Emma Richards update

Battered and bruised but landed in Cape Town after 30 days of solo racing

While her fine yacht Pindar was beaten to a pulp as she faced the tailend of Hurricane Kyle off the coast of Portugal, Emma was beaten to a pulp as she was forced to climb the 80ft tall mast to rethread a new main halyard. Pindar has a 2:1 halyard and halyard had simply snapped close to the dead end at the top block at the masthead, causing the mainsail to come tumbling down to the deck.

Climbing the mast when sailing singlehanded is the most nervewracking job and requires complete faith in the autopilot - no mean feat when the boat is sailing under headsail alone. Singlehanders use mountaineering gear - Emma used a device called a Topclimber. Even using this device Emma would occasionally find herself airborne as the boat rolled and would come slamming back into the mast.

"I went up twice. The first time was up to the second spreader to change the staysail halyard block four days after the hurricane. When I changed from the storm jib, I found the block had destroyed itself on the top of the staysail halyard. It never took me less than 3 hours to go up and down and usually I was up a lot longer than I thought. And I’ve still got black and blue arms from where I went up. I had a bottle of arnaca pills while I was out there.

"Going up the mast was a total nightmare. It is just one of those things you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. It was just brutal up there."

Emma says that Pindar herself is in pretty good shape after the battering she has taken. "The boat is pretty good shape, apart from we’re going to have a proper gooseneck repair instead of a gooseneck repair," she says. "Josh [Hall - who owns the boat] has been all over it, we’ve spent a lot of time looking at what’s broken and what’s in good shape. There’s nothing major."

One worry is the keel following a collision Pindar had with an unidentified waterborne object in the South Atlantic. "We’ve got a diver going down to look at the keel after we hit the container of whatever it was earlier in the race. I was convinced it was a container at the time because it was such a solid smack but then having seen a whale 3-4 days ago and seeing the enormity of that thing in the water I think that would have stopped me as dead.

"The keel is designed to take 12.5 knots or under of collision damage and I was doing about 12 at the time. It could have possibly have survived. Anyway we’ve got a diver going down… I checked all around the keel area for any cracks and in all the stringers but there was nothing there and I haven’t thought it since."

Now back on terra firma her ordeal has not put her off. "I’m okay. I’m a bit physically shot. I’m going to try to recuperate, but of course we’ve got the Table Mountain climbing and the diving with sharks and the wine tours – we got to do the whole African experience – but we’re here for one month so we should get time to do that and recuperate and fix the boat!

"I loved the racing. It is nice to do a tooth and nail fight in the race. It wasn’t like Bernard was miles and miles and miles in front and then we were all in a procession and we were bound to finish in that order. It was nice to have a proper race, a proper fight, with a bunch of boats. I’ve made it known that I’m here to race to them two now and I’m not just making up numbers."

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