I know it might not really fit with some of the other stories here, but this was my scariest experience on a yacht so far.
I was crewing for an inexperienced skipper, taking his own yacht from Londonderry in Northern Ireland to Craobh in the Scottish mainland.
It was to be a non-stop hop over the 100nm trip, hoping to get there in 15 hours.
As we set off, the weather indicated a force 5 to 6 blowing southerly, with it veering later - seemed pretty perfect for our little sprint across.
However, about 5 hours into the journey, the skipper made reference to the Corryvrecken. He only mentioned it in passing, but the lines "I hope it's not as bad as I've heard" did spike my interest.
So, as I'd never heard of this Corryvreken, and don't remember seeing anything on the ipad charts we were forced to use (remember, not my boat), I thought I'd see if I could drum up some information on it - just out of interest.
We were too far out for any mobile data signal by this point, and the only paper information onboard was either for the Firth of Clyde, or for Northern Ireland - nothing useful, so I gave up on my quest.
A bit later on, the skipper again mentioned this Corryvrecken, so I thought I'd probe him a bit on it.
"Oh, it's a weird tidal whirlpool that I saw on the BBC a few months back. Some weird geography of the seabed causes the occasional upspringing of water and odd tidal flows. Looked pretty cool.".
A whirlpool? what? I decided to ask why he hadn't mentioned this earlier and was he sure we should be crossing a whirlpool.
"Nah, it's fine, they were crossing it in little rhibs on the BBC, we won't have any difficulty I don't think." was his less-than-inspiring response.
Leaving it at that for the remainder of the conversation, I thought it best to take a wander below and give my father (a very experienced ocean master and RYA instructor) a ring to see what he knew of this "whirlpool".
My father certainly had heard of the Corryvrecken and was very quick to ask what the weather and tides would be like as we were to be approaching it.
Around a force 7 to 8 westerly and we'd be half-way towards hightide.
His response was simple and clear "avoid it."
I decided best to relay this information to the skipper, and he did listen, but after discussing with his first mate, decided to stick with the original plan.
So a few hours later, we started to enter the Gulf of Corryvrecken, and almost immediately the sea state changed from slight to rough, with oddly flowing waves at least a couple of meters in height.
after another 15 minutes or so, we were being rocked all over the place, with the waves at least three metres high, maybe even four at times, and approaching from various angles all at once.
The "occasional" upspringing of water turned out to be a pretty much constant affair, making helming an absolute nightmare, and to make matters worse, the windspeed was now gusting up to 40kts at times.
Despite the wind, we were barely moving at times - effectively stuck still on the spot, being bounced around and coming close to broaching a good couple of times.
It was an absolute nightmare to be in, and luckily we were only really in the worst of it for around 45-60 minutes, but it is not an experience I want to ever repeat.
Once we had got out of it and made it to the marina, I told the skipper he could forget me sailing with him again, got myself a stupidly expensive taxi to Oban and then got quite considerably drunk.
Username: sk93