Uncle Fester found this clip on Boing Boing. It’s a sloop attempting to enter an inlet on a Danish island in the Baltic Sea under very adverse conditions.
Category: seamanship
Frisbee on the roof, halyard at the mast top
The main halyard has needed replacing all season — the braided cover frayed and parted halfway up the line and was sliding and bunching up like a snake skin. I’d stand on deck and stare upwards, 52 feet up the aluminum pole and wonder how in hell I was going to re-reeve a new line without going up the mast. The smart thing would have been to temporarily splice a new one to the bitter end of the old one and haul it up through the mast-head sheave … but no, procrastination and a temporary fix tided me over until Tuesday afternoon.
I went for a solo sail in the afternoon, unreefed, full sail, charging out of the channel into the teeth of a boisterous 20 knot southwesterly. Just as I was about to kill the diesel and winch open the jib my phone rang. A buddy sitting in the parking lot at Loop Beach had seen me steam by and was calling to express his admiration that some idiot would try to singlehand a 33-foot sloop by himself into a smoking Nantucket Sound afternoon. Ha-ha, I said, unconcerned about the single-handed part. Solo sailing isn’t hard. It comes down to using one’s foot to steady the wheel and being very efficient in one’s movements to the main and jibsheets. It’s actually harder to hold down a small boat in a breeze with one’s weight than it is a 15,000 pound keel boat. One person or two doesn’t make a lot of difference.
I hung up the phone, sheeted everything down nice and tight, turned off the engine, and hung on for dear life as the wind indicator showed 25 knot gusts and started to push the boat around in the chop. Down below, in the cabin, crashes could be heard as the hull heeled and ditty bags, cups, 12 packs of soda, fog horns, boathooks, and other detritus started to fly around.
I enjoyed a very vigorous close-hauled reach out to Bell Eight, on the edge of Horseshoe Shoal where the wind farm is planned. Tacked around, and broad reached back like a comet to Cotuit, making the channel despite an extreme full-moon low tide, and sailing gracefully all the way into the bay without resorting to the engine. Handling the mooring alone is a challenge — my missing left big toe nail is a testament to running forward to snag the pennant and stubbing my toe on a big-ass jib car — but I manage to get the splice onto the bow clear and run the skiff back to the transom without too much chaos.
The main sail was luffing like a thunderstorm so I got it down quickly, uncleating the main halyard, complete with the frayed off cover, and letting it slump to the deck. Silence. Big exhalation of relief. Safe and sound. I ducked down below to find the sail stops and the shit-stick (my homemade comorant deterrent device) and when I came back on deck I notice an awful lot of 3/16th’s wire cable on the cabin top. Hmm. That’s strange.
The wind had caught the halyard and blown it out into a big belly, sucking the rope part of the steel-rope halyard to the top of the mast. I looked up, mouth open like a gaping idiot. Total amateur move losing a halyard to the top of the mast. I should, of course, have cleated the bitter end to prevent such idiocy from occurring. In the old days the rule was you lose it, you climb and get it. That made perfect sense when I was 16 and my father was making up the rules. At my age there’s no consideration of such aerial ascents.
Pissed, I tugged the remaining halyard and let the whole affair fall to the deck. Now the boat has no main halyard, rendering it esseentially into a big motorboat unless I can find a replacement, buy a bosun’s chair, and con my skinny son into riding the chair aloft while I haul him up with the jib winches. Taking it to a boat yard will yield a $1,000 bill. The other option — the safer one at least — is not to do anything, declare the sailing season over, and wait until the boat is hauled on October 15 and then make the replacement when the mast is unstepped and laying across a set of sawhorses. Decisions, decisions. This is a nice time of year to sail, would be a shame to throw in the towel now, but do I really want to go through the contortions?
Update: the ever helpful Uncle Fester sent along this video which made me want to vomit.
The Wave
I downloaded Susan Casey’s The Wave onto the iPad yesterday after reading a review in the NYT Sunday Book Review. Definitely a decent book and interestingly, a great multimedia experience if read on an iPad (more on that later).
