Everyone thinks sailing across oceans is just plain dangerous. After all, it's nearly three-thousand miles across the Atlantic Ocean from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean, and a lot of bad things can happen out there. For eg your yacht can collide with whales, there are black squalls, white squalls, tropical depressions, tropical storms, hurricanes, and icebergs - lots of fearful things are found offshore. At least this is what everyone feels. But you will be suprised to know that most yachting disasters befall cruisers when they are in the Danger Zone within one-hundred miles of land.
Offshore, there aren't any rocks and reefs to threaten your yacht. You do need to keep a good lookout so you don't get rundown by ships, but other than that, sailing offshore isn't nearly as risky as being close to land. Close to the land water is a soft and relatively forgiving medium. An incompetent sailor in a strong yacht can make stupid mistakes and still survive because water is soft as yachts are generally much tougher than the people who sail them.
If you make a mistake and run into land, you have instant disaster with probable destruction of your yacht. You can fall asleep at sea while you are on watch, and autopilot takes care of the yacht. But if you fall asleep in the Danger Zone close to shore, the autopilot will run your yacht up on a reef. The above pictures show the dents in the side of the aluminum hull, fortunately not puncturing the strong aluminum skin of the tragic yacht. Unfortunately, both rudders and rudder shafts are destroyed, and the folding prop, prop shaft, and hull adjacent to the prop sustained significant damage. You can't afford to fall asleep in the Danger Zone.
BE CAREFUL...
When sailing offshore, we keep a watch to look for squalls, ships, floating debris, whales, fishing boats, and fishing nets floating in the water. But overall, we aren't too worried, because we are outside the Danger Zone, and there is usually room for error but once we enter the Danger Zone, we are especially careful. Being one-hundred miles from safe port doesn't lull us into a false sense of security. Instead it heightens our awareness and we raise our state of alert, because we know we are in the Danger Zone!
