Somehow, someway, I’ve actually never written my full story about this event.
I gave lots of interviews after it happened, and there are articles published in Yachting World Magazine, Practical Sailor, The Washington Post, New York Times, and honestly more than I can keep track of. You can watch youtube videos of it on Good Morning America, The Today Show, and countless other news outlets.
Finally, here I am, about to put into words my perspective of what happened and what I learned from it. Hint: There will be a few surprises 🙂
Raindancer Sailing In The Bahamas
Part 1: The Buildup
Since I started sailing and working on yachts in 2016 my dream was to sail my own boat to the South Pacific. I remember reading Dove by Robin Lee Graham on my first ever passage from St. Thomas to Belize and closing the book after reading those last words:
Home Is The Sailor, Home From The Sea
And The Hunter, Home From The Hill
I was hooked. Adventure, exploration, love, simplicity, freedom, everything about the lifestyle of sailing embodied who I was and how I wanted to live my life. I kept devouring literature about the South Pacific, including reading the diaries of Captain James Cook and his early discoveries of the South Pacific Islands. A dream was born.
After less than a year, I pissed away all the money I had in my bank account to buy a 1979 CSY 33 for $30,000 USD. I immediately went back to work for 6 months before I could even work on it again. In my ignorant mind, that was the boat that would get me to the South Pacific. But after years of balancing working on the boat, working on yachts to pay for the boat, and the occasional cruising season in the Bahamas, I was always behind on funds and never felt like I was at a point where I was financially ready to sail off to distant shores.
Ironically enough, around the time that I thought I may have been ready, I was offered a unicorn of a job as the first mate aboard a 108 foot Sailing Yacht named “Marae” that one of my best friends was the captain on at the time. It was late 2018, and we were to sail from Fort Lauderdale to New Zealand with the owner of the yacht onboard, scuba diving our way across the South Pacific. The pay was great, the rest of the crew was great, there was no way I could turn that down. I accepted the job offer and got extremely lucky and sold my CSY 33 within a week for $40,000 USD.
Pictured Above: Sailing Into Bora Bora On Marae
To this day, my time on Marae has arguably been the best times I’ve had sailing. Although it came with its fair share of work related challenges, it was everything I imagined and more. It was almost too easy though. When you are working onboard a multi million dollar yacht with an unlimited budget, a yacht that consistently makes over 200nm a day on passage, reaching New Zealand honestly felt too easy. Not to mention having a chef cooking all your meals and a stewardess doing your laundry and making your bed. I definitely didn’t suffer enough.
Although I had officially seen and experienced the South Pacific, I still had the goal of doing it on my boat, my terms, and my schedule.
Between 2019 and 2021 a lot happened in my life. I was living in New Zealand working a major refit aboard Marae and my parents had just semi-retired and were sailing their Lagoon 450F “Contigo” from Florida to The Caribbean. They made it as far as Samana, Dominican Republic when my dad and best friend had a heart attack and passed away almost instantly while in the lobby at Puerto Bahia Marina. He was 56 years old, and in good health. That event absolutely changed the trajectory of my yachting career and my life as my priorities shifted.
I’d been working onboard Marae for a year and a half now. With my Dad passing away and Covid-19 causing global shutdowns, I made the decision to relocate back to Florida to be closer to my mom. With the heartbreak of losing my dad, I had honestly felt that I would never go back to the South Pacific. Mainly because I didn’t want to be that far away from my mom and instead felt like I needed to be close to her during the hardest time of her life. It was a no-brainer and I would do it again.
After a year of balancing time with my mom and running catamaran charters in the Bahamas, I started to feel more like my old self again. My mind drifted back to my South Pacific dream. I started to look at boats on the internet obsessively. I studied charts and planned my every move like if I were already on the way to the Marquesas. My girlfriend at the time noticed this shift in me. I remember one night she said, “Rick, I think you need to just do it. I think you need to get it out of your system because you can’t move on with your life until you do.”
That was probably the most unselfish thing a romantic partner has ever done or said to me, and to this day I still love her for it. She was right, she was so damn right and I knew it. She gave me her support, while at the same time deciding that she wanted something else out of life. We went our separate ways and I decided that the time was now to chase down this dream. After all, my mom was still young and healthy, my grandparents were still around to be there with her while I was gone, and I had my mom’s full support.
I couldn’t believe this was about to happen.
