Georgia-based trucker Daniel Whitchurch will use time away from behind the wheel to take his 30-foot cutter out into open waters.

Daniel Whitchurch likes rough water.

When the wind howls, he’s ready to go, eager to shove off and take on weather that few sailors would want to challenge.

The 47-year-old driver, who says his approach to sailing weather is “it’s OK if I can get the boat away from the dock,” took his wife and daughter sailing in the Seattle area the day after Christmas. “The wind was about 35 knots, and it was rough and it was snowing. We all wore wet suits under our clothes to stay warm and had ski masks on. The Coast Guard thought we’d only come out to help look for some lost kayakers instead of being a family out for a day’s sailing.”

And it was on another 35-knot day in the middle of a cold January that Whitchurch took a 40-foot sailboat out to sea and managed to surf it along the wave tops at 11 knots (that doesn’t sounds like much, but imagine a Class 8 tractor going faster than you ever thought it could go). “We were flying,” he says. “What a wild ride that was.”

“To me,” he says, “sailing feels like a combination of the feelings you get when you ride a Harley-Davidson and the feeling you get when you jump out of a plane.”