didn’t catch anything."

There then ensued two hours of trying to recover the destroyed sail. She dropped the mainsail and then set about with halyards hauling the sail back on board working from the tack aft. "It took all the halyards to lift the bit at the bow. And then I'd put the halyard round the sail again and lift the next bit up until it was all on deck up to the shroud. And then I had to set up one of the sheets to go to bow and back to drag what sail I had on board forwards so that I could use the halyards again to pull the rest up. It took ages and I was absolutely exhausted, because it all happened within 24 hours and my body was screaming 'don't you dare do that shit to me again'. It was a full on shit fight."

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