By Logan Rowell
BANG.
I looked up and, for one frozen second, my brain could not make sense of what I was seeing. The rig was gone.
A moment earlier, the mast and sails had been above me, doing what masts and sails are supposed to do. Now they were across the deck and in the water, the whole mess loading up, pulling, thrashing, and trying to turn a bad day into something much worse.
I was 18 years old. Fearless. Dumb. Naive. I had grown up on the wild side of snowboarding and mountain biking, where fear was something you mostly learned to ignore. I had carried that same logic offshore in a tired boat I could afford, blissfully underqualified for all the ways the ocean could make me pay attention.
And I did pay.
Torn sails. Broken gear. A dismasting. Some decisions that were lucky to end as lessons instead of tragedies.
It was also, in all the complicated ways that are true when you are young, and the world is wide open, one of the greatest times of my life.
My relationship with offshore passage prep has changed a lot since then.
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