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“In my mind,” he says, “it was like I could step so easily from the life conveyor belt onto the death conveyor belt. Just one small step. But I was so angry. I had two kids. I couldn’t leave them, or my wife. I was determined not to just die.”

The previous night, Pascal fixes lamb with herbs. They all enjoy a fine burgundy on the aft deck. Porquerolles, the sheltered side of an island off the south of France, near Hyères. A protected harbour, waiting for a storm to pass, being cautious. Five friends who have done well in their business, working together in finance. This trip a celebration, a reaping of the rewards. Jean-Claude and Philippe come from a famous and well-off family; their father, Claude Batault, a distinguished diplomat. But this is their own triumph, this business, and Jean-Claude is the proud new boat owner, a Catana 44 catamaran named Bayete. With all their electronics and safety gear, they are to be the lead boat in the Transat des Passionnés regatta that will take them to the Canary Islands and then across to the Caribbean. But their first stop is only the Spanish Balearics, not far away at all.

The French meteorological service is on strike, but the barometer is rising, and German and other sources seem to indicate the storm has passed. So they set sail the next morning at 8am in brilliant sunshine, so calm that even their largest sail, a spinnaker, can’t catch enough wind. They have to take the sail down and use the engines. Slow rollers, and after about noon, Richard and Philippe, the two novice sailors, throw up overboard, but it isn’t until after 2pm that the wind picks up and the other crew begin getting seasick.

The boat is exposed now to the Golfe du Lion, the most dangerous part of the Mediterranean, where the mistral comes howling through a gap in the mountains. And the mistral on this day will combine with Arctic winds from the northwest. A kind of perfect storm for the Mediterranean. Eighty knots, hurricane speed, and wave troughs as deep as 10 metres. But that is still several hours away. For now, the crew don’t feel any danger. “It began very benignly,” Richard says. “It sort of snuck up on us.”

They first notice a problem when they can no longer steer their course. The Balearics are southwest, at 210 degrees, but the bows are being blown down to 180 degrees, straight south, unable to keep a track across the waves. The crew trying to eat cake, the only readily available food. Everyone too sick to think about fixing lunch.

At 2.30 or 3pm, the inexpensive hiking barometer that Richard carries begins ringing out an alarm. The pressure falling at an extreme rate. He shows it to Jean-Claude and they laugh about the cheap piece of equipment. “I remember looking back and thinking I should have paid more attention to this cheap bit of equipment.”

The wind and waves become much worse over the next hour, so Jean-Claude unfurls a few feet of the jib to use as a storm sail to give them better stability and forward motion through the waves. And the boat takes off. Doing 12 knots now, surfing.

For almost an hour, between 4 and 5pm, the crew has a wild ride, running with the waves. They come up over a crest, surf down the enormous face, and crash into the next wave, burying the bows two or three metres into solid water. “It was just like a crash each time. The boat would literally come to a stop. It was punishing, really. Completely terrifying.” The wind gauge showing over 80 knots, hurricane speed. And much colder now.

At 5pm, Jean-Claude decides this is too dangerous, and pointless, as they’re being blown off course. So he furls the bit of sail and uses the engines to round the boat up into the wind. They will deploy the sea anchor off the bows and wait out the storm.

When you run downwind in a storm, you don’t feel the full force of the wind. But the moment you turn up into it is frightening. The crew is blasted now by a hurricane, each wave breaking over the boat, the air filled with water. And their ability to make good decisions is slipping away with seasickness, exhaustion, cold and fear. Jean-Claude and Hervé don their Gumby suits as protection, but this is a terrible mistake. The suits are for going in the water, a last protection from the sea when a boat has sunk. They’re not meant for work on deck. Thick neoprene loose enough to fit over shoes and gloves and full clothing, they’re hard to walk in, and the hands offer no grip.

A sea anchor is an underwater parachute. As a boat is blown backwards by wind, the parachute sets like a huge bucket and slows the boat almost to a stop. To deploy the anchor, a line is tied to each bow as a kind of bridle, then the parachute is thrown into the water. But on the Bayete, the parachute somehow goes into the water before the lines are tied to the bows.

The crew fight the lines of the sea anchor for more than half an hour. Jean-Claude and Hervé blasted on the trampoline between the bows, waves breaking over them, fumbling with hands that can’t grip, and the rest of the crew in the cockpit, pulling at the lines on the winches and using the engines, also, to try to move forward and decrease the pressure. They’re able to tie the line on the port bow finally, but can’t get a line over to the starboard bow. They’re in danger of losing it overboard. So Jean-Claude wraps it on the beam near the headstay, the wire between the bows that holds up the mast. This puts the boat at an angle to the sea anchor, dangling by its port bow, and this is why the boat will later flip over in the night.

But the crew feel triumphant. They’ve fought hard for a victory and can rest. Everyone goes below, takes off the gear, and tries to sleep. “We thought we’d be fine and didn’t need to alert the coastguard. We should have called, of course.” Three of the crew have strong sailing experience, and Richard feels confident in their judgment.

