HELL & HIGH WATER

Man, if you thought you were having a bad day,” says Conrad Colman, peering into the camera, “just look at mine.

Colman is a skipper in the Vendée Globe sailboat race. As he calmly addresses the lens, you notice that something looks very askew in the background. Colman is standing upright, but the boat is listing around 80 degrees to starboard. The cabin is flooded. He is thousands of miles from land.

And did we mention the fire?

A few days after he nearly went under, Colman explained the connect-thedots calamity that precipitated all of this. “The controller for the solar panel malfunctioned and caught fire,” he told via satellite phone. “There was thick smoke on the inside of the boat, leaping yellow flames behind my chart table. I grabbed a fire blanket, put my hands on the solar panel, and got electrocuted from it and burned by