Around Alone

In this extract from her new book about her singlehanded round the world race Emma Richards recounts her gruelling mast climb

I was sitting in the cabin a few hours after sunset on the Wednesday when I heard the dismal thud of my little world falling around my ears. There was a sudden difference in the boat’s movement, a loss of power, and I went up on deck to confirm what I’d heard. It was so dark that I couldn’t see the end of the boat but I didn’t need to look that far to see the mainsail had come down. The halyard had snapped. I knew instantly that I’d have to climb the mast to make the repair. I’d be out of the race standings unless I fixed it. You can’t go anywhere fast with no mainsail. It’s the main powerhouse of the boat, like an engine in a car.

We were a fraction south of the Tropic of Capricorn and slap bang in the middle of the South Atlantic. Namibia lay 2,000 miles due east, Brazil 2,000 miles to the west. They might as well have been a million miles away, I felt suddenly so isolated. I would have considered going up the mast immediately if it hadn’t been pitch black. Climbing 80 feet is tough enough in daylight and good weather and with help on standby. Attempting it then – tired, alone and effectively blind – was bound to mean a simple error that would only force me up the mast again later. I lashed down the mainsail to the boom that was swinging on its lazy jacks to stop it blowing overboard, and went back inside. I lay in my bunk and was rocked not so gently into slumber. The wind was shifting outside and I was already apprehensive about the task ahead.

The alarm went off at half past five on Thursday morning. I’d slept for four hours, the longest single stretch in almost four weeks since leaving Brixham. My body must have known what lay ahead and persuaded my mind to switch off and let me rest. I’d planned to go up at dawn, as soon as I had enough light to see what I was doing. I ended up waiting longer to allow some black clouds to blow through. The wind was varying between 15 and 25 knots and I wasn’t feeling too comfortable. I needed to make sure I had an appropriate sail setting that would cover the range of winds while I was up there. Obviously I wouldn’t be able to alter anything once I’d started.

I contacted the team around 8 a.m. to let them know what I was doing. I told them I’d be going up the mast shortly and I’d let them know when the mission was accomplished. All being well, they expected to hear from me in a couple of hours. I prepared the gear I’d need to take up. I took a knife to cutaway the old dead end. I took the spare main halyard (240 feet of rope). I took some tape, and a spare block in case the one at the top had been the cause of the halyard breaking. I put my video camera in my pocket, strapped on my helmet and psyched myself up for the challenge.

The climb would involve an ascent up a length of rope that was stretched between the top of the mast and the deck. The piece of equipment I used to get up and down the rope was a Topclimber, which consisted of a little platform seat (like a deckchair but with a web strap back and no legs) and two stirrup-like straps, with loops for my feet.

When I was ready to go, I climbed into the Topclimber, which was attached to the rope at waist height with a strap and a oneway jammer. The jammer gripped the rope when you exerted downward pressure on it. When I let go – and therefore exerted downward pressure by sitting in the seat – I could lift my feet from the ground and the seat was supported.

The foot straps were also attached to the rope with a oneway jammer. When I put my feet in them and stood up, I was able to release the pressure on the seat jammer, move it up a few inches and sit back down. Then I was able to release the pressure on the lower jammer by raising my feet, and move that up a few inches. I could then stand again, having moved up a fraction, slide the upper jammer up again, and so on. Basically, you move yourself up the rope – and hence up the mast – by repeatedly standing up and sitting down. To come down, you reverse the process.

It sounds so simple, and if you are trying to do this on a steady platform and with a taut rope, it is. If your platform is unsteady – and my platform was Pindar in choppy seas and gusting winds – it becomes a different proposition altogether. The tiniest bit of slack in the rope multiplied the potential for a hard climb, so I wound it down to the deck as hard as I could. I was still uncomfortable with the thought of a big gust coming through while I was high up there. If the boat’s motion became too unstable, the consequences didn’t bear thinking about.

Scaling the mast when Pindar wasn’t moving – when she was docked, for example – it took a few minutes to reach the top o fthe mast and not long at all to reach the first spreaders. (Spreaders are the ‘arms’ used to hold the rigging away from the mast. Pindar had three sets, spaced approximately 20 feet, 40 feet and 60 feet up the mast.) On that fateful day at sea, it took me twenty minutes to get to the first spreader.

