There we were in the bowels of the boat when suddenly the floor beneath us began to buckle and bend from the strain of the loose keel.

I went below deck with the skipper Tim Magee to check out the fittings and what we found alarmed us enormously.

Tim turned to me and gasped: ‘Wow, did you see that?’ I then unleashed a rather expressive swear word.

It was a truly frightening moment because we knew the potential danger we were in especially as we were out in the middle of the sea hundreds of miles from the nearest land.