In July of 2021, I flew to Staten Island, New York, to look at a 1976 Kelly Peterson 44 that had been sitting on the hard for about five years. It was shrink-wrapped, very dirty, and cluttered with random boat parts, but it had a voice that spoke to me. It felt like I was stepping aboard an old ship with stories engraved in the teak. Its wide decks and high bulwarks gave off a feeling of strength. Its large sail area and keel-and-rudder configuration gave off a feeling of speed. Its cabin below gave me a sense of home. The previous owner had replaced every electrical conductor, fuse, circuit breaker, switch, thru-hull, seacock, and chainplate. It had a great foundation to build from. I threw in a lowball offer of $40,000 USD and got back an immediate yes. Shit, I should have said $20,000.
Pictured Above: Raindancer A Few Days After The Shrink Wrap Was Removed
Remember all that talk about not suffering enough? The suffering began on day one when I bought Raindancer in the form of endless boat projects.
This “dream” started with me alone in Staten Island, riding around town on a craigslist bought little red bicycle to gather parts, while my dad’s passing still weighed heavily on my shoulders. It rained hard on the day I removed the shrink wrap off the boat, and the amount of water leaking in from every hatch and areas on the hull to deck joint had me on the verge of a mental breakdown. I actually cried that day. I remember thinking about my dad, but also thinking, what the fuck am I doing? Nearly every sailor has felt this at some point. It wasn’t the first time, and it certainly wasn’t the last. Over the next six months, I worked on that boat every single day and eventually made my way down the East Coast to Florida, arriving just in time for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
2022 was the year. Excitement was at an all time high. I had three crew joining me in January, a mix of friends and people I had met through crew sites, and the four of us were set to sail through the Bahamas, then on to Panama, through the Canal, to the Galápagos, and finally to French Polynesia.
It was an absolute shit show. But it was a really fun shit show.
We had a great time in The Bahamas and made it to Bocas del Toro, Panama then things fell apart. The government of French Polynesia had ramped up their Covid-19 entry requirements and I had also fallen in love with one of our crew which complicated things in ways that are probably deserving of an entire book. One by one the crew scattered and we told ourselves that we would all be back in a month to go through the Panama canal and keep going. That didn’t happen.
The intense highs and lows of those few months combined with a new romantic relationship on the horizon was enough for me to decide to park up in Bocas Del Toro for the better part of a year and go to the Pacific the following year. And that’s what we did.
In November of 2022 I had left my boat hauled out at Shelter Bay Marina in Colon, Panama while I flew home for the holidays. I returned to Panama on January 1st, 2023 with the kind of energy and motivation that you only get when you are about to do something you’ve been dreaming about your whole life. Between myself, my friend Simon, my then girlfriend Alana, and our other crew member Bianca, we spent a month at the marina working on the boat getting it ready to cross the Pacific.
Raindancer On The Way To The Galapagos
After making it through the Panama Canal we set sail for the Galapagos and arrived after a swift and speedy 5 day passage. With some of our boat buddies, we spent three weeks in the Galapagos before it was time for the big 3000nm passage to the Marquesas. We left on February 28th, 2023. We were planning on arriving in the Bay Of Virgins, the place I’d been dreaming of dropping my own anchor for years. This was it.
On The Way To The Marquesas
I can look back on the first half of that passage and remember myself day after day staring at the setting sun with such satisfaction. I was finally doing it, I couldn’t believe the next place I would see would be that magical island of Fatu Hiva. I thought of all the hard work over the years, the passing of my Dad, the unknown that lay ahead, and every event in my life that led me to that moment. I was on an all time high.
On the night of March 11th, Alana and I were laying together in the cockpit while on watch staring up at the stars. Not many people know this, but for reasons that we both still probably struggle to understand, we decided to break up that night.
Now, what does a break up look like out in the middle of the ocean? It looks like a lee cloth going up in the middle of your shared bed. It looks like silence and resentment. It also looks like re-igniting the fire that brought us together in the first place. Like the book Dove that inspired me, it was adventure, it was love, it was freedom, but it was also complicated.
The next day I remember talking to Simon on the bow of the boat and discreetly telling him that we had broken up. We talked about the new potential plans of eventually sailing to Asia after the Pacific and continuing on this trip together no matter what. We were solid together and I always felt like I had his support.
Two days later, on March 13th at around 2:00 p.m., disaster struck, in the form of a giant whale.
