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Sometimes, when we’re tired or stressed, even the best of us make mistakes which we look at afterwards with the wisdom of hindsight and say to ourselves, ‘How in Heaven did I manage to do that?’
A number of years before I swotted up my homework and submitted to a direct entry Yachtmaster examination, I committed a howler that could well have cost me my ship and, quite probably, my life too. My wife Roz and I were on passage from the Hamble River to Salvador in Brazil long before GPS had been thought of. The trip from our last stopover in the Canaries was a few miles short of 3,000 and was a particular challenge in a small gaffer, even a classy one like our 32ft Colin Archer-built pilot cutter. Here’s how it goes:
