How’s your surface-to-boat retrieval?
Man overboard. The cry we hope never to hear. Ever since the late Mike Peyton, Yachting Monthly’s longlived cartoonist, told me of the day he came across a woman adrift who’d lost her husband overboard it has played on my mind.
I’ve been there myself, twice. The first time, as kids, a pal and I were sailing, one Easter weekend, across the Thames Estuary, a leaky old 18ft Essex One Design which I’d barely enough money to fit out. My friend, Derek May, was crew and the wind was stiff. When the rotten jib-sheet, which he was holding up on the weather side, parted, he went head over heels into the bitterly cold river.