Casey wrote an account of the great white sharks around California’s Farallon Islands, The Devil’s Teeth, but The Wave is a better book, for me at least, in that sharks are lurid enough of a tired topic that I wasn’t particularly enthralled by an account of them (more of the scientists who spend weeks at a time on the forbidding lumps of rock due west of the Golden Gate). The Wave, for the most part, is a good tale of big wave surfing, an act requiring huge skill, massive cojones, and someone to tow the surfer onto the wave with a jetski. It chases, grail-like, the quest for the 100-foot wave, the monster that hasn’t been ridden, butthe far more interesting yet scant part of the book is about the effects of oceanic rogue waves on shipping. Apparently a ship or two is lost every week in general — primarily tired bulk carriers that are pressed into service too long by greedy owners and driven in conditions by delay-conscious captains when sane seamanship says its time to heave to.
I would have preferred far more on the type of maritime disaster tales related by Adlard Coles in his classic Heavy Weather Sailing than descriptions of the machismo surfer culture that doubtlessly will make the book more popular to the masses. To her credit, Casey does spend a great deal of time along South Africa’s Wild Coast, describing the terrible toll the monster waves there make on shipping. And her description of the 1,700 foot mega-tsunami of 1958 in Alaska’s Lituya Bay is enough of a superlative to make all other waves mere pond ripples.
The fun part of reading the book on the iPad was the ability to switch over to YouTube and find the actual video clips of specific surfers surviving specific waves Casey writes about in Tahiti, Maui or Half Moon Bay. The true wonder of the world that I did not know about before reading it, was the description of Cortes Bank, 100 miles west of San Diego where the Pacific abruptly shelves up from thousands of feet to a submerged seamount a scant six feet under the surface. That people cruise out there with the intention of surfing in the great void simply astounds me, and as a terrified sailor, the notion of cruising along and seeing a 120-foot comber breaking in the middle of the empty sea would cause me to void into my underwear.
Good book, read it with YouTube nearby, put up with the constant Laird Hamilton surfing stories, suffer through the scientists opining drearily about the end of the world, global warming, and the coming days of chaos, and you will be entertained.
On the Beach
At McKinsey, when one is in between engagements, that state of uselessness is known as “being on the beach” — a term borrowed from the Navy and the apocalyptic tale of post-nuclear Australia by Nevil Shute.
I’ve been on the beach since early June and trust me, if one has to develop new career options, one can’t do much better than being beached on Cape Cod in the summertime. But as the season draws to a close and my itch to do something substantial takes over, the beach is vanishing under the tide of future employment.
This past weekend, while returning from a boisterous sail in 25 knot breezes, I was shadowed by a Wianno Senior. As I entered the bay I noticed it was hugging Dead Neck awfully close, something possible at an new moon tide. Alas, in the morning while running the chowder races, I saw the boat had been beneaped at the entrance to Cupid’s Cove.
Today was glorious in the way only mid-September can deliver on Cape Cod, so I made a few chicken salad sandwiches, loaded up the cooler, grabbed the iPod and my eldest son, and set sail for nowhere. The goal was lunch in Oak Bluffs, but the wind pooped out and things turned into a slatting drifter. Just before the wind faded, we steamed along like no one’s business.
[flickrvideo]http://www.flickr.com/photos/churbuck/4991091191/[/flickrvideo]
Back I go tomorrow. The boat is scheduled to come out of the water the weekend of October 15, and I suspect this endless summer will be ending in Manhattan just about then.
The Dock Pull
The yacht club dock was pulled on Friday morning — a big group effort marshaled by Conrad Geyser, the yacht club’s wharfinger. The grounds were cleared of any potential flying debris, the doors locked and the place put to bed until tomorrow when we’ll probably start returning the skiffs to the water for the final Labor Day series. The dock had been scheduled to come out on Saturday, so the timing was right.
[flickrvideo]http://www.flickr.com/photos/churbuck/4954609156/[/flickrvideo]
I made a final check on my sailboat, riding pretty on its hurricane mooring off of Cordwood Landing. 2,000 pounds and some chafing gear and winds out of the northeast and I should be copacetic.
