Real Survival Stories - Earth’s Deadliest Waters: 1,000 Miles From Land

Episode Date: September 11, 2024

In 2017, Australian sailor Lisa Blair is going for a record - the fastest ever solo circumnavigation of Antarctica. She is nearing the finish line when out of nowhere disaster strikes. With her boat breaking in two, Lisa must pull off the most desperate of emergency procedures… all while battling the most treacherous waters on the planet… A Noiser production, written by Joe Viner. For more on this story read Lisa’s book Facing Fear. For ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Click the Noiser+ banner to get started. Or, if you’re on Spotify or Android, go to noiser.com/subscriptions If you have an amazing survival story of your own that you’d like to put forward for the show, let us know. Drop us an email at [e-mail] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's in this McDonald's bag? The McValue Meal. For $5.79 plus tax, you can get your choice of Junior Chicken, McDouble, or Chicken Snack Wrap, plus small fries and a small fountain drink. So pick up a McValue Meal today at participating McDonald's restaurants in Canada. Prices exclude delivery. It's around 10pm on Wednesday, April the 3rd, 2017. 1,000 nautical miles south of Cape Town, South Africa. A savage storm rages in the Southern Ocean.

Amid gale-force winds and eight-meter swells, a fifty-foot sailboat is flung around between the breakers. The power of the tempest has already caused the vessel irreparable harm. The boat's mast has snapped off at the base. It lies on its side, a jagged 22-meter length of aluminum horribly snarled up in a tangle of ropes, sails, and rigging lines. With each massive wave, the mangled mast is dragged back and forth like a hacksaw, its sharp metal teeth splintering the wood and fiberglass deck. Pretty soon, it'll cut right down to the hull, and this boat will sink to the bottom of the ocean, taking 32-year-old Lisa Blair with it. Lisa sits huddled at the front of the vessel,

her trembling hands clutching the guardrails. She has mere minutes, seconds even, to work out what to do, to calculate how to salvage her boat and save her life. And I knew I needed to disconnect the rigging and get it off the boat quick before it cut a hole too big in the boat and I started sinking. Because if I had to abandon to a life raft in those conditions, I would never survive. Lisa needs to disconnect the force stay wire, a length of rigging that runs from the top of the mast to the top of the mast to the end of the bow. But to do that, she'll need to do something unthinkably dangerous.

She must climb beyond the guardrails and crawl along the narrow spar that extends from the front of the boat, overhanging the water. Out there, Lisa will have nothing to hold onto. With tools in each hand, she will have to rely on the strength in her legs to clamp herself into position. One rogue wave, one slip, and Lisa will be swept away. But if she doesn't disconnect the rigging, her boat is going to sink. It's an impossibly tough call to make. A paralysing toss-up between certain death

and almost certain death. I'm facing that reality that in the next few minutes I'm not going to be alive but I have to make the choice to make my body work to climb out there or I'm certainly not going to be alive.

Ever wondered what you would do when disaster strikes? If your life depended on your next decision, could you make the right choice? Welcome to Real Survival Stories. These are the astonishing tales of ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations. People suddenly forced to fight for their lives. In this episode, we meet Lisa Blair. In 2017, the Australian sailor is attempting to complete the fastest ever solo circumnavigation of Antarctica. It's the ultimate test of nautical skill and endurance. When you're solo, you are the cook,

the cleaner, the rigger, the sailmaker, the helmsperson, the trimmer, the engineer, the mechanic. You're all of it in one go. Despite the myriad challenges, by early April, Lisa is on track to beat the record.

When out of nowhere, disaster strikes. The mast had snapped at deck level and had fallen to the starboard side into the ocean, which is the right-hand side, the side that the waves were coming through. And I'm effectively anchored in the middle of a storm the size of a small cyclone. 1,000 miles from land, Lisa must perform the most difficult and desperate of emergency procedures, all while battling the most treacherous waters on the planet. I'm sorry. It's January the 20th, 2017. Just off the coast of Albany, Western Australia.

