My near-miss up a mast

A transatlantic sailor has told of her ordeal after a gust knocked her off the mast, jamming her harness, and swinging her repeatedly into the rigging.

Karen and Chris Parker were sailing their Oyster 56, Mistral of Portsmouth, with two crew, when their Code 0 head-sail, designed for light winds, jammed. With squalls forecast, they feared becoming overpowered. After four hours of struggling to free the sail, and daylight fading, Karen decided to go up the mast.

“We wondered if we should cut the sail free at the bottom, but we had no idea if that would free it at the top. If it didn’t, we’d have made the boat unstable,” said Karen.

“Chris and I had practised with me going up the mast and him winching so we went with what we had practised.”

As the sail flogged itself to shreds against the rigging, Chris winched Karen up in a bosun’s chair. Karen had previously climbed the mast in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, to clean the stainless steel, but even so, described the ascent as ‘terrifying’: “I stayed utterly focussed on the line I had to cut at the top of the mast and didn’t look down,” she said.

Karen managed to free the sail, which fell into the ocean, and signalled to Chris to lower her down. A third of the way down, a gust of wind suddenly blew Karen off the mast. She lost her shoe, a knife and headtorch, and was left ‘thrashing around’ on her safety harness. As the boat pitched in 3m swells, crew-mates Laura Richardson and Martin Sharman looked on in horror as Chris held her harness line but was unable to stop Karen striking the rigging.

Multiple blows