The first winds are hitting us now at 8 pm, and should escalate up to 40 or 50 mph. No rain yet, the first bands are just crossing Nantucket. Earl is still a category 1 hurricane, but it has tracked far enough east of the outer Cape that we should see tropical storm conditions and nothing apocalyptic. I’m betting we lose lights around midnight when some limbs come down on the wires, but other than that. Shouldn’t be too terrible.
24 Hours to Earl
Today was a ballbuster – starting with the purchase of a new chainsaw, two gallons of gas, some files, more flashlight batteries. But otherwise a sunny, hot day, finding me glued to the National Weather Service for the 8 am advisory, then out to the big boat for one last round of worrying and fiddling. As I was ready to leave my phone flashed a voice mail from a friend who said to call him, he had another alternative for me to ride out the maelstrom. As his boat is in Rhode Island his 2,000 pound hurricane buoy was vacant and I was welcome to it. I jumped into the motorboat, headed up harbor to check it out, phoned his wife, went ashore to pick up a mooring bridle, and an hour later was riding on a massive mooring with a mooring float the size of half-submerged Volkswagen.
That was the morning. As soon as I got ashore I scarfed a lunch and headed back out with my son to start bringing the Cotuit Skiff fleet ashore for the planned 5 pm pulling of the boats. The Cotuit version of a barn raising only somewhat in reverse. We pulled the boats ashore with the motorboat two at a time, lining them up along the yacht club beach — back and forth for two hours until some reserves arrived and another boat was pressed into service. I turned to the yacht club’s motorboats and other equipment and at 5 the pulling began to accelerate, with four trucks and trailers in constant circulation between the boat ramp and the beach and the Ropes Field at the top of the hill, a big four acre pasture near the ballpark where the fleet has always sought refuge during big blows.
The field filled up over the span of two hours, and just as the sun set and the boat ramp was clogged with panicked boat owners trying to get their boasts out before darkness, I made one last run for a friend, got his catboat into the field, then locked things up and waited for another friend to return from a hurricane hole in Popponesset Bay where he was stashing his antique catboat for the duration.
The Cape and Islands are operating under a hurricane warning. The current track has it passing sixty miles east of Chatham — that’s eighty miles from me, but it seems pretty certain that we’re going to be under hurricane conditions from 8 pm Friday until dawn Saturday, with three to six inches of rain, sustained winds of 50 knots, and gusts into the 70s.
I’ll make one last run out to the big boat in the morning, check the chafing gear, then help pull the yacht club pier out of the water. My motorboat will get hauled, then a late trip for a ton of ice since we’re certain to lose power and the refrigerators will fail, then settle in for an increasingly wild afternoon, culminating with a full hit at nightfall.
Counting down the hours until Earl
Seventy years ago I’d be oblivious to what was coming. Now I know too much and what I know sucks. Starting Sunday I started keeping an eye on Hurricane Earl, a category 4 storm that is now forecasted to pass extremely close offshore of Cape Cod. Very close.
The last forecast from the National Weather Service put Cape Cod on a hurricane watch — meteorological speak that it’s time to consider the options and possibilities. With a 33′ sloop sitting on a 500 pound mooring less than half a mile away, I am definitely considering the options and none of them, with 48 hours to go, are great. So this morning I went to the firehouse and asked the chief for some old firehose, grateful when he cut me off a couple sections of 2″ hose so I could split them and wrap them around the mooring pennants where they rub in the boat’s chocks. My son and I brought the boat into the town down and took down the sails and the bimini awning, anything to reduce the windage and prevent the wind from picking open the sails and causing definite mayhem. I’ll return tomorrow to lash things down and fret some more.
My options now are:
- Stay on the mooring, hope the forecast holds, go to bed and pray the mooring holds for eight hours of 50 knot winds and some gusts over 60 miles per hour. The tackle is only two years old, I’m on the outside edge of the mooring field, and right now the wind direction is out of the north, over land, so I will get some protection in the lee, but not a lot. The worst direction, if we were in the northeastern quadrant of the cyclone, would be south or southeast, then the entire length or fetch of the harbor would kick up some very big waves. The other fear is the storm surge, but thankfully low tide is at 2 am, so the peak of the winds will come as the water is falling, not rising.
