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Oh, I'm sure that mine is yet to come.
I have done the "suddenly find myself going downwind with too much sail in 30 kts" and done a fairly passable (I think) job of not letting on to the crew how scared I was. The boat did just fine.
Not a sailboat, but once there were four of us scuba diving on a Fiberform 26 in the San Juans. We were motoring to a new dive site, between tides. The ladies were in the cockpit, suiting up (a little prematurely, it turns out.) The owner was driving, and I was standing in the open companionway. (Is a sliding glass door a "hatch?")
"Hey, look at that!" About a quarter mile away, off the port bow, there was a big whirlpool, south of Lopez (IIRC). You could see big logs getting sucked into it, tipping up and getting sucked down to... who knows? So I'm helping the ladies and suddenly there is an expletive from the helm. The thing is sucking US into it, just like one of the logs. The boat doesn't answer to the helm. Suddenly we are horizontal. One of the ladies is hanging over the rail, the other is hanging on to her by shoulders, and I'm hanging on to her weight belt with one hand and the edge of the hatch with the other. It is a Long Way Down into frothy nothingness. By this time, the skipper had shoved the throttles to their stops and the props were beginning to take hold. We basically slingshotted around and got spat out the other side of the whirlpool, going back in the direction we came from.
The whole thing took less than a minute, but it took a long time for everyone to calm down. I can't help wondering what would happen to a small sailboat, or anything with less than twin V8's in that situation. I also keep picturing some guy in a kayak, blissfully paddling along, when one of those logs comes back up...
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