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Troubled waters: what caused Texas A&M's I racing sailboat to overturn in the Gulf of Mexico, costing a heroic crew member his life and plunging his shipmates into an angry ocean?

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I was sailing in the Gulf of Mexico on June 6, the night that the Cynthia Woods, a racing sailboat belonging to Texas A&M University at Galveston, lost its keel and capsized, sending five crew members into roiling waters and trapping safety officer Roger Stone beneath its overturned hull. It was the first day of the biennial Regata de Amigos, covering 610 nautical miles from Galveston to Veracruz, in which our family sailboat, the Rosalita, was a participant. I have steered her in open waters after dark on more than a dozen occasions, but nothing prepared me for the conditions we encountered that night. After leaving the protected waters of Galveston Bay in the early afternoon, we ventured into a maelstrom of swells, some as high as ten feet, which assaulted our bow in unpredictable corkscrew patterns. Each time the Rosalita crested a wave, she would free-fall to the trough below, and we would be soaked a new. Heeling hard to starboard in 20-knot winds, our seven-person crew--me; my husband, Jeff; our two sons, ages 23 and 18; and their three young friends--took turns at the helm while the others sat high on the port side in a futile effort to stabilize the boat. [paragraph] Darkness robbed us of our only defense against nausea: the reassuring sight of the horizon. One of the boys will forever provide my visual definition of misery: pathetic and shivering, curled in a fetal position and tethered by a safety harness at midship, moving only to throw up or duck the relentless waves. Dawn broke, but the high winds and massive waves continued unabated. None of us had dared to eat or drink much since noon the day before. To continue the race was to risk dehydration or worse. Our ship's computer calculated that we would have to endure at least three more nights like the previous one to reach Veracruz.

"How long would it take us to get to Port Aransas?" I asked Jeff. "Twelve hours," he...

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