Solo yachtswoman waits for rescue thousands of miles adrift in wrecked boat

A solo yachtswoman who was competing in an around-the-world race is now waiting to be rescued in the Southern Ocean after a storm destroyed her boat and left her injured.

British sailor Susie Goodall – the only woman and the youngest competitor in the Golden Globe Race – was around 2,000 miles west of South America on Wednesday when a brutal storm lashed her boat with 60-knot winds.

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Susie Goodall leaves Les Sables d'Olonne, France, July 1, on the DHL Starlight at the start of the around-the-world Golden Globe Race.

“One wave mounted on top of another,” causing her yacht to flip from stern over bow, the race’s spokesman, Barry Pickthall, told CNN.

“I was thrown across the cabin and knocked out for a while,” Goodall, who is a sailing instructor, wrote to organizers on her communications equipment. She added it left her “beaten up and badly bruised.”

“The only thing left is the hull and deck which remain intact,” she said of losing the mast and rigging on her 35-foot boat, DHL Starlight.

Chilean authorities are coordinating her rescue, but due to Goodall’s remote position the nearest vessel alerted, the 38-tonne carrier Tian Fu, won’t reach her until the early hours of Friday morning.

The morning after running over another rope on our first night sail. The calmness of the sea belied the anxiety we felt.

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“It will still be dark when the MV Tian Fu reaches the scene and the rescue operation is unlikely to commence before daylight,” organizers said in a press statement.

“It will be for her Captain to decide the best method to transfer Goodall from yacht to ship. This could entail launching the ship’s own man-overboard vessel, or lowering a cargo net or ladder over the side for her to climb up from the yacht or her life raft,” organizers said.

Goodall has since gained “control of the situation” and “is quite safe the way she is,” Pickthall told CNN.

On Thursday, the solo yachtswoman said in a message that it had been a long night, after writing the day before that she was “totally and utterly gutted.”

In spite of conditions calming down to 15-knot winds, life on board the damaged boat is uncomfortable for the skipper. The Southern Sea tends to be “very rough” and the temperature will be “sub zero,” Pickthall said.

Main Sail presenter, Shirley Robertson, takes the plunge at the University of Portsmouth's extreme weather lab.

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Goodall was in fourth place on her 157th day at sea and past the halfway point in the non-stop 30,000-mile Golden Globe Race before the storm hit.

Out of 18 competitors, four were forced out of the race due to broken masts and nine others left for personal reasons – “[many] weren’t prepared properly,” Pickthall said.

The tough competition marks the 50th anniversary of the 1968-1969 Sunday Times-sponsored Golden Globe Race, in which Robin Knox-Johnston became the first person in the world to perform a single-handed non-stop circumnavigation of the globe.

Goodall has endured a sailor’s nightmare, but has managed to retain her composure. In one of her messages to the organizers, she wrote: “In need of a good cuppa tea!”