THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. — Rescued solo sailor Abby Sunderland summed up the end of her circumnavigation quest in a sentence.
"The long and the short of it is, well, one long wave, and one short mast (short meaning two inch stub)," the 16-year-old California girl wrote on her blog just hours after she was rescued Saturday from her crippled sailboat in the turbulent southern Indian Ocean.
A French fishing boat brought her on board more than 2,000 miles west of Australia after a wave broke the mast of her boat, Wild Eyes, satellite phone communication was lost and she set off emergency beacons.
Her parents said after a 20-minute phone conversation with their daughter that she was bumped and bruised after three days adrift but otherwise healthy.
"She sounded tired, a little bit small in her voice, but she was able to make jokes and she was looking forward to getting some sleep," her mother, Marianne Sunderland, told reporters outside the family northwest of Los Angeles.
Her mother, who is close to giving birth to a boy, said her daughter joked about her ordeal affecting the baby and also talked about plans for the next school year.
"Crazy is the word that really describes everything that has happened best," she wrote from "a great big fishing boat headed I am not exactly sure where." She will spend more than a week traveling to Reunion Island, a French territory east of Madagascar.
She dismissed criticism that she was too young to undertake an attempt to sail around the world by herself.
