Veteran polar sailor and mountaineer Bob Shepton reflects on losing his rig while sailing with a crew of school leavers in the Drake Passage
Learning curve
‘We should have turned back when the storm hit’
Adam Dunlop and his wife Maria learned a few hard lessons when their engine started to struggle mid-Channel in worse conditions than forecast
‘We learned fast in fickle weather on the Cornish coast’
Ingmar Hupp encounters fog, a fouled anchor and a 44-knot wakeup call, all while attempting to adapt to rapidly changing conditions
‘What I learned deploying my series drogue in a gale’
Steve Brown found his series drogue a big asset when riding out foul weather in one of the world's most inhospitable sailing grounds
‘My solo cruise ended in a liferaft’
Phil van der Mespel had always dreamed of a long offshore adventure. When unforeseeable disaster struck, careful preparation for the worst-case scenario saw him rescued within hours
‘We were caught by katabatic winds in Oman’
Barry Grey and crew feel the full force of a downslope wind and end up running aground and being rescued by the Coastguard
‘I saw flames licking out of the companionway’
Rosemary Young recounts fire breaking out on her family cruiser and shares the valuable lessons she learned
From offshore sunset cruising to ocean survival in the Atlantic
A beautiful Atlantic cruise turns into a heavy weather situation for Maarten Zeeuwen
‘I was rescued from death alone in mid-ocean’
Crippled by pain while sailing solo in the Indian Ocean, Andrew Halcrow had to call for rescue
‘We were up the creek without an anchor’
At anchor on a falling tide, at night, and faced with grounding, Kitiara Pascoe finds her CQR irretrievably fouled