Part 2 – The Whale
It was a picture perfect day in the south pacific tradewinds. A gentle 13 knot southeast breeze was moving Raindancer along at around 6 knots. We had about 1250 nautical miles left until we would reach Fatu Hiva. Bianca was serving up the second round of pizza when we experienced a violent impact from our stern.
Clunk! Crash!
The stern of our boat lifted out of the water like the back tire of a school bus hitting a speed bump too fast. Metal breaking and fiberglass cracking sounds radiated through the boat. Alana yelled, “We hit a whale” as she pointed to the port stern of the boat. I looked over and there it was, a huge whale with its pectoral fin out of the water as it retreated back to the depths. There was an unbelievable amount of blood pouring out of the whale as it swam down and disappeared.
The high water bilge alarm immediately went off and regained my attention. I grabbed the wheel to see if we lost steering (we did) and yelled down below, “check the bilges!” Alana lifted up the salon floorboard and saw water rushing in at shocking speed. I ran down to the engine room to check the main bilge and verify the direction of where the water was coming from. On my way there I noticed my Leatherman sitting at the navigation table and decided to clip it onto my board shorts. By the time I got to the engine room the water was already at the oil pan of the engine and rising rapidly. I continued to the aft cabin in the direction of where the water was coming from. When I got there it quite literally looked like water was pumping in from every direction overflowing around the floorboards and from under the bed. I thought, this should be fun.
I pulled the items from underneath the bed to get a look at the bilge, rudder shaft, and steering gear, assuming I would see an obvious hole in the boat. I didn’t. For some reason it did not occur to me that the water would be coming in slightly forward of that somewhere in the long run of the propeller shaft log.
My first thought after that was to jump overboard where I should easily be able to find the hole and attempt to plug it. As I’m coming up the companionway I told the crew “hey guys, I think we’re going down.”
They had already gotten the ditch bag out and had begun stuffing cans of food into bags and filling up anything and everything with water including cooking pots, tea kettles, and water bottles. I always keep 6 one gallon jugs of water tied together under the salon table during passages and they grabbed those as well. I instructed Bianca to operate the manual bilge pump in addition to the automatic ones that were going off. I considered turning on the engine and removing the intake hose to use as an additional method of expelling water but between the chaos of things I didn’t get around to it.
On my way outside I made a quick mayday call on the VHF Radio and activated our first Epirb. Our liferaft was a 6 person super light offshore Winslow life raft in a valise that we kept under the salon table. Alana and I threw it up into the cockpit and I decided to deploy it. I tied off the liferaft painter to the stern cleat and threw the whole thing overboard. I then pulled all of the painter line out and gave it one big yank. The liferaft immediately started to inflate. Once it fully inflated you could hear the air release from the pressure relief valve on the life raft. Of course, we all froze for a moment because it sounds exactly like it would if there was a hole in the raft.
By this time the boat was probably ⅓ full of water but the sails were still up and the boat was still moving. The sea anchor on the liferaft automatically deployed which caused an extreme amount of tension to be placed on the painter line, which I later found out was designed to break at 500LBS of pressure. We must have been close. We needed to get the sails down ASAP.
As I’m releasing the main halyard and furling away the headsail I remember thinking how this would be the last time I furl away the sail. I snapped back into reality again when Simon yelled, “Rick, should we launch the dinghy?”. “Absolutely Simon!” I replied.
Keep in mind that my original plan of diving straight overboard to try to plug the hole was being significantly delayed by the distraction of abandon ship procedures.
We kept our tender inflated, and upright on the foredeck. All we needed to do was release the ratchet straps and push the tender overboard. Somehow we even remembered to put the drain plug in!
Once the tender was in the water I finally got around to putting on my mask and fins and diving overboard into that deep blue endless abyss. I thought about the whale for a second, then held my breath and dove under the boat. I immediately saw a massive hole right where the propeller shaft exits the boat through the shaft log which on the Kelly Peterson 44 is located in a very well protected area in an aperture on the back end of the skeg. See photo below:
The hole was awkward with large and small broken pieces of fiberglass everywhere and a shaft coming out of it. Simon passed down the first thing we could find which was a tarp with lines attached to it that we would occasionally use as a sun shield. I took another deep breath and went down and attempted to shove the tarp in the hole while wrapping it around the shaft and trying to tie it to the forward end of the skeg to keep it from coming off. I tried at least three or four times with the boat pitching up and down and side to side. The tarp kept sliding off. I was hoping the negative pressure would keep it held into the hole but that’s not what happened.
