MASTERCLASS

Squalls are the school bullies of the ocean. But, like all bullies, your best bet is to outsmart them – and that means knowing where they form, how to avoid them and what to do when they turn up uninvited.

Sailing west across the Pacific to Tahiti we’d had persistent squalls for several days, but they had all been fairly benign. We’d diligently dropped, repacked and re-hoisted the spinnaker three times in one afternoon for squalls that turned out to be a complete non-event, so I finally gave in to the temptation to just leave it up. At the last minute a wall of white horses appeared under the cloud and we scrambled to drop the medium-weight symmetric. We bent a stanchion in the rush, but otherwise the drop went smoothly, although I was kicking myself for leaving the spinnaker set.