Waves thump against the hull of a 50-foot racing yacht as it's towed out of harbor Hundreds of spectators line the dock, clapping and cheering and waving banners They've all come to see off 32-year-old Lisa Blair, to witness history in the making Lisa stands behind the wheel of her yacht, guiding it forwards Gradually, the roar of her yacht, guiding it forwards. Gradually, the roar of the spectators fades. The support vessels cast her off with cries of good luck and godspeed. And soon, Lisa is left alone with the ocean, and with her one shining objective, to sail around Antarctica and become a record breaker.

So I had this idea and I made the commitment in 2014 to go and sail solo, that I was going to become not just the first woman in the world to do it, but the fastest person. Lisa will be sailing between the 45th and 60th parallels through a 16,000-mile-long stretch of the notoriously tempestuous Southern Ocean. It's the roughest conditions in the world because you get no land to break up the storms. So as these huge storms develop, they just get bigger and bigger and bigger as they blow their way around the world. And the only place that they kind of impact any land on that journey is at this place called Cape Horn,

which is the southern tip of the South American coastline. To brave these waters, you need courage, skill and a cool head. Though Lisa possesses all these qualities, she's only been sailing competitively for about six years. In 2012, she was part of the winning crew in the Klippa round-the-world yacht race. Since then, she's completed several solo voyages, all while setting her sights on the next big challenge.

In 2014, Lisa happened across the exploits of a legendary Russian adventurer named Fedor Konyakov. He's probably one of the most famous adventurers out of Russia that's still alive. And he's sailed around the world solo four times. He's gone to the top of Mount Everest multiple times. He's just done the most, like, one adventure after another for his entire life. One feat stood out to Lisa. The fastest solo circumnavigation of the Southern Ocean. She had found her next project. And for the next three years, Lisa's sole focus became getting to the start line. She took out loans, searched high and low for sponsors, and eventually scrimped,

saved, and borrowed enough to buy a vessel capable of beating Fedor Konyakov's record. I borrowed another 65,000 to round off the money I needed to just get to the start line. And three and a half years after setting that goal of sailing solo around Antarctica, I sailed the boat to Western Australia. By January 2017, Lisa was about $300,000 in debt. But none of that mattered to her. She was ready. The night before departure, Lisa was up late on board her boat, checking and triple-checking to ensure she had prepared for every eventuality.

I'd been visualising every possible worst-case scenario that I might face out there for three and a half years. I'd been dreaming of them, thinking of them. Every spare moment I had awake, I would be working through how could I survive that situation? What would I do here? What would I do there? And then suddenly I was off and I was about to go and live those experiences. I knew I would face some of them out there in the Southern Ocean.

And I didn't know whether I was capable or what, but I knew that I was now going to have to put my money where my mouth was and aim the bow south and go. Lisa stands at the helm, wind swept and spray soaked, her determined gaze fixed on the horizon. 101 days. If she can return to port in Western Australia in 101 days or less, she'll have done it. She'll have beaten Konyakov's record and written herself into the history books. But setting records isn't Lisa's only motivation. Emblazoned on the side of her vessel are the words, Climate Action Now.

It's both the name of her boat and a call to arms, a rallying cry. Over the course of her sailing career, Lisa has witnessed firsthand the damage that human activity has done to the oceans, from melting sea ice to dying coral reefs. Prior to her departure, Lisa launched a social media campaign, asking people to send post-it notes detailing the small daily actions they take to reduce their harmful impact on the planet. The response was overwhelming. We took all of those messages and we gathered them up and we turned them into this digital design. And then we wrapped my entire 50-foot race yacht in thousands and thousands of the community's actions and the community's messages.

And so now it was a lot less about a solo girl sailing around Antarctica and much more around carrying that voice of change and that voice of positivity with me. Lisa now sails these messages of hope into the Pacific. But conditions in the largest body of water on Earth can be unpredictable and extreme. On board her lightweight fiberglass yacht, Lisa is extremely vulnerable to the elements. You never know when the next disaster is going to take place and they are always happening, you're always pushing into a survival situation, you're always having to be on your game.

