Twenty years on

20 years have passed but it seems like yesterday. I was working from home in NJ and I saw a message flash across the screen that there was a plane crash in NY. So I turned on the TV. The plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. I thought OMG what a terrible thing - I knew people who worked there. I had been there myself just the week before for a lunch meeting.

Then the second plane hit. I called Alex at work and told him to come home -- that we were under attack and had to prepare to escape. I was convinced this was just the beginning. You could see the smoke on the NY skyline from just about everywhere in NJ.

I started packing our backpacks and camping gear and devised a plan to walk out of NJ to our boat in Rye and sail off across the ocean. Then the towers collapsed.

Soon everything stopped. No planes in the sky, no trains, trucks, buses or cars. Silence. I'd never heard true silence before. People walked across the GW bridge, like zombies covered in white dust. That would have been me if I had been working in the City that day. Although I decided that I would have 'borrowed' a sailboat from the Manhattan Yacht Club and sailed across the Hudson as our offices were on the lower west side.

At the weekend, we drove to Rye, got on our boat and hoisted the sails. The smoke was still billowing from the towers and we were the only boat out on Long Island Sound in deathly silence.

Suddenly, one boat emerged from the opposite shore and we sailed toward each other, like the last remaining souls on earth. Soon there were sails being hoisted everywhere with determination that we would not let them take us down.

#NeverForget