I’d lost my footing a couple of times already. The motion, though still relatively stable, was enough to be jolting me around. I was already bruised from being bumped against the rig. I was physically uncomfortable and I was nervous about the weather. I decided I needed to make myself more secure before going any further. I thought I could do this by tightening the rope between the masthead and the deck so that I wouldn’t be swinging so much, if at all, with the motion. But to tighten the rope, I needed to be on the deck. I started to go back down. Using the Topclimber, I could only move the jammers a couple of inches at a time. I’d gone down about a foot (with five or six up-and-down movements using limbs that were already tiring) when I realized it was a stupid idea to go back. I’d be hurting by the time I got to the deck, which would hardly inspire me to come back up again. The rope was already fairly tight and it wasn’t going to get much better. I’d already procrastinated for a couple of hours after dawn about when to go up. I told myself I was just procrastinating again, trying to find some excuse not to continue. I looked upwards. The rope wasn’t deflecting from its position too much. I changed my mind again and started to go back up. I reached the first spreader and sat on it while I adjusted my harness. I could already feel my muscles pumped up with the blood flow. I looked around to see if there were any big clouds or gusts heading my way. There were none.

I took a deep breath, put my weight on my feet and pushed up again another few inches. It was starting to hurt and I was still swinging against the rig but I got into a rhythm for a while and was almost starting to feel good about what I was doing. Then the wind increased. I’d set the autopilot to steer to a certain angle from the wind, so if the wind shifted I would still be sailing with the same angle of wind, just in a slightly different direction, which would have been no great loss for that short period. With the increased wind though, the boat heeled over more.

Each impact with a wave jolted the mast, flicking me like a rag doll outwards and then back into the mast. Ouch. I stopped climbing and held on for a while, hoping it would last only for a set of waves. No such luck. I was going to be bounced all the way and I had to deal with it. I tried to climb an inch or two between jolts, making sure I was holding on to the mast when each one arrived. My arms ached but the adrenalin was pumping and I forced myself towards the second spreader, where I was able to take another break.

The higher I got, the more exaggerated the movement became. Each wave had the top of the mast flicking like a whip. As I rested I scanned the horizon for ominous cloud or squalls on the water. There was not much new to see but the clouds were definitely getting darker. I pushed on to the top spreader. It took nearly all my effort and I arrived there battered, knackered and frazzled. Occasionally I had had to remove my extra safety line – which was preventing me from swinging more than an arm’s length from the mast – so I could move it past an obstacle. Several times when the extra line was unattached, a wave hit and I was flung backwards away from the rigging. The violent motion spun me around and brought me crashing back into the rigging. My hips, spine, legs and upper arms all took a thumping. It was at that stage that I began to contemplate the possibility that I might sustain some serious damage. At least I had a helmet tostop direct blows to the head.

I made it to the last spreader nearly broken. I lashed myself against it, rested for a few moments and pulled out the camera. I talked to the camera, explaining where I was and what I was doing, as much to distract my mind as anything else. I was also thinking that if and when I made it down safely, it would be good to have a record of what it was like up there to remind me of the parts of solo racing that I hated.

That was therapeutic, if not for particularly long. I seemed a bit distracted, I thought. I said how tough it was and what the weather was like. Then I panned the camera downwards. Watching it later, I was struck by the way my legs were hanging so limply, even at that stage.

After one more push I almost made it to the top. By that stage the 240-foot rope I’d been carrying around my shoulders felt like the weight of at least a couple of bodies. I was fading and I’d really had enough. I’d been climbing for around two hours already. That’s when I saw the black squall clouds coming my way. I didn’t know how long they’d take to reach me but I knew there must be strong wind under them.

I drew every ounce of strength I had left to try to hurry up. As I approached the top, movement became almost unbearable and the motion of the boat likewise. With each whip of the mast I grabbed it with a terror-induced grip to try to stop myself being flung around. The g-force was so strong that my hands were ripped away, leaving instant blood blisters. The next time it happened I could feel the blisters burst. The skin on my hand sfelt raw. I blanked out the pain and carried on.

When I finally made it, I could only just reach around the back of the mast where I needed to do the work. I tied the spare halyard to the mast with more care than I’d ever tied anything. If I dropped it, I’d need to go down 80 feet and get it. The very thought made me feel ill.

