“Scream” Gerry insisted. She is always giving me orders. “Sit in the bloody corner and scream!”

This time, I decided to take her advice. No, I hadn’t joined a trendy re-birthing class and normally I might have questioned her frantic instructions. However, to be perfectly honest, screaming was just what I felt like doing.

We were on our own on a forty-foot sailboat in the middle of the Atlantic, two unfit, middle-aged, wannabe adventurers. One of whom who had just crushed his hand between two blocks of metal in the boat’s self-steering system. So, for once, I did as told: slid along the soaked teak bench, cradled my throbbing fingers against my oilskin, and let rip. It helped; really, it did..

This was no time for bandages and sympathy. The wind had picked up from a frustrating 5 knots to an alarming forty knots, and more. The wind-speed indicator peaked at fifty-five knots then dropped back to zero, its sensor broken.

The spray was horizontal, visibility six feet, noise deafening. Gerry grabbed the helm, while I cranked away the jib, despite my damaged hand.

Bang! A reefing line snapped, and the main sail began flapping wildly. Gerry had started the engine and was struggling to keep the boat heading into the wind.

Sitting there, I remembered a conversation with an elderly sailor just a few weeks before. He was shocked when I claimed to love the sea. “I used to work on oil tankers,” he said. “There were times in the Southern Ocean when the waves were broke over our bridge, sixty-five feet in the air. There is only one word for the sea, and that is ‘treacherous’. You mustn’t love it.”

Treacherous is a good word to describe a storm that blows up in seconds. Just then, the rigging started to glow blue as sparks ran up and down the wires that hold up the mast.

As our minds began to work again, Gerry barked out orders from behind the wheel. The rain was so heavy that she could not see the wind instruments just eight feet away. So I yelled out the wind direction to her: “left, left” or “right, right”. Then Gerry had an inspiration, “I don’t know what is going on here, we seem to be turning in circles. Go below and fire up the radar; see if you can find any way out of this.”

I waited impatiently for the elderly display to warm up. Finally the fluorescent green image appeared and I could she was right, we were going around and around in this squall.

I shouted through the open companionway that the storm was not very big, to turn ninety degrees and see if she could get us out of this mess. Putting the engine into high speed, she turned the wheel hard to the left. The sail flogged furiously but within minutes calm was restored. We collapsed side by side in the cockpit, shaken and speechless from the experience.

You learn the most from the bad days and that narrow escape taught us plenty.

This was not like any other squall that we had ever experienced. The wind was incredibly hot and seemed to be blasting straight down onto us. It had happened at nightfall when we were in the process of preparing the boat for worsening weather. We thought we had done the right thing… reduced the sail area, put on safety harnesses, and renewed a chafed line. This is all good practice. Nevertheless, we had still been surprised by a weather phenomenon unknown to us. We had sailed into a microburst, a rare meteorological incident credited with downing aircraft and sinking ships – unpredictable and potentially lethal.

What saved us? Working together to identify problems, using technology to gain a 360-degree view of the situation. Understanding the bigger picture to see that the area of instability was very small and that we had choices. Yes, turning risked a knock-down but doing nothing would only prolong the ordeal.