A Descent Into The Maelstrom, Edgar Allan Poe, 1845
Was a crew member in a sailing regatta and for one 5-10 minute period the waves were just coming from everywhere, breaking all over the place. It was exhilarating, like riding a roller coaster up and down! Then a (relatively) very big one, out of the blue. It seemed to go between us and the next boat, maybe 60 feet away. From the deck, we couldn't even see the top of the mast of the other boat.
And then we fell out of the water.
Our boat, all 30,000 pounds of it, dropped straight down and we crashed, hard, into the water below. The mast bent so much that the cable stays were loose. The impact threw everyone down. The sound: it sounded like the fiberglass crunched and broke. For a moment we all thought we were dead. But we weren't. The mast snapped back so hard the cable stays made a twanging sound. Sails limp - no wind at the bottom of the hole. Then the water all around us swallowed us up; our buoyancy sent us shooting straight up with a lot of force. The wind hit us hard; no time to reflect; have to deal with that now.
We were never a good team, but I came away from it with far more confidence being on the water than I started :)
This is advice, hard won, by mariners who abandoned their ship, were lost at sea in their lifeboat, and left behind them a ghost boat that eventually makes its way to shore.
It’s interesting to know that they happen a lot more often than would be expected statistically from those simple mechanics. Yet another fun potential rare event to keep in mind while surfing in Northern California :)