Richard is the only one not to go to bed, because Philippe has grabbed the master cabin that he normally sleeps in. So Richard sits in the main salon for several hours, until 8pm. He has no sense of doom, only the thought that “this was some of the biggest shit I’d ever been in”. The boat pitching but not rolling, “riding quite well”.

At 8pm, Philippe emerges. Richard grabs the bed and falls asleep. He wakes two hours later to a slow flip of the boat, rolls out of his bunk onto the ceiling, all his gear falling on top of him, stuff everywhere. He isn’t injured, though. And he’s warm and dry, no water in the cabin. He pulls on a tracksuit top and bottoms, then a waterproof padded jacket, then a life jacket.

Jean-Claude is calling from the main salon, telling the crew they need to get out through the escape hatch. “I remember thinking this was a bad idea,” Richard says, “because I was warm and dry.” Richard has to jump down from his cabin into the salon, into waist-deep water, cold. “If we hadn’t opened up that hatch, and if we had just stayed in our rooms, we would have stayed dry.”

The boat never does sink, as it turns out, but Jean-Claude is afraid it might, and he anticipates the life raft will have deployed. He assumes they’ll have a brief transition from the boat to the life raft. The crew stands on the underside of the salon table and crawls out through a small hatch in the salon floor, which is now the ceiling. “When we got out onto the bottom of the boat, there was nowhere else to go. And once we opened the hatch, it flooded the boat.”

Philippe brings the EPIRB, the Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon that will alert authorities to their position, but the conditions are so rough it is swept overboard almost immediately. With the boat held in place by the sea anchor, the EPIRB will drift miles away from the boat, bringing rescuers to the wrong area.

The life raft has not deployed. And it’s underwater, hidden away across a sloping smooth fibreglass surface with no handholds, the boat pitching. The men are unable to talk to each other in the wind and the waves. They can only hold on. But Richard believes Hervé is swept away first because he’s trying to find the line that will deploy the life raft. It should deploy automatically but also has a line that will release and inflate the raft.

At this point, no options are left except to hold on. “The whole world had changed,” Richard says. The inside of the boat flooded, no life raft, no rescue beacon or communication, his tracksuit bottoms swept away, and he watches his friends die one by one.

Alone and tied to a dead man, legs frostbitten and torn, exhausted and sick and going hypothermic, Richard knows he’s going to die. “I didn’t have any hope I’d be rescued. No hope at all.”

When dawn comes, the waves are only more terrifying, more visible now. But Richard can hardly see. He doesn’t have his glasses, and his eyes are swollen from being doused with saltwater every 20 or 30 seconds for the past 10 hours. “What’s going to kill me?” he wonders. “You know death is coming, but how is it going to happen? The cold and hypothermia? Or thirst and dehydration?”

Richard knows there’s a refrigerator not far under his feet, filled with drinks. If he could just dive down. But what has saved him so far is not submerging in the water. Pascal died soon after going for his swim. Pascal a constant reminder, still sitting next to Richard, slumped back against the hull but caught up in the ropes.

While Richard is thinking about this, he’s thrown off balance and one leg comes out of the hatch. He’s teetering, going over, and his hand goes down quickly and he has a bit of luck. His Rolex catches on a small eye ring. He has a deep gouge to his wrist, but the watch saves him. “That was the closest I came to being swept off.” He gets his wrist freed and has both legs again in the hatch.

Richard keeps fighting. With every wave that tears at him, he’s submerged and shaken, but he keeps holding on. “Just thinking about it now makes me angry,” Richard says. “If you want to survive, it’s the anger that will get you through. I had a routine of wave after wave, in survival mode, and it just goes on and on and on and on.”

Occasionally, he makes plans. He thinks that if the weather relents, he’ll go for the life raft. But the raft will involve a dive down, and he knows he’s too weak. He’s convinced that really there is no hope, but he’s so angry he refuses to give up or to make it easy for the storm. The storm will have to do something to get him.

He keeps thinking of his family. This trip was supposed to be fun and easy, a luxury sail with his friends, the boat stocked with the finest cigars and wines. A celebration after hard work. He hadn’t thought he was taking a risk. And now he is so angry that he’s taken this risk and will not be there for his wife and two sons. He doesn’t want his sons growing up without their father.

The storm is as stubborn as Richard. It rages on. Richard can no longer feel his legs, he’s bitterly cold, he can barely see, and then he sees something that he must be imagining. A helicopter, and only 100 metres away. A diver dangling from a cable, lowering towards him. Richard didn’t hear it coming over the howling of the storm, and he has trouble believing. But then the diver is closer, trying to time a landing on that deck that is pitching and falling, and he grabs Richard in one quick swoop, and Richard is being pulled upwards into the sky. He feels guilty leaving Pascal.

The helicopter spots Richard by a fluke. They’re so low on fuel, they head back to base, and the spotter happens to see a fleck of orange in the corner of his eye. He has the pilot do a pass, despite the low fuel, and then finds Richard. Richard is the only one with a life jacket, and it saves him. The bottom of the boat is white, impossible to spot in all the white foam. But the life jacket is orange. “You’re just so lucky,” the spotter says.