Going to sea alone takes all the challenges of crude sailing, the sleeplessness, the discomfort, the feeling of isolation, and amplifies them. But it also magnifies the positives. For Lisa, the solitude helps to create an intense, unique experience. You learn to move with the rhythm of the sea, and there's a real beauty in that if you stop to pay attention to it. And then you get the bird life and the whales

and the dolphins and all the wildlife encounters out there, and then you get the bird life and the whales and the dolphins and all the wildlife encounters out there. And then you get the incredible sunrises and the sunsets and the different skylights and the moods of the ocean are different every single day and the colour of the sea changes depending on what ocean you're sailing through. And so as difficult and as challenging as it is out there, it's home to me, and it's one of the most remarkable places to be. Lisa's boat skips nimbly across the rolling waves of the South Pacific. As she continues east, she looks ahead to the hardest part of this voyage,

a narrow stretch of the Southern Ocean between Antarctica and the bottom of South America. The gap between the South American coastline there in Cape Horn and the most northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, that space of ocean is 500 nautical miles wide and it's called the Drake Passage. And what happens is these big storms in the Southern Ocean will span over 1,000 nautical miles,

so twice the size of this gap. And they go the entire way around the planet, getting more aggressive, deeper, building up bigger waves. And then suddenly everything has to funnel and feed through that gap. The conditions in the Drake Passage can be diabolical, with some of the world's strongest currents and waves reportedly reaching over 65 feet tall. Many early European explorers feared this stretch of water above any other. It's been called the most dreaded bit of ocean on Earth, and sailing through it has been described as so challenging and dangerous, it's like going to the moon.

And so, as Lisa closes in on Cape Horn, the excitement grows, but so do the nerves. All she can do is pray for favourable conditions. But then she gets some bad news. We get the next weather forecast and it's showing the largest storm of the entire trip is going to hit me just as I get to Cape Horn, which is like the no-no. This is where you want to time it for perfect weather, right? There's only one thing for it. Lisa hoists the spinnaker, balances the keel, and tacks onto an easterly tailwind. The mainsail bulges.

The boat springs forward, accelerating gracefully across the waves. Lisa doesn't have time to wait it out. She's going to have to race the storm to the Cape. For the next week, she hurtles across the Pacific, closely monitoring the weather as she goes. In March, she enters the icy waters of the Drake Passage. She's less than 50 nautical miles from Cape Horn, when suddenly the wind drops, the sea flattens, and Lisa's heart sinks. There's this thing that happens, and we call it the calm before the storm. And it's a real thing that happens. And this was the calm before the storm.

And I was caught in it. And I'm drifting in less than three knots of wind, 30 nautical miles from Cape Horn. And I've got this enormous storm system bearing down on top of me. When the storm hits, it's punishing. But through heaving seas and howling gales, Lisa persists. You can't breathe facing into the wind. I would have to cut my mouth and turn my head because the wind's ripping the tops of the waves off, so it's just water.

It's not raining, it's just the force of the wind tearing the ocean up. It's one of the sternest tests she has ever faced as a sailor. Guile, guts and graft are needed just to keep going. But eventually, she emerges out to the other side, battered and bruised, but intact and on course. After exiting the Drake Passage, Lisa passes into a stretch of ocean known as Iceberg Alley, where there's no trace of a breeze.

Chunks of Antarctic ice lurk in the freezing fog. For two weeks, Lisa drifts through this lonely, ethereal place. Then she emerges from the mist to discover that she isn't alone at all. There was this one day where the sun just burnt the fog out enough. It was drifting in no wind. And I was surrounded by about 20 whales sleeping on the surface of the ocean. And for a day I just drifted with these whales across the surface of the ocean. And then drifted into the next fog line, lost sight of them. And the wind arrived and then kept sailing.

