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I do have one other scary event, but not life threatening. I took my sailboat to Lake Tahoe while on a two week vacation. One day, I took my 15yr old nephew and his friend sailing. My boat is 24' and it took us half a day to sail from the south shore to the north. On the way back, we had the spinnaker flying and the boat was hauling about as fast as it had ever sailed. The wind was picking up and I had to close the cockpit door because waves were splashing all the way from the bow to the rear of the boat - we were getting drenched but having a blast.
All of a sudden, a rogue wave came out of nowhere and hit us from the side. When this happened, the rudder snapped off the boat and yanked the tiller right our of my hand. Keep in mind, this was a 6' piece of 1.5" thick wood and the thing flew thru the air and then quickly sunk to the bottom of the lake.
As soon as the rudder broke, all hell broke loose. The boat was out of control and going over. Neither of my passengers had any idea what to do. I literally leaped from the cockpit to the mast in one giant step and got the sails down. Everything was then ok. After this, we motored (with an outboard) back home which took about 6 hours due to the propeller coming out of the water on every wave.
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