Sailing's Strangest Moments

It concluded that both commanders had shown poor judgement and recommended that two vessels under steam should always ‘pass each other on the port side’.

Yet the Icelandic sailor had only been trying to say sorry! He’d caused the original damage when he became tangled in Dragon Song’s moorings in the Solent and dragged it behind his own vessel. Spotting the yacht the following year, Olafsson, who had been drinking, sailed across to apologise and promptly careered into it again.

On the deserted Cerf Island he found a derelict fisherman’s cottage but no fresh water, so he lived on pawpaws and coconuts for the next nine days until he was rescued by a fishing boat, which he’d attracted with a flare. In the interim, NCS Challenger had washed up on the beach with the hull surprisingly intact.

Somehow, however, Tangvald picked up the pieces of his shattered life again and circumnavigated the globe – without an engine – aboard L’Artemis de Pytheas. In 1987, aged 63, he married his sixth wife, nineteen-year-old Florence, and, with the three children born on the boat by different wives, continued to sail the oceans of the world until his death in 1991.

Well done, skipper,’ remarked the cartoonist Andrew Spedding, clapping Primrose on the back. ‘You won’t get the OBE this year!’

In 1971, the Conservative Prime Minister, Edward Heath, steered the British Admiral’s Cup team to victory at the helm of his 42-foot yacht, Morning Cloud. He sailed into Plymouth at the end of the punishing 605-mile-long Fastnet race to cheers from a crowd of onlookers after a five-day race that had taken him from Cowes on the Isle of Wight to the Fastnet Rock off the Republic of Ireland and back to Plymouth.

Simon was immediately recommended for the People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals Dickin Medal for acts of bravery in wartime by animals serving with the police, Civil Defence or any branch of the armed forces. Not only was he the first – and so far the only – cat to gain the medal, but it was the first time a Royal Navy animal had received it.

The famous newscaster Walter Crokite’s widow, Betsy, had the last word: ‘Errol Flynn died on a 70-foot boat with a seventeen-year-old girl. Walter has always wanted to go that way, but he’s going to settle for a seventeen-footer with a 70-year-old.’

The Ena was seaworthy but had been stripped of all her gear.
‘They had taken the sweeps, mooring lines, fenders and even my false teeth which I had left behind in a glass of water by my bunk!’ Page said. ‘You can’t trust these men of Kent!’

The next problem was relaunching the Tollesbury, which had grounded with the falling tide. It was two hours before the tide refloated the barge. They pushed off into deep water, setting their sails, but they made little progress in the light winds. So they dropped anchor again and the mate, a First World War navy veteran, signalled a destroyer and asked for the troops to be transferred. First, the Tollesbury had to survive an air raid. Then a barge tried to tow them off too quickly and the towline snapped.