End in sight

With the penultimate leg of Around Alone starting this weekend Emma Richards is hoping for a podium position

This weekend sees the departure of the final leg of Around Alone and the run north up the Atlantic from Salvador, Brazil to the finish in Newport, Rhode Island where the boats are expected to arrive during the first week in May.

For 27 year old British skipper Emma Richards, it represents the light at the end of the tunnel. While Around Alone has its own unique flavour as an event - it is the only round the world race, singlehanded or otherwise, to start and finish in the US - and many lifelong friends are developed over its lengthy duration, it has for Richards, been one hell of a way to confirm what she knew all along - that she doesn't like very long distance singlehanded offshore racing.

"Yes - I am absolutely sure I don’t like singlehanded sailing," agrees Richards. "I don’t mind the responsibility. That’s fine. There would be more responsibility if you were the skipper of a crew. It is things like when everything is going pearshaped and you could really do with a hand. But also when everything is going so well and the sailing is absolutely perfect - perfect surfing waves, perfect weather, the best sail combination up and you have six hours of the best sailing you’ve had all year and you think 'wow, this makes it all worth it' then you think “I wish there was someone else here to share it with."

Then there is the solitude. Richards gets many phonecalls on board from friends, family, her sponsor Andrew Pindar and she also has a weekly Friday night call with her doublehanded racing partner and Miranda Merron, regardless of where the two are in the world.

"I speak to a lot of people so that’s good, but it’s not the same, because they’re not there to hand you a screw driver or something when you’ve dropped it and you can’t reach it because you are hanging on to three different wires and everything’s gone wrong," she explains. "Or when you’ve got no autopilots left and there’s nothing but a piece of rope to lash the helm with while you go off to fix something. That happened off Great Barrier Island at the end of leg three when we had 40 knots of wind."

Singlehanding also plays havoc with her competitive streak. The common scenario is being on the edge of sail limits where with a full crew or even one extra pair of hands there would be no question about making the change. With singlehanding there is much more 'wait and see' which Richards says she finds "frustrating".

Clearly Richards is learning the art of playing the averages. In the last leg from New Zealand round Cape Horn to Brazil she made the conscious decision to ease off the gas until she got past the Horn. She did this partly from seeing what had happened in previous races but also her experience in previous legs. In each leg to date she found that she pushed hard, the boat had broken and then she'd had to go slowly and lost places as a result.

"The first half was a total mission to be conservative, staying north out of the ice, to keep the boat in one piece so I could race up the other side," she says. But by sailing further north and not pushing as hard Richards found herself tailing the class one boats. So was this a good tactic? "I was thinking that was the worst tactic ever before the two booms broke. I was thinking what a lemon - what have I done? But when the two booms broke I think it justified my decision."

Her strategy after Cape Horn did not go entirely according to plan. "The first half went really well. I totally caught up with Simone [Bianchetti] and got to within six miles of him, and then I got stuck in the same hole as he’d got stuck in for a day and he disappeared off so that was that." She finished in Salvador on 14 March in fourth place having spent 33 days and 20 hours at sea a day after Bianchetti and four days after Bernard Stamm.

"I was pleased with the result," she continues. "I arrived with no damage. I got as good a placing as I could hope after I was more than 300 miles behind the last 60 at one point when there were still six of us in the race."

The mainsail she shredded on the previous leg stood up well receiving a couple of small rips, neither of them sailing related. "One of them was below the third reef, there is a little line that holds the sail out to the end of the boom so it doesn’t fold over the side. There was a ton of water in there and a wave landed in the reef point and tore it."

The leg itself was the normal mixed bag of delight and horror. On the approach to the finish line she had found her sailing through the middle of a lightning storm. "I was under this massive cloud watching the lightning hitting the water right next to me and somehow not hitting the mast. That was scarey. I reckon it was less than one quarter of mile way. The noise and the flash happened at the same time. There’s wasn’t anything like a second or a slight delay. It was deafening. It was like someone cracking a whip right next to your ear. It was horrible and there I was holding on to a carbon tiller..."

Fortunately she got away with it. A direction strike on Pindar's carbon fibre mast would have taken out all her electronics. In some instances lightning has been known to punch a hole in the hull.

Aside from seeing her competition disappear into the distance in the Southern Ocean, the most frustrating period came in the South Atlantic when she was attempting to claw her away upwind. "We all had the wind dead on the nose. If you’re doing 8.5 average boat speed with a bad tacking angle your VMG to windward is only 5 knots. And when you have two knots of current against you it is just depressing when you just watch the course over the ground and the course made on your nav programme. By the time the current has pushed you back, your tacking angle is ridulous. It is about 120 degrees."

This was compounded later when she had to contend with the Pampo oil field off Brazil.
"Going through the oil field I had the radar on 12 miles radius and I counted 42 vessels or rigs or tugs or just 42 different things in that area. I remember calling Brad [van Liew] and saying 'don’t whatever you do go through this oil field. It is just a nightmare.'

"At night, there’s these massive big flames coming out of the top of the platforms and it looks like a mad Terminator movie. And you are on your own on the boat and you don’t sleep - I was in there for 30 hours trying to get out. And it was big squall and no wind, big squall and no wind and you couldn't see anything in the squalls. Then you'd have the two knot current pushing you back, so you would think you were making it round one rig and in fact you’d have to go the other side of it."

The high point of the leg was rounding Cape Horn. Richards says she saw it, but had a little bit on her plate at the time. "I got the top boat speed I have ever had on this boat just before I came into Cape Horn," she recounts with enthusiasm. "In a 35 knots gust I got 32 knots out of the boat under two reefs and Solent and staysail. I wouldn’t normally have that sail up in 35 knots, but it was just gusts coming in and I was handsteering all the way in there anyway. I knew I would be handsteering until I passed Cape Horn and the major islands there."

Compared to some other skippers Richards says she gets little downtime. "I spoke to Brad quite a lot on the phone because I was a lot closer to him on this leg and he has got a free communicate sponsor. He must be on the phone all the time! Other than that not really - talking to Tim Kent, he said he has a big box of books on the boat and he’s read them all! I haven’t read any. Music - on the second leg in good trade wind sailing, I managed to listen the Lord of the Rings, the BBC version. It was a lot of listening but I could sit on the helm with the deck speakers on and it gave me something new to listen to new and to think about."

Going into the final leg Richards says that her goal is to get on the podium. Current form suggests that beating Bernard Stamm and Thierry Dubois who have respectively come first and second in every leg so far, is unlikely.

"I don’t know how Bernard does what he does," Richards admits. "I really wish he had finished the Vendee Globe because I would have liked to have seen what his position would have been, because I'm convinced he would be up there. Mind you, at the rate he is pushing now he wouldn’t have made it anyway. He has fallen apart a few times."

Meanwhile the cunning Frenchman Thierry Dubois has been studiously coming second in every leg to date based on the tactic that Stamm's Bobst Group-Armor Lux will break before they reach Newport. This nearly came to pass on this last leg when the keel came close to falling off the Swiss boat and Stamm was forced to put into the Falkland Islands to effect repairs. Despite this he still managed to beat Dubois into Salvador on the water, although a 24 hour penalty for stopping dropped him to second. "Thierry was furious with himself for letting Bernard sail back in front of him," Richards says.

"After leg two I thought it was possible to beat them" she continues. "It was a long leg and I was only 15 hours behind Bernard and seven behind Thierry. I think it is possible but I also have to remember that this final leg for me instead of going out all out to beat those two and perhaps break the boat, all I have got to do is to finish by Tiscali to get on the podium."

She says her only worry is Bruce Schwab, whose pencil thin Ocean Planet with its free standing rig is fast upwind in the light. "So if he gets to the Equator way before me and disappears and I get stuck…." Simone Bianchetti's Tiscali, a sistership to Roland Jourdain's Sill, is also better than Pindar upwind. Richards explains why: "If it gets to 8-9 knots I’m starting to put in ballast and in 12 knots I’ve got nearly three tonnes of ballast in - that’s adding one third to one half the weight of the boat again. It’s just ridiculous really." Tiscali in comparison has a canting keel.

Meanwhile back in the UK, thanks to the efforts of her Soho spinmeisters Henry Chappell and Victoria Fuller of Pitch PR, the Emma Richards media profile is at an all time high. There was an hour long BBC documentary about her, she was also featured in the series Faking It. She has a weekly column on Saturday in the Independent and 12 major pieces about her in the Daily Telegraph. Features about her have also appeared in general consumer magazines like Marie Claire and Vanity Fair.

Aside from boosting Richard's profile it is also working for her sponsor Andrew Pindar. "It has taken a couple of years to prove within his company about what a great thing it’s been for Pindar. It has been a good thing for the company – there is no doubt about it," says Richard.

Pindar is also a major shareholder in the US high street printers Alphagraphics. "The Americans love the race, and because Around Alone starts and finishes in America, it’s been just a great thing for them to get involved with." Both Alphagraphics and HSBC have been having great success getting school children in the States to follow the race.

Then there is the waffle deal.

Somehow Bird's Eye, who manufacture potato waffles, picked up on Emma liking the fried potato grids and agreed to sponsor her until the end of the race. At present Emma is not having to dress up in an elaborate waffle-shaped costume of block foam to do children's parties and says that talk of her becoming the face of the potato waffle or the new 21st century lady sea dog answer to Captain Bird's Eye in any television advertising is just that - talk. However being a good Scot she has not discounted the idea of being involved in a TV ad campaign - there is after all the mortgage to think of on the flat she bought at the start of Around Alone and has not seen since...

Meanwhile she and Bruce Schwab have unofficially taken on some of the work for the HSCB Education Trust following Graham Dalton's dismasting and subsequent retirement from Around Alone.

Beyond Around Alone Richards says she wants to team up with Miranda Merron again to sail in the Transat Jacques Vabre, but has still to find a boat (her present boat, it is believed, has already been chartered). She may also join up with another fellow Royal & SunAlliance crew Sharon Ferris to race in the women's match racing in Marstrand this summer.

But under no circumstances will the Vendee Globe be in the program... "I've told Andrew Pindar to withdraw his support if I ever start talking about sailing in the Vendee," she quips.