Pictured Above: Another Not So Great AI Generated Image Of What It Looked Like (Sort Of) Underneath Raindancer
That was it. It was time to focus the rest of our energy abandoning ship safely with all of our emergency gear.
Before getting out of the water I instructed Simon to reel in our fishing lure while I guided it down and below the life raft. We were afraid the hook would catch and puncture the tubes of the raft. As he was reeling it in I saw a fish. “We’ve got a tuna!” We must have been dragging this medium sized skipjack tuna for a while. We threw him straight into a bucket and into the dinghy. Dinner was sorted for our first night on the liferaft.
The girls had been transferring all of our emergency bags and supplies into the cockpit then into the liferaft and dinghy. By the time I got out of the water both Bianca and Alana were waiting in the dinghy with all of our supplies and ditch kits. They had done an absolutely amazing job of getting all we needed off the boat. I can’t remember transferring one thing, only asking to make sure that the pelican case with all of our emergency comms had made it onto the liferaft.
Pictured Above: AI Image Of Raindancer Sinking. It was the best chatGPT could do based on the info I gave it
I stood on the aft deck looking around the boat to see what else we could take with us before the boat went down. Our dinghy outboard was mounted on the stern pushpit and for a moment I thought about trying to remove it and get it onto the dinghy. I needed my spanner which was down below. I made my way to the cockpit and looked down through the companionway. The water was nearly at the top of the steps. I would have had to have held my breath and swam down into the boat to get the spanner. Nope!
I told Simon it was time. He stepped off the boat into the ocean and swam his way over to join Alana and Bianca in the dinghy.
Now I stood alone on the aft deck of my floating home Raindancer. It sounds weird, but I could hear her aching in pain. It sounded just like the whale screaming out in pain. I took a mental photograph of the entire scene. I thought about all the time I’d spent working on her. I said goodbye and stepped off the toerail of the boat as it started to go under. I swam about 15 feet over to the liferaft, turned around, and all I saw was the last 10ft of the mast disappearing below the water. It looked like a crime scene. There was debris floating everywhere.
Then I heard Alana yell from the dinghy, “Rick, the painter is still attached!” I reached for my Leatherman, flipped open the blade and cut the painter loose right as it was coming tight.
Exhale.
Part 3 – The Raft & The Rescue
Step one was over. Survive the abandon ship.
After safely tying the dinghy and liferaft together we all joined together in the raft. Without much dialogue, I activated our second Epirb and pulled out our Iridium Go to begin sending out mayday messages to our buddy boats. Unfortunately our only form of communication (Our Iridium GO) was already below 30% battery with a partially broken antenna. We had been using it just before the whale struck to send messages to family and friends. It was sitting on the navigation table connected to the charger when the whale had hit.
After sending out messages to our buddy boats, sailing friends, and my brother, we turned off the Iridium and waited patiently for two hours to turn it back on in the hopes that we would have a lot of replies and reassurance that someone was coming to rescue us.
Me, Simon, And Bianca In The Life Raft – Photo Taken By Alana From The Dinghy
We started talking about what had just happened. We were still in shock. It felt like an out of body experience. There was no time to stop and process it, only time to take action while a voice in the back of our heads kept saying, I can’t believe this is actually happening right now.
Maybe it was our way of coping with the trauma, but I was surprised at how quickly we were all laughing together in the life raft. Saying things like:
“Holy fucking shit, dude! Did you see that whale?”
“I can’t believe how fast the boat sank.”
“This is fucking insane. I can’t believe we’re actually in our life raft right now.”
“Remember when we said Simon was so nice that if we ever got stranded in a life raft and were starving, he’d probably chop off his own leg and offer it to us?”
“Sorry, Mom.”
The next thing we did was take inventory of our food and water and make a “worst case scenario” plan. We calculated that we had roughly 10 days of water rations and 30 days of food. We had a lot of food. It was everywhere, we could barely sit or lie down in the liferaft or dinghy because there were piles of supplies and safety gear everywhere. Based on our current speed and track we would either make landfall or just miss the Marquesas in about 35 days. However, if we would have pulled up the sea anchor and turned the liferaft around to use the canopy as a sail, I bet we could have made it there much faster.
After two hours we turned on our Iridium Go and got back some great news from our friend Tommy on Southern Cross. Everyone knew now. It was all over facebook, boat watch, the world arc network. Tommy informed us that there was a catamaran fairly close to us that should arrive in 8-10 hours. We celebrated by popping open bags of chips, opening cans of food, eating candy bars, and chugging water. All we had to do now was wait.
