Barbara and Mike Arnold from Kingsbridge were keen sailors.

They used to come down to Salcombe every weekend, summer and winter.

Barbara was a teacher in her 50s and was offered early retirement meaning she was free to take part in an adventure.

Mike was in his 60’s and the couple decided to buy a 38ft Moody 376 called Octagon which would become their home for the next 12 years.

It took a year to fit her out then they set off as Barbara described:

“We went across the Channel to France, across the Bay of Biscay, down the Spanish coast, and then Mike had to fly home from Gibraltar because he developed a hernia putting water bottles on the boat.

“Luckily he soon returned aboard.

“We crossed the Atlantic to Barbados and along the Caribbean.”

The Atlantic crossing was interesting: “We had flying fish, tropical birds and birds of paradise and only saw one other boat.

“We had one passage where it was bad so we kept watch 24 hours .

“It meant one on watch, one resting or cooking.

“I was down below resting, and the boat suddenly lurched and stopped.

“We were dead in the water so I went down below, got my wetsuit on then went down the ladders at the back to sort the problem out.”

You’ve got to get out of the Caribbean for the hurricane season (June to November).

Barbara takes up the story: “You either go to Trinidad or you go up to Maine.

“We chose to go to Maine via Bermuda, so went up the island chain, across Bermuda and then into Maine for the summer and It's beautiful.

“Then we came all the way down the Eastern Seaboard (including New York) and we spent the start of the year 2000, the Millennium, in Lake Worth by Miami.”

The couple then travelled through the Bahamas back down the Caribbean chain visiting the places they hadn’t seen.

They called in at Trinidad, had some work done on the boat, then headed to Venezuela in South America.

Barbara says it was not straightforward: “There was a shortage of milk, cocoa, everything so we needed to get out.

“We just went so from Venezuela we went to the ABC islands then toured Cuba, which was an eye-opener.

“It was a good place to visit historically with nice people but it wasn't a nice place to live and lots of bureaucracy.”

Barbara and Mike carried on to Belize for supplies.

Next came Honduras, Guatemala and Panama with its canal.

Barbara explained: “We were going through with six yachts, but the authorities don't like yachts going through.

“You have to have an advisor in other words, a sort of pilot, not that you need them, but you have to have one.

“So we were raffled together, and then they put us on a buoy when we got through the canal.

“Then the engine broke down, it just cracked in half, and we had to head to Panama’s main port of Balboa,

“We'd had some work done in Guatemala and I think it did more harm than good.”

“We eventually made it through the canal into the Pacific and the first set of Islands called the Pearl Islands.“

Barbara then had a shock: “A retired canal pilot who used to take big boats through the canal, looked at my leg and said: ‘That's skin cancer.

‘Here's my dermatologists, phone number’ and I was diagnosed with skin cancer.

Barbara had a low, wide, local excision at Devon and Exeter Hospital leaving her with a scar on her leg and the couple headed back to join the boat in Panama.

Then the boat got struck by lightning, luckily while they were sheltering in a bar.

Barbara continued:

“They saw the lightning strike the boat and a puff of smoke come out of the boat and everything was black but we mended it.

Back in Bermuda, Mike was taken ill and had to fly back to the UK while Barbara stayed with the boat.

She wasn’t allowed to stay in Bermuda so they hired a commercial couple to help them sail home.

They reached the Canary Islands where the couple had to fly back for family reasons but luckily Mike had recovered and flew back to rejoin Barbara.

A couple who were friends said they would like to come back and sail with them.

It was June 2009 and Barbara takes up the story: “I said, I don't like the look of the forecast and I get seasick, but no, no, no, the two men had decided the weather was fine.

“Well, it wasn't.

“We were in a storm and were more or less hove to, because we couldn't sail,

We were quite a way into the Atlantic and too far off the Spanish coast for rescue.

“I was lying down because I'd done a night watch and Mike came tearing in saying that water was coming in somewhere.

“The bilge pump was on continuously and not going off.

“The only place that they hadn't been able to check was underneath the saloon table so they decided the water was coming in through the keel bolts.

“We couldn’t have launched the life raft.

“We would not have survived.

“The waves were so big and the winds were strong.

“Eventually, we thought we've got to send out a mayday.

So we e-mailed the kids to say we're going to set off the alarms and this is for real.

Any signal sent out from an EPIRB (Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon) gets picked up by land stations and they also pressed a button on their SSB radio which sent an emergency signal picked up by HM Coastguard at Falmouth.

They were too far out for a lifeboat so they sent an aircraft.”

In the end they were rescued by a US tanker with a crew from Myanmar called MTM Princess.

Barbara said: “They chose this boat, because, although it was a tanker, it was small so the freeboard wasn't that high and they managed to get alongside.

It was far from easy to jump onto the ladder as Barbara remembers:

“Octagon is coming back up on the wave.

“I'd just jumped off up to onto the ladder, so I know the boat is going to come back up and I thought, I'm just going to be crushed.

“I'm not going to survive and I think you (Mike) thought the same.

“The crew pulled the ladder up with me on it.

“I felt the guardrail of the boat and knew I'd been rescued.

“So then they lowered the ladder again.

“And then Angela, who's not the bravest of people and can't swim,

managed to jump on it. “

“Then Dave went and Mike.

“The crew were wonderful.”

The couple and their friends made it to Santander then on to Stansted.

Sadly the Octagon is now somewhere at the bottom of the Atlantic.

The book: Across the Atlantic and Nearly Back by Barbara Arnold is available from Austin Macauley.

You can see footage on the rescue from the BBC’s Real Rescues on Youtube:

https://tinyurl.com/p4fj3wwu