Lisa forges on through squalls of sleet and snow. She's over three quarters of the way through the race, and the toughest hurdles are already behind her. If she can maintain this speed, she'll beat the record by the slimmest of margins. It was finally at the point where I started to tell myself that maybe I could do this. I'd gotten past Cape Horn, I'd gotten past Iceberg Alley, I'd crossed the South Atlantic, which was notoriously dangerous, and it was about 3,000 nautical miles of sailing left to do. And I anticipated that it would take me about four weeks to get to Australia. And I was just starting to get ahead of Fedor Konyakov. So I was a day

ahead of Fedor's record at this point. And I was just starting to feel like, you know what, maybe I could actually do this. And that was really when it all went horribly, disastrously wrong. Definitely 100% closer to getting 1% cash back with TD Direct Investing. Conditions apply. Offer ends January 31st, 2025. Visit td.com slash dioffer to learn more. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Thank you. It's 7pm on Wednesday, April the 3rd. Lisa is below deck, settling down for a 20-minute power nap. Outside, her boat pitches and rolls over the 8-metre swell. It's been like this for days.

Biting wind, pounding hail, temperature just above freezing. Lisa curls up in her sleeping bag. Her eyelids are just beginning to droop when suddenly... Out of nowhere, I just heard this like bang and it was the most violent metallic kind of noise it left this ringing this echo of a ringing in my ear and almost sounded like a gunshot had gone off and i i didn't know what had broken but i knew something vital had broken she springs out of her bunk and runs to the perspex dome lookout it takes her eyes a moment to adjust, night is falling rapidly, but against the darkening sky she can just see the outline of the 22-meter mast flexing and bending in the high winds. Lisa's stomach lurches. A length of rigging wire that connects the mast to the deck has snapped. If she doesn't

secure the mast somehow, that could go next. Lisa pulls on her waterproofs, then bolts for the hatch. I'm halfway out when I hear the next sound, and it's this cut-wrenching noise of metal on metal, twisting and grinding, and it's amplified a thousand times inside the boat and all the pressure of the mast and the rigging wire goes in a second so the whole boat shaking and shuddering and twisting around me everything's moving and it's so definitely loud and i knew at that point that I had dismasted. The mast of Lisa's yacht has snapped clean off at the base. It lies on its side, 90 degrees to the boat, still attached to the deck via a tangled system

of ropes and rigging lines. Lisa has heard about demastings, one of the worst calamities that can befall a sailboat. She has, of course, prepared for this rare emergency. She is prepared for everything. But right now, with it actually happening in front of her, all she can do is stare in horror. All I could see was this just catastrophe around me. It was jarred bits of metal just sticking up and all the railings on the starboard side were torn off. All the railings were missing.

They were just gone. The beam of Lisa's headlamp illuminates shocking images. The contorted, serrated metal stump of the mast, heaps of tangled ropes, wires and rigging lines, the white sail crumpled and sagging against the roiling surface of the ocean. Because of the way the mast has fallen, it has effectively created an anchor, holding the yacht in place

while waves the size of two-storey buildings continued to break all around. The violence of that situation meant that every wave coming through, it was pushing and pulling the mast on the deck of the boat in such a way that it physically started to cut the boat in half. So it started soaring through the deck. Lisa can already see the damage where the mast has started to soar through the deck. Sooner or later it will gouge a hole in the boat's hull and all will be lost. She tries to steady herself, to weigh up her options. There is the boat's engine, but is it safe to turn it on?

It could be entangled with ropes. And besides, starting the motor won't do anything to prevent the mast from slicing through the vessel. It's clear what she has to do. She must get rid of the toppled mast before it damages the boat beyond repair. To do that, Lisa needs to cut away the rigging, which is tethering it to the deck. I'm shaking completely from the adrenaline. My stomach's churning. I'm white as a sheet.

