This is my true story; the three of us were delivering a 30ft. sailing boat in the dangerous waters of the Pacific Ocean around New Zealand, when mainly through our own carelessness a catalogue of mishaps and dangerous situations developed that very nearly cost all of us our lives.
This is the build up to one of the many dangerous situations that developed on that trip, unfortunately there were to be many more.
"We could now hear the waves breaking on the coast so we dropped the sails and started motoring towards where we thought there was land. Jeff was on the tiller, he must have been given night vision at birth because I could not see a thing past the bow of the boat on this pitch black night but he kept telling us that he knew exactly where we were because he had been there once before in daylight, he was now getting angrier every time that we questioned his seemingly non existent navigation skills. I was very worried now because the 3 to 4 meter swell was taking us in much too quickly towards the very loud sound of breaking waves and although I could not see a thing in the total darkness I was sure that the sound of the breaking waves was now coming from different directions all around us. Bryce decided to keep completely quiet and sink lower into his seat in the cockpit.
I said to Jeff.
“Are you sure this is the correct place. How can you see anything in this darkness?”
Before he could reply....
BANG....
Scrape...
BANG....
BANG.....
The boat and our spines suddenly became tuning forks, as we came down from a wave we landed on top of a rock, then we went up and down and every time the boat dropped there was another bang and a scrape as the boat hit the rocks"
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