Round the world Emma

Pindar girl Emma Richards announces her latest venture

Regarding the event itself, Richards says it was never in her game plan until this year. "To be honest I'd never set my sights or my goals quite as high as that. For me Around Alone is the probably the biggest thing I'll ever ever do." One gets the impression one is being put off the scent a little here for surely the Vendee Globe - singlehanded around the world - is the ultimate event if you race Open 60s? Traditionally in the four year work-up cycle to a Vendee many competitors have used Around Alone as a dry run for 'the big one'. However Richards remains resolutely perched on the fence when I suggest this.

"The Vendee? I don't think so. I don't really know. Having spoken to both Mike [Golding] and Josh [Hall], they both say Around Alone is so much harder because at least the Vendee is a one hit and once you've started that's it, you're there till the end and it's a lot easier to deal with a situation like that, than to come in for three weeks, you're not fully rested, you haven't had enough time to fix everything and then you have to leave again. And it just continues like that for nine months. It's such a different mentality." However she adds: "I'm not discounting anything now. I'd discounted singlehanded sailing two years ago!"

It seems that Richards' relationship with singlehanded ocean racing is very much a love-hate one, un-mitigated hell when it all goes wrong and you have to fix a giant, highly complex boat by yourself, but providing an unrivalled sense of personal achievement within moments of hitting the dock. Time hasn't completely given Richards' singlehanded transatlantic race two years ago a rose tint.

"During the actual race there were a lot of times when it can be so frustrating and the endurance side of it is just so hard," she recalls of the Europe 1 New Man STAR. "Sometimes you just wished you had people around who could hold something while you're doing something, so you didn't have to do everything yourself. But by the end it was just so rewarding because you had done by it yourself and the only help you had was over the phone and mentally from your shore team and your supporters. But physically on the boat, everything you did was your own work. It was the most rewarding thing I've done, the most challenging thing I've done, and when I look back on it now I think, God, I've got to the stage where that's exactly what I'm looking for to do again now, to do something for myself, to get my results, to get what I want to do. It might all turn horribly pear shaped, it might go wrong, but I look forward to giving it a go."

Richards says that one of the reason she contemplated taking part in Around Alone rather than the Route du Rhum was the confidence racing to Cape Horn on Amer Sports Too had given her. "It was absolutely invaluable. Last time I was down in the Southern Ocean before the Volvo race was when we broke our mast and the whole thought of going down there was quite daunting and actually I probably wouldn't have jumped at the chance of doing the Around Alone if I hadn't just been down there and realised that, yes, we had some tough times down there on Amer Sport with the ice and everything but at the end of the day it wasn't something you couldn't cope with. And the weather we had down there with Amer Sport was worse than the frontrunners in the Vendee Globe. They didn't get more than 35 knots in the Southern Ocean and had higher winds coming up the Atlantic. We had a lot more than that with the Volvo boats and I still felt it was quite feasible."

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That look of grim determination...