When I saw the plane, I was absolutely astonished! Two emotions crashed over me: surging joy and crazy fear.

Wild Eyes was built for speed and I was flying down walls of water twenty and thirty feet high.

In that moment it dawned on me that everything has to line up perfectly for something to turn out this awful.

The seriousness of my situation started to sink in, and again I fought panic. I pushed it down, but it was harder this time, like my insides were an open can of shaken soda and I was trying to keep it from bubbling up out of the top.

I'm one-hundred-fifty miles off Cape Horn, both autopilots are broken, and my boat is drifting toward one of the nastiest chunks of ocean on the face of the earth.

On June 10, the worst storm in the series swept across the middle of the Indian Ocean and Wild Eyes was directly in its path.

It seems like people my age are over-protected today, even to the point where a lot of parents refuse to put their kids in the position to make important decisions, to aspire to great things, because they don't want to put them in a position to fail.