It’s been quiet for me on the writing front lately – having a completely separate business to run and all that. But I still get to do bits and pieces of work from time to time for magazines and radio.

Roisin from Outsider magazine  (They’re on Twitter too – @OutsiderMag) asked me to interview Nick Ward a few weeks back for their upcoming ‘Survival’ issue. Nick is a survivor of the 1979 Fastnet race – yacht racing’s most famous disaster. When he came to in the water, tethered in by his lifeline and with a broken leg, he realised the rest of his crew (those that were still alive) had abandoned ship, and spent 14 hours with his dead crewmate hoping for  a rescue before being spotted.

And when he was found – did his crewmates come visit him in hospital?  Nope. They didn’t even send flowers.

It’s an amazing story, and the Outsider guys have given it a great treatment in the pages of the mag, which you can pick up for FREE in many outlets, listed here. The entire article is below the fold.

Having written a book about the whole affair, Nick seems fairly zen about having been abandoned in one of the worst storms in living memory. Apart from entitling his book ‘Left for Dead‘, that is.

Below is a snippet from the interview we did, wherein he gives his views on the call his crew took to abandon their 30-foot Grimalkin, along with him and the dying Gerry Winks.

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