The life raft was miserable. I’ll say that again, the life raft was miserable. Picture being in a wobbly waterbed in the middle of the ocean. I think I have a moderate to high tolerance for sea sickness, but the life raft was making me feel sick. We each took turns rotating between the dinghy and the liferaft. The dinghy was much more stable and gave a sense of security having a hard bottom.
Sitting In The Dinghy After Losing Raindancer
The sun was finally beginning to set on the most improbable day of my life. Alana and I watched from the dinghy while the outside world turned from orange to black, and the stars began to light up the night sky. I held her closely in my arms. She turned to me and said, “should we get back together? You can move into my place on Vancouver Island.” I smiled and replied, “yeah, might as well.”
We set up a one hour on, 3 hour off, night watch system. The person on watch was in charge of scanning the horizon for lights and making a mayday call every 45 minutes on the handheld VHF radio. Alana and I spent most of the night in the dinghy trying to sleep while being consistently hit in the face by flying fish.
At some point in the middle of the night during Simon’s watch, he spotted lights on the horizon. I still get chills just thinking about that feeling. We cheered, hugged, and screamed in happiness and excitement.
I got on the radio and hailed the approaching boat. That’s when I heard the crackling voice of Captain Geoff Stone aboard his catamaran, Rolling Stones.
Ha. Rolling Stones, I thought. My dad’s all time favorite band. What are the odds that that would be the boat to rescue us?
I told Geoff over the radio, “We’ve never met you guys, but we are so damn excited to see you.”
We discussed a plan to execute the rescue. I decided it would be safest to do the transfer from the dinghy. Once Rolling Stones was close enough, we would detach ourselves from the liferaft and drift back in order to allow them to approach with as little hazards and obstacles in the water as possible. We loaded up our essential items and ended up leaving quite a bit of supplies in the liferaft. That decision was based on one thing, getting the four of us from the dinghy on to the catamaran safely. That meant we had to leave behind any non essential items.
We untied ourselves from the liferaft and began to drift back. A few minutes later Rolling Stones made a slow pass next to us and illuminated our dinghy with their spotlight. There was a moment of awkward silence. They had no idea what physical or mental state we would be in, and we didn’t know anything about them. I broke the silence with a loud and enthusiastic, “HOWDY!” Which seemed to have broken the ice well.
Geoff was the one who made the call about how they would approach us for the rescue. He wanted to back down and place his starboard sugar scoop transom right next to the dinghy. Since the sea state was relatively manageable I thought it was doable but I was also cautious of a large swim platform pitching up and down and potentially crashing on top of our dinghy. The plan worked well. They approached us and one by one we timed the waves and launched ourselves onto the swim platform of Rolling Stones.
Our Crew Moments After Being Rescued
“Hey! Thank you guys so much for coming for us! Great to meet you, I’m Rick.”
Definitely not your ordinary first impression, but as you could expect, we immediately bonded with the amazing crew of the Rolling Stones. I stepped into their salon and noticed there was a statue of a pelican.
Ha. A pelican, I thought. My dad’s favorite bird that he would always take amateur photos of to send to me. What are the odds that that would be the boat to rescue us?
I later told my mom about The Rolling Stones, and the pelican, and she broke down into tears, convinced that they were signs from my dad. Him looking out for us.
Captain Geoff and his crew offered us freshly made bread and snacks. They also offered us showers, tooth brushes, clothing, deodorant, phone chargers, and even sacrificed one of their cabins for us. Their crew of 4 turned into a crew of 8 overnight. After talking together for probably an hour, myself and the rest of the raindancer crew got some much needed rest.
The next morning when I woke up is when the reality of what had just happened came crashing down on me.
Part 4 – The Aftermath
I remember waking up on the morning of March 14th in the port forward cabin of Rolling Stones. I could hear that almost everyone else was awake already making conversation in the galley and salon area.
I stared up at the ceiling, listening to the sound of the waves rush past the boat as we made our way westward. I tried to process what had just happened, but my brain didn’t have the required capacity to comprehend it all.
After socializing and saying hello to everyone, I called my brother. That was the first and only time that I actually broke down into tears over the loss of Raindancer. I remember telling him, “It’s gone man, everything’s gone.”
That afternoon I offered to make lunch for everyone. While cooking in a new galley and figuring out where everything was, less than 24 hours removed from losing my home, I remember thinking how quickly things can change.
