AlexH

The Voyages of Basil and Angela Huxham: Gotta get to 20:

Just another day on the ocean:

Meanwhile in North Minerva reef, dinghies and outboards went flying like kites and had to be cut loose, never to be seen again; snubbers broke, anchors were lost and only their engines saved some boats from the reef. Others weren’t so fortunate. An Italian couple sent out a mayday, their boat wrecked on the reef, they took to their life raft. NZ Search and Rescue’s Orion aircraft appeared and circled overhead trying to coordinate a rescue, hampered by the fact that most boats in the reef that night were having their own problems. Shun, a Japanese single-hander, lost his boat on the outside of the reef and was rescued by one of our rally boats. We’d seen Shun several times over the past year, most recently in Opua where he used to do graceful, martial arts type exercises on the dock every morning using his boat hook.