- Stay on the mooring but also stay on the boat. This means actually sitting out the storm with a lifeline wrapped around me, tied to the helm, with a pair of swim goggles to keep the driving rain from blinding me, and then using the diesel and the throttle to keep the boat into the wind and the pressure off of the mooring. This is the crazy man option.
- Try to get it pulled tomorrow morning, but that is not a sure thing — the hauler has to be in the mood and he is sure to have an extremely hectic day. That entails a trip to the dock, a visit by the crane truck to pull the mast, then a trip up into Prince’s Cove to be hauled and then parked in the back yard by the trees on four jackstands. Hurricane Bob in 1991 did some massive tree damage and who knows if the jackstands would keep the boat upright anyway. Hauling means no fall sailing – once out, then the boat is out and the season is over.
- If it comes ashore — well, it comes ashore and the damage will be bad. Nothing to do but shrug and hope it doesn’t.
I’ve got a 18′ motorboat to pull — that will come out right at the last minute on Friday afternoon. A friend needs to borrow it to get his catboat tucked away into a hurricane hole inside of Shoestring Bay on the west side of town in the next series of bays. To make things more interesting I just became president of the association of the Cotuit Mosquito Yacht Club, and tomorrow is going to be spent making sure the yacht club’s launches are taken care, of the dock is pulled, the kid’s boats are stowed, and then 50 Cotuit skiffs hauled and stored in the Ropes Field to ride things out. Hurricane boat pulls are the Cotuit version of an old fashioned barn raising. Several cars with trailers, a couple crews on the beach to de-rig and pull masts, another team on the water in motorboats hauling in the boats, then another crew with 4″ x 4″s to lift the boats on the trailers and another in the field to lift them off. Tomorrow ought to be busy, especially if this heavy heat persists.
The phone has been ringing all day, and everywhere you go the question is the same: “Do you think it will hit?” Smart money says it goes east off of Chatham, putting us in the northwest quadrant where the counter-clockwise spin means the winds will come in from the landside. Forecast has it 30 miles southeast of Nantucket . That’s 50 miles from where I sit. Way too close. Way, way too close. Let’s hope it stays out there. A short jog to the west and complete devasation is a sure thing if it comes ashore. Bob was barely a hurricane and we were without lights for nearly a week, the tree damage was incredible, every pissed off homeless yellow jacket on the Cape was out for revenge …. and nearly every boat in the harbor was trashed and thrown onto the beach. If Earl does the same it will not be a very good September. All the food will spoil. People will snarl at each other in the gas lines at the gas station. I guess i need to go buy a chainsaw and a new power washer. The first lesson learned from Bob is wash the house as soon as possible given that every green leaf in the neighborhood gets shredded to confetti and pasted to the paint with salt spray. Lawn furniture to stow away … badminton nets, hummingbird feeders ….. tomorrow is going to be a long, long day.
Here’s the wind profile: The little flags point in the direction the wind will come from and the small bars indicate the wind velocity. Sustained winds over 70 mph make for a hurricane. The forecast has us gusting with peaks around 65 mph. Sunset to 3 am … it’s going to be a long nasty night. And if the power goes — well, no blogging for a long time to say the least.
Think I’m over-reacting? Napatree Point – 1938
Android at sea: my favorite nautical apps
Vern Graebel, the founder of my ISP, Cape.com, was walking down the hill to Ropes Beach after a Cotuit Kettleer’s baseball game a few weeks ago. I caught up to him and we started talking about sailing and a particularly great spot to spend the night, Tarpaulin Cove on Naushon Island, the largest of the Elizabeths. I shared my fear of anchoring there and dragging during the night and how anchor-dragging-paranoia made it tough for me to get a good night’s sleep aboard the sloop.