I thought so much about what I could have done differently, I was absolutely humbled by that whale. I was overly confident in my boat and my abilities to deal with any problem at sea, including collisions. I always thought in the event of a collision I would be able to handle any hole in the boat swiftly and smoothly.
There was one floorboard that I remember thinking, holy shit, I didn’t look in there. I don’t know how, but I didn’t look in there. My stomach dropped. That had to have been where the water was coming through on the inside of the boat. In the midst of it all I got distracted by everything we needed to do in order to abandon ship that I didn’t give enough attention to the actual hole that was sinking the boat. I certainly never gave up, I just got distracted and delayed. Looking back on it now I’ll definitely admit that I was shocked to see that much water coming in. This was no broken thru hull fitting or small crack, but still I wondered how much I could have slowed down the water intrusion had I initially stuck around in the aft cabin a little bit longer and let the rest of the crew handle the launching of the liferaft, emergency comms, dinghy, and sails.
Maybe I would have only slowed it down enough to buy us an extra 10 minutes. Maybe I would have found a way to eventually completely stop the water intrusion or at least get it to a point where the bilge pump could keep up with it.
Then I thought, if I had been able to stop the water from coming in, we would still be dealing with a loss of steering, loss of engine, major structural and mechanical repairs, electrical repairs, etc. And if we somehow would have been able to limp our way to the boatyard in Hiva Oa, I would have been dealing with a large scale project and technical repairs in one of the most remote boat yards on the planet with barely any supplies.
Probably better that it sank!
Those first few days were hard, I was trying to decide what it all meant. Or maybe what happened was just simply bad luck? How could this huge dream of mind end like this, just when it was about to begin? Is the whale sinking my boat a clear and concise sign that I need to give up sailing? Or was it just another obstacle that needed to be overcome?
After only a few days I started to see the whole thing as just a simple accident. My love for the ocean and sailing was and still is unshakeable. I’ve learned that over and over again. So I decided to flip the switch in my head and begin thinking about how the hell we can keep this adventure alive.
Our First Steps On Land In 23 Days With All Of Our Belongings
Once I learned that I would receive $95,000 USD in insurance money, that dream felt like it still had a heartbeat. The mood lightened up and Simon said, “good thing you got rid of that piece of shit!” And before we even made it to land on Rolling Stones I had already made an offer on a Norseman 447 that was listed for sale in Opua, New Zealand. Two weeks later they accepted the offer of $50,000 USD. I flew to New Zealand, surveyed the boat, and bought it just a little over a month after Raindancer had sank. Looking back on that now, it actually seems a little reckless and impulsive. I probably should have gone home first and processed everything before making any rash decisions. But I didn’t. Very Foolhardy of me.
6 months after Raindancer sank we were sailing Raindancer II up to Tonga right smack in the middle of humpback whale season. A lot happened on that trip as well, but that is a story for another time.
Raindancer II In Tonga – The Next Chapter
Part 5: Reflection
I often wonder how my story, and my life, might have been different had Raindancer not sunk that day.
Sometimes I still imagine arriving in the Bay of Virgins and finally realizing that dream. I imagine sailing through the rest of French Polynesia and across the South Pacific. I wonder what experiences I would have had, who I would have met, and how long I would have kept going. I’ll never know the answers to those questions.
But then I find myself thinking:
“You know, Rick… plenty of people have sailed across the South Pacific. But how many people have been struck by a whale in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and lived to tell the story?” Which of those experiences will matter more to me in the long run?
When I was 22 years old, backpacking alone through Australia, someone told me, “At the end of your life, all you have is your story, so you’d better make it a good one.” I may have taken those words a little too seriously.
Today, I don’t think that’s entirely true. The people you love, the lives you touch, and the memories you create matter far more than any story. But I do believe there’s some wisdom in that quote.
Raindancer gave me a story that I never would have chosen, but one I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life. What was once the most heartbreaking day of my sailing career has become one of the defining moments of my life.
And the best part?
Everyone survived.
So what did I really lose?
A boat.
Most of my belongings.
The immediate chance to sail through French Polynesia.
What did I gain?
A story unlike almost any other.
Resilience.
Experience that can’t be bought.
A renewed appreciation for life.
And… $95,000 in insurance money.
I’m pretty sure that one day I’ll sail across the Pacific again. But whether I do or not, Raindancer already gave me more than I ever expected from any boat. She’s also the one boat that I’ll never sell.