And I just think, I've got to get my wet weather gear on, grab my bolt cutters and start cutting the rigging away. There are five individual rigging wires that Lisa needs to cut. The first is the backstay wire, running from the top of the mast to the stern. After grabbing her bolt cutters from below deck, Lisa works her way to the rear of the boat. Each wave engulfs her her submerging her up to her neck in white water fighting to keep her balance she locates the backstay wire and squeezes the bolt cutters but the angle of where the rigging wire laid plus the boat pitching and rolling so hard in the swell it just became

impossible and they would just slip too much and i couldn't get any purchase on them so after about 10 minutes of trying i just thought these aren't going to work she rushes below deck and places a satellite call to jeff her shore manager back in australia notifying him of the situation but there's nothing he can do right now. She's on her own out here. With gloved, trembling hands, she grabs a toolbox and manically searches through the implements, hoping something will trigger an idea. Her head spins. Blood rushes in her ears. Think. Then, an idea.

The rigging is connected to the boat by a series of stainless steel split pins. If she can remove each of these inch-long fastenings, the rigging, mast, and sail would all drop away. Lisa grabs a hammer and a screwdriver. The intention was that I would take the split pin, which is this little tiny sort of stainless steel pin that we bend open to hold a joining pin together. And I would take that pin and I'd knock it out and physically separate the rigging from

the boat without having to cut the rigging. So that was my game plan. Lisa repositions herself above the backstay wire. She finds the split pin and loosens it with a screwdriver. Then she lifts her hammer and brings it down with all her strength. But the pin doesn't budge. Lisa tries again and again. Throbbing pain radiates from her left hand, which is trying to gouge out the pin with the screwdriver while she hammers with her right. And after about 10 minutes of trying to attack it this way, I'm just thinking, this isn't working, this isn't working, I've got no time, I need something else. Panic is now mixing with dread.

If Lisa doesn't start making progress soon, then the narrow window she has to save her boat and her life will be slammed definitively shut. It's about 8.30pm. Lisa clings to the bucking stern of the boat, tossed about in the eight-metre swell. She squints through the stormy flurries, concentrating on the tiny stainless steel pin glinting at the base of the backstay wire. She grits her teeth and brings the hammer down hard. She tries again. Minutes ebb away. Then, a breakthrough. I've got my hammer and I'm pounding away and I'm still getting torn across the deck of the boat and I'm still getting beat up by the waves.

But after about another 15 minutes, I finally separated that first piece of rigging. One down, four to go. The next piece of rigging to tackle is the inner forestay wire at the front of the vessel. Lisa turns and starts making her way down the listing deck. As she reaches the middle of the rocking boat, she's suddenly at risk of being impaled by the sharp thrusting metal of the snapped mast. It's this jagged kind of tube, but it's all this twisted bits of metal at the end that's just like near your head as you're trying to crawl past on the deck. And you've got to time that right that it doesn't shove hard with a wave and catch you

because it would just stab you with the metal. With each wave, the mast is thrust forward like a medieval joust. Lisa waits for the lurch, then scampers along the deck before the next wave comes. Sharp objects and trip hazards are everywhere, looming suddenly in the headlamp's glare. She can't lose focus for a second. She scrambles to the front of the boat and starts hammering at the inner four-stay split pin. After a few minutes that feel like hours, the pin finally comes flying out. Lisa flinches as the freed rigging line starts whipping around the deck.

At the end of the wire is a cylindrical furling drum, a new danger to deal with. That drum at the bottom started getting pushed and whipped around the deck of the boat so incredibly violently by the force of these waves coming through. It was like this angry snake just like whipping around. To dispose of the rigging, Lisa needs to grab the furling drum and throw it overboard. But again, precision is everything. I had to try and time it with the tilt of the boat, with the wave coming at the right moment. And so the boat sort of lurched away from me for a second and then lurched towards me and angled up. And I kind of ran up the hill of the deck of

the boat, grabbed this piece of rigging that's whipping around and threw it off the rail at the same time and then I got washed across the deck of the boat and base of the safety rails. Three hours have passed since the demasting. She has now successfully detached two out of five lengths of rigging. But hours in the lashing spray and stabbing wind have taken their toll. I've been on deck crawling around on this boat for about three hours. I'm freezing cold. I was going into hypothermia. I was getting to the point where I had to physically look at my hand to know I'd closed it around a tool.