Once Richard is safely aboard, he drinks a litre and a half of water, and when he arrives at the hospital 40 minutes later in Toulon, he pees black. So much internal bruising, he’s urinating blood. The doctor tells him he’s likely to die from kidney failure. “Over the next 24 hours, we’ll see what happens,” the doctor says.

Richard wants to call his wife, Sarah, but he has trouble recalling his phone number. He’s finally able to leave a message, and then he’s told his wife is on the phone, so he’s unplugged from intensive care and wheeled down a corridor, but the woman on the phone is a tabloid reporter. She’s lied about being his wife in an attempt to get an interview.

Richard does finally talk to Sarah, and she flies down, and the Foreign Office arranges a passport for Richard’s mother so that she can fly too. Richard feels rescued by his wife and mother and by the doctors in the emergency room. But then he’s transferred to another part of the hospital, and here begins an unimaginable nightmare.

He remembers being taken to the basement, a kind of dungeon, every four or five hours. He has been lying on a green surgical sheet, and the raw wounds covering the backs of his legs and bottom — from the removal of dead flesh from hypothermic burns — have leaked into this sheet and crusted up. Here in the dungeon, he recalls them ripping the sheet off, taking scabs and raw flesh with it. “I can’t tell you how bloody painful it was. The whole back of my legs and arse. They could hear my screams all the way through the hospital.”

Richard begs his wife to get him out of here. They’re giving him strong drugs also. “It was like drowning, completely losing touch with reality. I was trying to make sense of things, and then these drugs would send me down a long, dark tunnel, and it would feel like days or weeks until I emerged, though it had only been a few hours.”

Richard needs to be alert to help with the search-and-rescue attempts. Jean-Claude’s wife has launched a huge effort to find her husband and brother-in-law and the other missing men. Everyone has questions. The storm was deadly, with another six men gone from the yacht Parsifal. Crew have been rescued from three other boats. For the Bayete search, it’s important to know whether the sea anchor was still attached, to calculate drift, and important to know when Jean-Claude and Hervé were swept overboard. And everyone keeps asking, “Why didn’t you stay inside the boat?”

The basement treatment continues, and he is not allowed to leave, because his wounds are raw and he’s not stable. And the insurance company doesn’t want to pay for repatriation. They refuse Sarah’s requests, until she demands they tell Richard directly. “You tell him. You tell him you’re not going to get him out of here.” They relent, finally, and Richard is transferred to Barts hospital in London, where there is no longer any pain. He can communicate, also, in English, and a plastic surgeon begins all the skin grafts, an enormous job using more than 250 staples. Richard is safe.

Richard doesn’t give interviews afterwards. He wants to focus on his family and move on. He spends time talking to his sons. But he feels hugely depressed from survivor guilt. “You don’t feel euphoric at all. Just guilty and depressed. The other families would ask why I was the one to survive. Why me. And really it was because I was a big fat shit. I had more body fat, so I could cope with cold water. And I had a few lucky breaks, wearing the life jacket and not going into the water.”

A few months later, Richard’s mother is diagnosed with cancer and dies within six weeks. He’s already lost his father six months before the sail, also to cancer. “I felt my mother had rescued me, and then I lost her, just like that. I was very close to my parents. It was a tough time.”

Jean-Claude had given Richard his BMW as a gift right before the sail, and Richard begins to take risks in it. “I felt invincible.” He’s testing limits, out of control. “For many people in this situation, with survivor guilt, suicide is a risk, and my risk-taking in the car was probably an extension of that.”

Thankfully, though, nothing happens, and Richard becomes involved in helping the other families. There’s a French law that says estates can’t be released for seven years if no bodies are found, so several of the families are left without financial resources. “I wanted to try and help out.” He has the idea to set up a trust for them, and Jean-Claude’s wife steps in generously.

Fifteen years on, Richard takes the tragedy as a wake-up call to live his life fully. “I don’t take life for granted,” he says. Now that his sons are in gap year and university, he and Sarah are taking off to Mauritius for five years. “We don’t want to get stuck in ruts and just survive, working hard and not really living. We want to have an adventure.” And he’s giving the BMW to Jean-Claude’s children, but he realises there’s nothing that can compensate for their loss. “Jean-Claude’s wife would give anything and everything to have her husband back,” Richard says. “The families are still devastated. I think the weight of that, of those families still suffering, is why it’s taken me so long to tell the story fully.”

Richard is hesitant to tell the story also because he doesn’t want anything to be interpreted as blame. “In hindsight, when you’re sitting on dry land, without a hurricane around you, you can make different decisions. But at the time, all Jean-Claude’s actions were what he thought would be the best for us. He thought he was taking us to the life raft, for instance, and couldn’t have known that it wouldn’t deploy. It was a terrifying situation, and he was doing his best. We were all doing our best to survive.”

David Vann.