All Guide Posts » Close Calls

On the water, or sometimes in the shop, most of us, no matter how experienced, have had some sort of near catastrophe. Here are a bunch that demonstrate that it’s not the screw-up that counts, it’s the recovery.

Author Title
Guest Author
A Rock And a Hard Place: Lessons Learned in Going Aground in HOI AN—a guest post by Bob Stephens: What follows was written by our friend Bob Stephens of the yacht design firm Stephens Waring of Belfast, ME. It’s...
Guest Author
The storm trysail: A faithful and forgiving foul-weather friend, by Ed Zacko: This is an article from Good Old Boat (a magazine we like a lot), written by Ed Zacko. Good Old Boat and Ed have graciou...
Kaci Cronkhite
Wooden Boats from Tasmania, Part 2: Rescuing the 8-Meter Sailboat VARG: Mother Nature. Of course she’d take charge of my best laid plan for these OCH posts. As boaters, I know you’ll under...
Ellen Leonard
Learning from Experience: Seasickness – My Biggest Disaster and What It Taught Me: Everyone has a different theory about seasickness, but they all agree it’s a disaster. Slight nausea can be overcome w...
Alec Brainerd
Learning From Experience: My Biggest Disaster and What It Taught Me, by Alec Brainerd: A few winters ago we received a call from a gentleman in Palm Beach, Florida who wanted a new Watch Hill 15 built, to sa...
Ed McClave
Learning From Experience: My Biggest Disaster and What It Taught Me: The folks who run this site have asked me to write about the lesson I learned from my biggest disaster. Just by asking f...
Ben Fuller
Learning From Experience; My Biggest Disaster and What It Taught Me: With little boats you don’t tend to have disasters; you have recoveries. My capsizes are too many to recall, but I...
Eric Blake
Learning From Experience; My Biggest Disaster and What It Taught Me: Bill Porter changed my life. It was through a series of letters that  I got to know him and take over the beloved ketch...
Havilah Hawkins
Learning from Experience; My Biggest Disaster and What it Taught Me, by Havilah Hawkins.: It’s hard to know where to start, since narrow escapes and near disasters have been a topic of discussion at the dinne...
Geoff Kerr
Learning from Experience; My Biggest Disaster and What it Taught Me.: Professional disasters at Two Daughters Boatworks have been blessedly minor and far between, at least on the craftsmansh...
Jane Ahlfeld
Learning from Experience; My Biggest Disaster and What it Taught Me by Jane Ahlfeld: Although it never became a disaster, I do remember a day when I pushed the limits a bit and was using a little luck to g...
Dick Wagner
The Inside Passage: Exploration of the earth is done. It’s all on the map. There is no place that hasn’t been sailed through, wa...
Kaci Cronkhite
Learning from Experience; My Biggest Disaster and What it Taught Me.: Tossing Out the Best Laid Plans On my first and only single-handed sail from Thailand to Malaysia, I never expected to r...
Walt Ansel
Learning from Experience; My Biggest Disaster and What it Taught Me.: My friend John Philips and I decided to build a small inshore fishing boat in the early 1980’s. We wanted a low tech,...
Dick Wagner
Learning from Experience; My Biggest Disaster and What it Taught Me.: I was single-handing a Phil Bolger Black Skimmer from Juneau to Seattle. The waters were deep and cold, even when I luck...
Doug Hylan
Learning from Experience; My Biggest Disaster and What it Taught Me.: This incident was hardly a disaster, but it certainly could have been!  More of a mystery really.  It happened aboard...
Harry Bryan
Learning from Experience; My Biggest Disaster and What it Taught Me.: A small boat shop proprietor must be in charge of production as well as sales and customer relations. There is no reason...
Peter Neill
Learning from Experience; My Biggest Disaster and What it Taught Me.: I sail a desk. For more than thirty years I have presided over organizations that own vessels and use them to provide tr...
Brion Toss
Learning from Experience; My Biggest Disaster and What it Taught Me.: For about forty years now, I’ve been rigging. But in all that time I’ve only had one job, and that for just two days...
Ginny Jones
Learning from Experience; My Biggest Disaster and What it Taught Me.: Back in the late 80’s and early 90’s Gannon and Benjamin (on Martha’s Vineyard) owned a 72’ yawl named ZORRA. Pu...
Brion Toss
The Positive Influence of Clients from Hell: “If I have seen further than others, it is because I stood on the shoulders of giants.” Isaac Newton &nbsp Rigg...

 

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Recovering from an Open Boat Capsize, From Denial to Self Reliance: A cautionary moment: Steve Stone purposely capsizes his Caledonia Yawl to show us what to expect when an open boat goes...

 

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