“There’s an app for that,” Vern said, drawing his Motorola Droid out of his pocket. And indeed there was, “Anchor Alert” — an cool little $15 app that uses the GPS receiver in the smartphone to determine one’s position. You anchor, pay out so many feet of chain and line, determine the length of scope of that, and tell Anchor Alert which then draws a series of concentric circles with your “anchor” in the middle and an icon of your boat out the specified length from the mooring point. Using the GPS’s accuracy rating, the program waits until you move N feet away from the radius of the circle formed by your anchor and boat. Slip 30 feet and you receive an alarm (or a SMS if you aren’t aboard).
I use my HTC EVO for a few other nautical tasks. I may need to invest in a decent waterproof case (I use a kayak bag to keep it dry now), and the battery life with the GPS enabled is pretty sucky. But …. it is amazingly useful for some essential tasks.
- Tides: I use “TideApp” to give me the times for high and lower water at any of the dozen locations I sail to. It also gives me essential data about the ebb and flow times of the current, an essential aid in navigation for determining the offset of one’s course caused by the lateral forces of the moving water.
- Chart Plotter: Okay, so it isn’t a $3000 binnacle mounted Garmin chart plotter with integrated radar — that has to wait for more flush financial times, but the Navionics USAEast chart pack is awesome for giving me an accurate and detailed fix on a valid NOAA nautical chart. This is a little expensive at around $15, but it is great to have a precise fix when I need it on the water. I use it sporadically because of the battery draw down, but suppose I could rig some 12v car adapter sort of rig to keep it going 100% of the time. Again — smartphones and the cockpit of a sloop in Nantucket Sound are not a felicitous combination, keeping the thing dry is a constant worry.
- Google Sky: “Give me a tall ship and star to steer her by …” It’s been years since I’ve taken a noon shot with a sextant (something I might brush back up on this winter), but knowing the stars while at sea is always good fun and Google’s star map is awesome to play with.
Any sailors out there have other apps to recommend?
Going aloft
If you own a sailboat sooner or later you’re going to have to get to the top of the mast to deal with some mistake or repair. Lost halyards, flaky anemometer connections, jammed genoa tracks or a bad roller reefing system — you look up, mouth agog, and curse the fact that someone, most likely you, is going to have to go aloft.
In the days I raced with my father on our Wianno Senior, the Snafu III (#140), his rule for going aloft was quite simple and brutal. If you lost the halyard (usually accomplished by forgetting to clip it to the head of the spinnaker and then wildly hauling the loose end to the top of the mast) theny you were the one who went up after it. Climbing a spruce mast by “shinning up” while underway in a three foot confused Nantucket Sound chop ranks among the more unpleasant things I’ve ever done, especially for me, the Cub Scout who had to have his fingers pried off the stairs to the fire watcher’s tower in Georgetown, Massachusetts in 1968. I am terrified of heights, it is, with no doubt, the single biggest phobia I have. I get freaked out watching people on window ledges in the movies, let alone experiencing vertiginous terror for real.
I’ve been hauled up a mast by making an impromptu Bosun’s Chair out of a bowline on a bight and stepping into the two rings. The resulting choke hold on my nether regions was amazingly unpleasant, and the feeling of being winched up the mast by a person on the deck is pretty terrifying. If they mess up and slip then down you. Crashing 20, 40 feet down onto a winch or worse. Going aloft is serious business. Consider what it was like in the days of sail to go aloft in the ratlines and climb out on the end of a yard arm to take in sail in a serious sea. A simple ride up a mast is a breeze compared to what those jack tar’s went through in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Serious off shore voyagers like the late Bernard Moitessier install permanent mast rungs on their mast — think of backwards “7’s” bolted to the mast. This is very utilitarian and guarantees a fast run up the spar, especially underway, but I’m not inclined to drill out and through-rivet a series of such a solution on my 51′ tall Kenyon aluminum mast.
The solution? A real bosun’s chair. A $200 expense (I am not inclined to skimp just as I wouldn’t shop for a discount parachute) that gives me some firm support under the butt, a tool bag, and some certified hardware s the worst won’t happen while I’m aloft. I’ll probably go with the Harken Bosun’s Chair, based on the video posted on YouTube by West Marine.
And I don’t intend to use it. That’s what teenaged sons are are for.