Abby Sunderland Quotes

Fifty feet of mast lay in the heaving water, downed lines and shrouds holding it there.

Even without looking I knew: there was no way I still had a mast. And without a mast, the trip was over.

It was dark. Something had fallen on top of the cabin light, turning the cabin into a black tunnel. I couldn’t hear anything at all. The roll didn’t stop. It continued to port, and for just a few seconds I was sitting on the ceiling in the dark.

The swells were amazing! As big as three-story apartment buildings!

But the more times she missed, the faster she’d be traveling when she finally slammed into the mast. And it wasn’t if she hit the mast; it was when. At that point, Abby would be either severely injured or dead.

The terrifying physics of going up-mast in heavy seas are inescapable.

Going up the mast is one of the most dangerous things you can do as a solo sailor.

Slowly, my brain let me in on the fact that I had just come this close to dying.

If a big wave came at the wrong moment, it would sweep me off into forty-eight-degree water, where I might last twenty minutes. Drowning quickly might be better.

Terror ripped through me as I was falling, falling, falling toward the sea.

When a sailor overcomes crushing adversity, there’s a massive sense of accomplishment.

The winds were blowing from west to east, pushing Abby’s boat toward the rocks as Abby struggled with the autopilots below. If Wild Eyes reached those islands, she wouldn’t run aground, keel in the sand. She would be smashed into pieces.

I’m one-hundred-fifty miles off Cape Horn, both autopilots are broken, and my boat is drifting toward one of the nastiest chunks of ocean on the face of the earth.

I saw the loose tiller jolt hard to the side as the boat began to spin.

But none of that kept me from picturing what a tsunami might look like if it did rise up and roar toward my little boat like some watery blue version of the Great Wall of China.