I tied myself to the mast so I could work with both hands. I got my knife out and cut away the remaining foot of the old halyard. I put it in my pocket so I could examine it later. There was no sign of damage to the block so I left it there. I tied one end of the halyard to the dead end on the mast with a few hitches and secured it with plenty of tape. Every stage of the task seemed to take an age but I needed to do it carefully. I wasn’t going to be coming up again in a hurry. I turned round to check on the black clouds. They were nearly upon me as I started down.

If going up had been slow, descending was more painstaking and painful still. I moved in even smaller stages than when I’d gone up. If I pushed the lower jammer down too far the footstraps would be too low to stand on. And if I couldn’t stand on the straps and take all the weight off the top jammer, it wouldn’t move. I needed enough play each time so that I could push the jammers up a little before they loosed their grip. Only then could I squeeze the jammer levers and release them to move them down. I was already in agony and in my rush to reach safety I was getting impatient. This only served to make the whole process slower because I was trying to hurry the jammers into working and they kept resisting. I just wanted it all to be over.

I was somewhere around the top spreader when the first big squall came in. Pindar heeled over and the autopilot struggled to keep her heading where she was meant to go. Each time the pilot tried to force the boat at an angle further from the wind, she heeled over more.

When she heeled, I was incapable of making upward progress. The mast was leaning over too much, with a more violent slamming motion than before. At points I was hanging over the water, urging Pindar with every fibre of my being to straighten herself back up. I remember hoping that if I was going to be thrown from the mast, I wanted at least to fall 60 feet to the deck and take my chances with the bump. I wouldn’t be in good shape afterwards but I’d have a better chance of survival than if I landed in the water and then watched the boat sail away from me on autopilot. Pindar had turned into something more like a powerboat, bouncing off every small wave.

Trying simply to hold myself against the rigging was no good. I was taking a full-body battering. The skin was being scraped from my knuckles each time I used the jammers and my hands were becoming numb. My arms, ribs and legs were being pounded. I could feel my back and shoulders bruising. My head cracked against the mast. Thank God I was wearing the helmet. On a calm, stable sea I’d have expected to go up, do the repair and come down in less than an hour. That day, it was close to two hours before I wished I was anywhere else in the world but then somewhere in the region of four hours I stopped thinking properly at all.

I desperately wanted not to be there but I was and I had to deal with it. Mentally, it was like being a nervous flyer on an aeroplane as it hits terrible turbulence. There was the same sense of intense discomfort and stomach-churning uncertainty. If being thrown around at the top had been the seatbelt sign coming on, then being tipped and shaken and hammered by the squalls was like hearing the pilot start to weep.

At times, I so craved respite from being thrown around, just needing to rest my burning muscles, that I lashed myself to the mast merely in an attempt to be still. But in those moments of ‘rest’, when my mind was given a moment to think about the situation, darker thoughts stole in. And beyond the fear of broken bones or serious head injury or being thrown into the sea I was ultimately most chilled when I thought about Mum and Dad.

They were waiting back in Scotland for a phone call that hadn’t arrived. The image of someone telling them their daughter was dead crushed me. I was breathless thinking about it. I untied myself and started inching down. I went through the motions and after what seemed an age I reached the deck. When I got to the bottom I was still tied into the climber but I just lay down on the deck and stayed there for several minutes. Then I took the camera from my pocket and told it I was okay but I’d had a nightmare. Then I unhooked myself, untied the new halyard, fed it through its own jammer on the mast and tied it around the winch so that it wouldn’t go anywhere. Next I scrambled across the deck, adjusted my course and sails and went downstairs to make some calls.

My first calls were to Andrew, Robin and my parents. It was about 1.30 p.m. by the time I got on the phone. They hadn’t heard from me for five hours. None of them answered and I left messages. I found out later that they were all on the phone to one another, wondering where I was. When I did get hold of them, it was Mum I spoke to first. I think it’s safe to say she was relieved. Subsequently, in the still, warm safety of the living room at home, she’s said that if I were ever to die at sea, at least she’d know I’d died doing something I loved. After that trip up the mast, I knew I didn’t ever want that to become true.

Published by Macmillan, Around Alone by Emma Richards is available in hardback. from Amazon, who are offering a 40% discount off the list price of £17.99 - click here for more info .