Yes, know what you mean... I still remember one North Sea crossing, where all the forcasters were only sayning "breeze", but all of them were also predicting different wind directions. England, scotland, denmark, norway... all different directions..
We ended up with a hurricane and 9m high waves. It was rather exciting, especially since we were about to win the race over to scotland... but when our 37 foot yacht started to break up, we luckilly had a sensible captain who ordered turning arount to go with the wind back to norway.
as an afterthought, we discovered that we were winning by far, and if we had continued, we would either have sunk or won. two other boats similar to ours went down, but luckilly all the crew was saved by emergency personell from the oil rigs. We never regretted turning around.
It was tough when we were in the middle of it, and definitely an experience to value.

Marius (Escort Cab + 2CV)