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

I will never forget the feeling of walking into my home, a place that while drifting helpless in the middle of the Indian Ocean I wondered if I would ever see again.

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.

The terrifying physics of going up-mast in heavy seas are inescapable.

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

If a big wave came at the wrong moment, it would sweep me off into forty-eight-degree water, where I might last twenty minutes. Drowning quickly might be better.

But none of that kept me from picturing what a tsunami might look like if it did rise up and roar toward my little boat like some watery blue version of the Great Wall of China.