I'll stick my oar in here, too. I've been DC'd in The Minch near Lewis before and saved near land/surface vessel/action, successfully. And I've saved seemingly a bazillion miles from anything and it's borked!
If you can, save it, pause it and come back to it later. At least if the pause failed (my old XP machine didn't like pausing for long) you've got the save to fall back on. If you can't do either successfully then there's always the next patrol
