Ben Ainslie’s Honeymoon Rescue

If you think you’re too hot a sailor to ever get in trouble with your boat, think again. Shit happens. Even to top pros. A case in point was when British sailor Sir Ben Ainslie — acknowledged as the most successful Olympic sailor in history — was sailing his yacht with his newlywed wife Georgie Thompson through the reef-strewn waters of the British Virgin Islands, not far from Sir Richard Branson’s Necker Island resort. 

In his blog on www.virgin.com, Sir Richard reported Monday that aboard Ainslie’s yacht "the furling system broke on the main sail and the sail became so twisted that it couldn’t go up, down, in or out." Sir Ben put out a call for assistance and three members of the Necker Island watersports team came to the rescue. 

As Branson wrote, "The only way to avoid going onto the reefs was for Marco to go to the top to cut the sail to pieces, whilst George and Ben were winching Marco up and down and Georgie was helping in the boat. Unsurprisingly, Ben kept an amazingly cool head whilst directing operations — he just needed more hands to sort out the mess." 

The incident ended with no further harm to the boat, and afterward Sir Ben and Georgie later spent several peaceful days at Branson’s spectacular Necker Island Resort. All’s well that ends well. (Yeah, we’d bet that Sir Ben’s boat was amply insured.)

On a side note, we’ve always been a little suspicious of in-mast and in-boom mainsail furling systems, although some sailors swear by them. If you’ve had experiences — either good or bad — with such systems, we’d love to hear about them. Email us here.