Don’t’ miss clicking on this link (also linked within the article) that plays the video from Bella Luna. That video is worth a million words, and prompts me to post these comments.
First comment: Articles like this provide a great service by informing the boating community about actual incidents. Thank you author Jen Brett and Cruising World. Besides Cruising World, other good sources for real information on how things can go wrong include the Coast Guard reports in Sounding magazine and articles in Boat US magazine. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the insurance companies could publish their claims investigations on-line?!
Second comment: The text and the video do a fantastic job of putting us right into the cockpits of those boats as they actively manage the constant tensions dealt by storms at sea. How will the wind and sea conditions develop in the future days along our route? Are we squeezing into a narrowing weather window? Is TS Sean developing or moving? Should we push faster or slow down –haul the drogue and hoist the double-reefed main or hang out? Should we hold course, head up, bear off or change destinations altogether—to Bermuda or cross the stream back to the coast? It sounds stupidly obvious to be talking about forecasts, speed and direction, but it takes effort to overcome our natural inertia to stay locked into a go-fast rhumb-line route-plan. We are weaned in protected waters and only really need to manage those tensions when we hang it out there offshore. That’s a reason we are compelled to go out there.
Third comment: When conditions deteriorate, bad things happen and options become limited. Drogue lines foul props; furled jibs develop pockets and threaten to vibrate the rig to destruction, air gets into fuel lines and kills engines and generators, mainsails blow out, autopilots fail, steering cables jump the sheaves, knotmeter transducers blow out!! From the article, it sounded like much that could go wrong did go wrong on some boat. So the idea of squeezing through a weather window to get to Bermuda before a storm—and there is always uncertainty in a storm’s track, IMHO is right out of a scene from the Dirty Harry movie. “Go ahead. Make my day.”
Even with all systems running perfectly, the wind and seas can dictate very few directions in which those boats could head. It’s a lovely goal to keep big seas well aft of the beam. But eventually for some of the boats, Bermuda was upwind to the East, and nastier conditions awaited downwind to the West. Since most storms move and interact with coasts, other storms and ocean currents, it never seems to fail that big seas are confused. Crests interact with each other and with swells and with gusts to make “interesting” shapes arriving from a range of angles in the black of night. Hand-steering during the day, it’s like skiing the moguls –fun for a few hours between stops at the lodge for hot chocolate. During the night or under autopilot (typical), the boat will occasionally come off of a wave with a frightening bang, or clip the top off of a wave. Can you imagine, as the article reports, at 0200 in the night from hell, “...we came off a wave so hard that it blew out the knotmeter transducer!!!” It’s time to slow down or to speed up, according to your boat and energy level. You don’t need to study books or get certified by a class to know this. You can’t ignore when your boat is unhappy and it’s usually obvious what you need to change –assuming those options are still open to you. Don C. knows when he is driving his Hylas 54 Freestyle too hard in big seas when the bell on the main salon bulkhead rings by itself. “Don’t ring the bell”, he challenges the helmsman.
Heron provides a pretty comfortable ride when I listen to her. Drive her too slowly and you don’t benefit from the dynamic stability of her hull design that improves with speed. It takes some sail pressure to dampen roll. At high speed in flat water, Heron feels like she is “locked on rails”. Drive her too fast and the hull sections forward of the keel will go airborne as they come off of irregular waves. Around day five of our trip from Hampton to St. John, we adjusted the autopilot to head up a bit above course to reduce the number of seas from dead-abeam, and we kept our speed down by maintaining a second reef. Her cross section forward of the keel is canoe-like with significant rocker –not a most contemporary design. But it was smacking the backside of some waves, ringing her bell so to speak.
