Chapter 2.         Eye of the Storm              “She’s free, she’s free.” The yacht’s chain had gone slack. As Valhalla slipped off the back of the wave the chain pulled taught and with a tremendous twang, snapped! My reflex was to ram the throttle forward hard. Miraculously the fourteen-inch prop pushed her bow ahead through the next wave which thankfully broke behind us. We were free from our anchorage, and I steered her to a north-east compass bearing into rough but deep water, leaving our anchor and fifty fathoms of chain behind. I’d sometimes though of putting a folding prop on her and now I thanked Neptune that I hadn’t. The sky was getting lighter, the seas were short and sharp and if I think back on it, the wind was probably blowing at least twenty knots as the crew began busying themselves around the deck to quickly set some sails, to steady her and get us away from the island. First up was the stay-sail then the mizzen, which steadied her roll and gave her the power she

    My t-shirt, felt soaked to my underpants. The warm tropical rain was beating almost horizontally into my face and had soaked through the toweling, tucked under the collar of my hooded sailing jacket. It was just after 4am in the morning and the night was pitch black on deck. I’d been awakened an hour earlier by the thumping of Valhalla’s lead keel against coral heads. We had made landfall late, the afternoon before, on our fifth day of a slow uneventful sailing leg from Auckland, NZ. When we encountered what I can only describe as eerie weather conditions. The sea was relatively calm, but most of the afternoon we had battled sudden squalls, very unusual for way out in the Pacific. No sooner would we get all the canvas up and we’d be pulling it down again. Small banks of clouds would suddenly appear in the clear azure sky and rush towards us, hammering us with the squalls they carried in their bellies. But not just from one direction, they came at us from different directions, a