That is NOT funny at all. A very dangerous problem which appears to be caused by a faulty windlass brake. The cable is made well fast at the bitter end in the chain locker, otherwise somebody could have been killed. That sort of thing should never happen, but these things do happen, and it was lucky no one did get injured. You can see that the band brake on the windlass gypsy was in flames due to the effort of trying to stop the cable running out. This same problem occurred when I was at sea off the port of Kotka in Finland. The band brake would not hold, the brake lining went on fire, and the full length of the cable ran out before it stopped. The Chippy was so scared he ran off, which was a very sensible thing to do in those circumstances.
