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.

Terror ripped through me as I was falling, falling, falling toward the sea.

The swells were amazing! As big as three-story apartment buildings!

Slowly, my brain let me in on the fact that I had just come this close to dying.

There are a number of places on marine charts where even the most weathered sailors point and say, "Right there, nothing can go wrong. Everything has to go right." One place is the turbulent passage south of Cape Horn. Another is the dead center of the Indian Ocean.

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

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.