Back in April I completed a sailing trip from Hobart Tasmania, to Bateman's Bay on the NSW south coast. There were three of us on a 46 foot ketch (a two-masted yacht). From a departure point near Wineglass Bay on Tasmania's east coast we headed north east into and across Bass Strait before dropping anchor in Eden harbour just before dawn on Day 3 after 47 sleepless hours at sea.

On the first night in the Strait we ran into a strong gale with wind gusts up to 47 knots and seas of up to 5 metres. It was an uncomfortable night and quite fatiguing. But the real challenge came for us towards the back end of that leg when having passed Gabo Island and only a few hours from port we had a navigational system shut down just as we entered the shipping lanes off Australia's south east corner.

Our yacht was using a PC-based navigation system and at a critical time Windows decided to do an automatic shut-down-re-boot which took down our systems while we were within 1 NM of a 2,000 tonne South African tanker somewhere out there in pitch black conditions at 2am.

Needless to say that after surviving that not-so-fun episode all Windows-based technology has now been removed from the yacht and I picked up a new appreciation for the "business" criticality and reliability of technology.