"I signed off last time about to do a sail change in a building breeze. I had to roll up and take down the Code 5 in what was by the time I got on deck about 35 knots of wind, which is over the limit for an old sail! This is a perfectly normal procedure, I started rolling the thing up but it got jammed half rolled up and half unrolled! There it was, flogging itself silly at the front of the boat. I went up the front to try and free it up, but the furling drum is right at the end of the bowsprit - I was not going out there I can assure you - there was a big sea and we were surfing at nearly twenty knots sometimes! I taped my big kitchen knife to the deckbrush handle and went up to deal with the problem, which was that the cover of the furling line had wrinkled up like Nora Batty's stockings (a character in a British sitcom-editor) inside the drum, got caught on a cunningly placed spike and wedged itself up very very tightly! Whilst hacking away I took my eye off the ball missed a big wave which we surfed down, and got hosed down the deck, knife in hand, as we buried the bow in the wave in front at high speed - everything went dark, there was a whooshing noise in my ears as they filled up, and I held my breath as water went down my neck right down to my boots, up my nose, up my arms, everywhere. I took some sizeable pieces out of my fingers as I tried to grab stanchions and guardwires on the way past - the force of the water was incredible and I still have the bruises to testify! When I came to a stop at the mast I had managed to keep hold of the knife luckily! I had several goes at cutting away at the drum, rolling and unrolling the sail; I cut forty five metres of cover of the rest of the line with a pair of scissors on my hands an knees, and still it was up there, half in, half out and flogging like nobody's business. After nearly three hours I decided it had to be dropped on deck as it was whilst I still had a mast! I sailed as far downwind as I dared without gybing, and went for it - first time I aborted and winched it up again before it went in the water, then second time I had it on an "inboard roll" of the boat - it was there on deck, coming down, coming down, then,outboard roll - whoosh, over the side, in the water. The boat stopped short and rounded up into the wind with a parachute handbrake over the side. There followed another two hours of struggling as I tried to get the thing back onboard, but things were going badly wrong - bent stanchions, then the first rip, then around the keel - the stuff of nightmares. I finished up dragging the thing off the bowsprit after trying to save the boltrope for my poor old broken gennaker, but I couldn't get the thing out of the middle of the partially rolled sail. In the end I had to let the thing go before I had to get in the water and get it off the keel. I watched it sink. A twenty thousand pound sail lost because of a hundred pound piece of string with a loose cover. All I had left was the swivel and two thimbles and a ten inch piece of the head.........I don't mind admitting that nearly killed me, I was fairly well beaten up and bruised, and soaked to the skin, and rapidly becoming cold. It was 1400 when I went on deck, and 1915 when I came back down."

Steve White (Toe in the Water) in his daily message