And I was starting to go into vagueness and brain fog and the ability to like make clear decisions was going by that point this mast had been had already cut all the way through the deck and it was working its way down the hull of the boat so it was starting to cut the boat in half faster the next split pin to remove is at the base of the main forstay wire. It's positioned beyond the guard rails at the prow of the boat. This is the bad one. Because of the position of the pin, Lisa will have to climb over the railings in order to reach it. She'll then have to shimmy her way out along the bowsprit, the long spar that juts out at the front of the vessel. She will be untethered, unprotected and completely exposed to the fury of the waves.

And so I needed to make a choice and I needed to make it now. But I knew if I climbed out on the bow it was probably a 50-50 shot that I would survive out there. But if I didn't go out there, it was 100% certainty that the boat would sink and my chances of survival in a life raft were almost nil. And so there was this certain death or this 50-50 shot. Lisa hurries below deck to the navigation room. She places another call to Jeff, her shore manager, and tells him what she's decided to do. He falls silent. What Lisa is describing practically amounts to suicide.

And then I had to say to him, if my PLB, my personal location beacon that's on my life jacket, if that's activated, it's because I'm no longer attached to the boat. I'm in the ocean, and don't come and rescue me. If I am washed off the boat in those temperatures, it was about two degrees sea temperature, I would have less than 10 minutes of survival in the water. So there would be no recovery for me from that point. So I would have enough time to activate the EPIRB

to at least be able to tell my family what happened. And then I would have to just go. I would go. She hangs up the phone. This is the moment every sailor prepares for, but hopes will never come. Before setting off, Lisa had a frank conversation with her family about the life-threatening dangers she would encounter on this voyage. She assured them that she had prepared for 99% of scenarios, but admitted that there is always an unpredictable element you can't fully account for.

There's always this 1% that we can't control, and I was living that 1% moment in that moment. And so I had had these chats, and I'd said to them, if I don't come back, I want you to know it's OK, because I'd rather have gone for a record like this and tried and lived than to never try, to never have that experience of going on that adventure, whether it ends badly or not, I want to go. Lisa makes her way to the front of the vessel as it pitches and sways.

Conditions seem to be getting worse. Lifting her headlamp, she shudders at the sight of the waves, rising from the black depths, tendrils of white spume webbing a 10-meter swell. When she reaches the railings, she stops, suddenly frozen. Is she doing the right thing? In my mind I'm thinking there's got to be a safer way, there's got to be a better choice, there's got to be another tool, another piece of equipment, there's got to be something that I can do that's gonna help me survive this better than this choice in front of me. And after about 20 minutes of being huddled

against the side of the boat just getting colder and colder and stiffer and stiffer losing my ability to save the boat faster and faster i couldn't think of another way to save the boat i couldn't think of a safer option here goes nothing. Lisa climbs over the guardrails and inches her way along the bowsprit. The wind feels like a thousand icy hands pulling at her waterproof clothing, dragging her down towards the churning sea. Blinded by spray, Lisa turns her body around so she's facing the boat.

After locating the split pin, she jams the screwdriver into the divot and twists hard to the left. But as she does, she hears an ominous rumble. You can't see them, but you just hear this roar of water. You can feel the whole boat gradually start to climb. And it's like it's climbing up a mountain. It's getting lifted as this wave passes underneath. And as you get lifted, you go up and up and up and up and up. And then you get somewhere near the peak of the wave and you hear it break. Suddenly, Lisa and her boat are falling, plummeting into the deep, dark trough of the wave.