Fourth comment: As you can see in the video, the drogue and the hanked-on storm jib on the inner forestay was a sweet combination. They didn’t look overpowered and later in the video they hauled up the double-reefed main, which increased their speed and improved the motion. They had the drogue running from the port beam, presumably to allow the boat to point less downwind (towards Bermuda?). Nice. It might have been better to rig it with a second line to the starboard quarter, allowing them adjust the heading. I carry a Paratech parachute sea anchor to park the boat off of a lee shore, but would much prefer a Jordan series drogue with some bridle steering capability for speed control in dangerous seas. I carry a storm jib pre-loaded in its bag, attached to the Kevlar inner forestay with soft hanks. But I would much prefer that it be roller furled. This keeps us off the foredeck, keeps the sail bag off of the deck, and allows partial furling speed control. But think of it: The furling line is a single point of failure; boats who leave jibs up in Marion harbor during Irene and other storms often get huge pockets that shake the devil out of their rigs; one of the NARC boats had a pocket in their Kevlar jib and were just waiting for the rig to come down. So maybe the storm tactic underway should be to commit early to the storm jib on the inner forestay and wrap other roller furled headsails using a spare halyard to prevent them from developing a pocket.
Fifth comment: I do NOT like the preventer shown in the video that was rigged between the toe rail and to the mid-boom. Bad idea. Old school. Look how close some of the seas get to the boom. One dip and they have a broken boom or gooseneck. Any boat preparing for offshore should have a preventer that goes from the end of the boom directly to a block on the bow, and back to the cockpit –the design described by Bill Seifert and Dan Spurr in their book “Offshore Sailing: 200 Essential Passagemaking Tips”, and in many Marion-to-Bermuda Race seminars. (It also offers a faster and safer way to control a jibe without touching the mainsheet, so I use it jibing down the bay all summer long.)
Sixth comment: Wind doesn’t destroy boats; seas do. Since we are born and bred sailing in protected waters, we are enamored by wind speed forecasts. But big seas will lag the arrival of strong winds, will vary over a wide height distribution, and the same wave height can range from fun to terrifying depending on its shape (period, etc.). It sure would be nice to have both a better measure of sea state, higher resolution forecasts and more live buoy data. The wave height grib as shown on passageweather.com is awesome, but we need better.
Seventh comment: The article helps us recognize that seasoned sailors can make serious mistakes. Why did Jan come up from below in nasty conditions without wearing a vest/harness/tether? After a few days of physical and mental stress, sensory overload from shrieking rigging, a never-ending full-body work out from wild motion, the non-knowing when it was going to get better, the frustration of not making progress, etc., mental and physical capabilities are far far below normal. After getting repeatedly swept by waves in a “10-year storm” in 1983 in our 31 foot Southern Cross coming back offshore to Marion from Nova Scotia, I suggested to folks that the best way to imagine our misadventure is to don’t eat for a day or so, drink way beyond the legal limit, take an extended icy cold shower with your clothes on, climb onto a tumbling amusement park ride without fastening your harness in the darkest night while taking a math test that you need to pass. We should take no solace from our knowing to stay clipped onto the boat. Because in such depths of exhaustion, since it isn’t both trivial and automatic behavior, you and I might have made the same brief mistake that Jan did.
Eighth comment: Finally, I have to express my fundamental frustration when some imply that it is ok to make risky weather decisions if you know your boat and have experience and are well prepared. Those things are baseline requirements. But given the other options of waiting or going down the coast (from Newport towards Cape May), why would you instead think that you should dash through a forecast gale, across the stream, in the face of a blocked low to the south?! In the prior post, I already vented my humble opinion that it was clearly a dangerous decision. Oh. No prob. We can stop in Bermuda. Huh? It doesn’t make it ok (in my mind) that the boats who got into Bermuda in 84 hours just ahead of the stink think they made the right decision. I’m not hearing any or enough regret from them about their decision to leave and that they were lucky they didn’t have an issue. To suggest that if they put a professional skipper on every boat, and if there is enough crew to get there without an autopilot, and if the boat can handle 60 knots sustained over a long period, then all is good to go. Bullshit. Total bullshit. Just red herrings to distract from the fundamental risky behavior. (None of that would have saved that woman.)
Still, I’m a libertarian in this matter. If they want to ski en mass down Mount Washington with avalanche warnings, when perhaps another trail is safe. Let ‘em. But when they get to the bottom missing one of their own, they shouldn’t be proud and somehow justify the mistake by saying that those guys didn’t have the right skis to keep up..., or shouldn’t have listened to Herb.RIP Jan Anderson
