One of our most useful tools in dealing with heavy weather at sea is our engine and in this chapter I relate how we used ours to good effect in a nasty lee shore situation. But the sad truth is that in many cases a yacht’s engine is disabled by heavy weather making it useless at the very time that the crew need it most, so I go on to share some solid suggestions of things you…

In the previous chapters we have talked about heaving-to and various drag devices, but none of that is going to help us if we are caught on a lee shore. In this chapter I write about when that exact scenario happened to me and what we have done to prepare ourselves and our boat should it ever happen to us again.

Continuing on with the theme of learning from the best, this chapter is about the many things we learned from Tony and Coryn Gooch about storm survival and drogue retrieval—they know what they are talking about after decades of voyaging in some of the toughest parts of the world’s oceans and Tony’s single handed non-stop circumnavigation.

There’s always more than one way to skin a cat—or retrieve a Jordan Series Drogue—so when Hal Roth, a man with 200,000 miles and three circumnavigations under his belt, makes a suggestion, we listen.

You went out and bought a Jordan Series Drogue, but now you need to put together the gear and procedures to get it safely deployed when you need it and in this chapter I share exactly how to do that.

As wonderful as heaving-to is, done wrong it can be dangerous. In this post we tell you about when heaving-to went wrong for us, and what to watch out for.

As we have shared in earlier chapters in this Online Book, we now believe that for extreme weather where large breaking waves may be present, a Series Drogue, as designed by Don Jordan, is the best survival strategy. That said, heaving-to is still a technique that not only can save your bacon in a gale, but is also surprisingly comfortable and useful for taking a break from the demands of shorthanded voyaging. In this chapter we tell…

Many of us buy storm survival gear, throw it in a corner of the lazarette, and head off to sea congratulating ourselves on our foresight and seamanship. But when we do that, we have not really prepared for a storm at sea. In this introductory chapter I explain why having a real storm survival system is so important.