I heard the wave break and I had a fraction of a second where I sort of threw my right arm and just sort of hooked the rigging and just hugged the boat as tightly as I could, just held on with every ounce of strength I had left. And then the boat crashes down hard. And suddenly, Lisa is underwater, plunged into the southern ocean. She emerges moments later, spluttering, disoriented, and knowing she only has a few seconds to land the next clean hammer blow. I'd get three or four strikes with my hammer and it was like, then you'd hear the next wave break and you'd have to hug the boat and hold on again and go through that next G-force effect of getting lifted up and tossed to the trough of this wave and then

engulfed in white water and every time those waves came over you didn't know if you would hold on you didn't know if that wave was going to tear you off the deck again and again lisa must brace herself and withstand the next wave before rapidly trying to release the pin. It's like performing surgery on a bucking bronco. As the strength starts to leave her body, each deluge of freezing white water feels like the one that will rip her overboard. She's running on empty. Another wave picks up the boat and drops it like a weightless scrap of driftwood. Elisa resurfaces from the froth, clamps her thighs tight around the bowsprit, and, with a burst of reserve energy, levels one final blow against the steel pin.

And then I don't know how I did this. I honestly couldn't tell you how, but somehow as the boat lurched one way, I happened to strike the split pin out and that piece of rigging came free with the furling drum. In one fluid movement, Lisa pulls herself back onto the deck and collapses against the railings, gasping and shuddering.

She looks over at the toppled mast. Only two more pieces of rigging are connecting it to the boat. The port side and starboard stays, which should be easier to detach. Lisa allows herself a few moments to catch her breath, to recognise what she has just done.

I had no idea how I'm still alive. I honestly have no idea how I'm still alive. I'm not out of the woods yet, but I had lived through the part that I didn't think I'd survive, and I'd been able to survive it. It's almost midnight in the Southern Ocean. Lisa is below deck in the navigation center. She's shivering violently.

The adrenaline has subsided, but her heart still pounds. After dealing with the forestay wire, Lisa disconnected the final two pieces of rigging. Then she watched as the mast, rigging, and sails were all ripped off the deck by the next wave and sunk to the bottom of the Southern Ocean. Mastless and without a sail, the boat drifts in the battering seas. She's made it through, but at what cost? Elisa has notified Jeff, her shore manager, that she is alive and safe. Now she just wants to speak with her mum. But when she tries to get through to her, there is no answer.

Instead, she calls her media manager, Tracy. As soon as she picks up, Lisa cracks. I couldn't even get a word out. I just broke because it was the first kind of warm person that I was able to talk to and I just started sobbing so hard and she was trying to talk to me. She's like, oh, honey, are you okay? And I was like, I can't, I can't. Like I just fully, I couldn't say a word.

I couldn't get anything out. All the suppressed emotion from the last five hours bubbles to the surface. After hanging up the phone, Lisa lies crumpled and sobbing on the floor of the boat. In that moment, I had realized that while I'd survived the night, I'd survived the dismasting. I'd also lost everything. I'd survived the night, I'd survived the dismasting, I'd also lost everything. I'd lost the record. The record was done. Three and a half years of hard work was gone. I had over $300,000 in bills and debt outstanding. How was I going to pay that off if I didn't set a record? There was just this catastrophe of noise in my head. And it was the sheer feeling like I had failed,

like I'd failed so astronomically, outstandingly badly, that my mass had come crashing down and I'd nearly killed myself in the Southern Ocean, and I had failed. She crawls into her bunk, wraps herself in her sleeping bag, and lies there shaking for the next six hours. In the morning, Lisa emerges from the cabin and looks around. It is a scene of complete destruction. At least the storm has passed. There's still a brisk wind, but the waves have diminished and aside from a few fluffy white clouds, the skies are clear. Ideal conditions to start repairing her damaged vessel. Setting aside the pain and disappointment, she gets to work patching up the hull. She cuts a section of vinyl dry bag

and places it across the hole before applying weatherproof sealant to the edges and screwing it in place with a power drill. By the time she's finished, the sun is beginning to set. It's taken her all day. Lisa makes herself a bowl of porridge. And as she eats, two options now become clear complete the voyage

and finish the record attempt or call it quits I was still on the record even though I'd dismastered and I didn't have anything standing up I could potentially build a new mast with the debris of the boom that I had and sort of sail very extremely slowly, but like at two, three knots,

the last bit to Australia. And that was a real potential option available to me. Or I could turn my engine on, void the record and make the safe choice, which was to alter course to Cape Town, which was a thousand nautical miles directly north of me in South Africa. Ultimately, Lisa makes the safe choice. That evening, she switches on the boat's engine and puts it in gear, officially voiding the record.

After 72 days, it's all over. A little over a week later, Lisa reaches Cape Town. Arriving into port, she's greeted warmly by a local community of sailors who were notified of her situation and came to offer their support. She's even given free accommodation by someone in the community, a chance to recover from her ordeal and to slowly start getting back on her feet. It won't be easy. I was broke. I was also broken emotionally.

I thought I'd lost everything. Like even though I'd survived, I really felt like I'd lost everything. And so I was quite emotionally fragile at that point. To Lisa, it feels like she's wasted everything she's worked for over the last three years. All the money raised, all the sponsors who believed in her. But as the days go gradually by, she picks herself up, dusts herself down, and focuses on the next steps. First things first, she needs to fix her boat. She manages to get an insurance payout of $60,000. It's nowhere near enough to professionally refit the vessel, but it'll have to do. For weeks, Lisa works tirelessly down at the dockyard. She replaces the mast, rigging, and sails, cobbling together any spare parts she can

find. Eventually, three months after arriving in South Africa, she's ready to return to the ocean. Lisa bids farewell to the friends she has made and casts off her lines once again. Lisa's plan is to return to the place where she demastered and pick up from where she left off. The world record might have eluded her, but she can still complete the circumnavigation. For days, Lisa struggles on through unrelentingly bad conditions. But then, ten days after leaving Cape Town, Lisa crosses the point where she demasted

and it's like a switch is flipped. The finish line is in sight. Suddenly I wasn't just fighting to get back to that start point, I was on it again and I was now travelling with the wind, with the storms, with the waves and suddenly I was like sailing back to Australia and I spent the next six weeks going through storms and blizzards and dodgy icebergs and eventually made my way back to australia on july the 25th 2017 lisa sails into port becoming the first woman ever to circumnavigate

antarctica it's a monumental achievement in spite of everything that went wrong. But she doesn't rest on her laurels. Within days, she's already thinking about going again, with her sights set firmly on Fedor Konyakov's world record. I didn't know when, I didn't know how, I didn't know how long it would take me. I knew I needed time to process, time to get over the trauma of that scenario but i did know that i was going to go off and i was going to sell solo around antarctica and i was going to break that world record one day five years later in february 2022 lisa sets off once again from western australia for the next three months she braves coloss storms, freezing blizzards and the monster swirls of the world's most treacherous ocean, all in pursuit of the ultimate prize. And eventually I sailed into Albany in Western Australia, 10 days ahead of Fedor Konyakov, setting an overall new speed record and became the fastest person in the world to sail solo around Antarctica, which

in my books is pretty cool. With this achievement, Lisa rewrote the events of the past. But as always, it wasn't long before she was looking ahead to the future. She is now the holder of eight world records and as of 2024 she is planning to become the first person to sail solo around the Arctic. A feat only possible because of the effects of climate change. So once again Lisa will take on a personal mission to highlight something universal, something that affects us all. We can achieve anything we want in life. And for me, that's sailing. It's trying to use this

platform of climate action now to enact change. And I'm doing that on a global impact level now. And I'm only able to do that because I've been able to grow into the person that's capable of that. So I no longer limit my ability to succeed in any area of my life and I don't limit my ability to dream. And I think that's a really powerful position to find yourself in. To be continued... summit of a volcano. Surrounded by stunning scenery, used as a location for the Lord of the Rings films, William finds himself stuck in the mountains, facing doom. On the moonlit slopes, he is suddenly assaulted by 1.5 million cubic meters of rock, mud, and ash. Consumed and entombed by the volcanic flood, William will have to find the deepest reserves of physical strength and strength of mind if he is to survive.

That's next time on Real Survival Stories. Listen today without waiting a week by subscribing to Noisa Plus.