to dislodge some calking or the boats rail was under long enough for some water to ingress in areas that had dried out calking under the cap or deck joint. With enough small leaks you can take on enough water to make the misery factor pretty high especially if you have a sick child to deal with as well. An older boat, especially if it's never been in really rough weather, can develop many, many small leaks that could have gone unnoticed for years. They could be leaks that go un-noticed even when washing the boat or during prolonged rains with the only indication some extra water in the bilge. That kind of water would be very easy to blow off. Now you get out in some really nasty weather and the small leaks start to add up and the worry factor kicks in. I didn't see in the article where he said he saw daylight with a hold large enough to start packing pillows in. Something short of that I'm not sure I would call it a deck joint failure. I would call it a small area damaged by the broach at the deck joint. A deck joint failure to me is three feet of sky I'm looking at through the hole. Maybe its semantics but 'hull to deck joint failure" with only a few gallons of water in a rough sea? Don't get me wrong, I think they made the exact right decision under the circumstances. A sick baby trumps just about everything on the table in my book. It would take a strong guy to have is family evacuated and stay behind to single hand his boat to Hawaii. He would, however, still have his home and dreams intact. The wife would have had to be the driving force for that to happen in most cases I would think.