Well… I will start out with clearly I suck. I jibed WildChild a second time in two weeks. I have not accidentally jibed her in the last two years even once… now twice in the last two weeks…  so clearly I must suck. I have no problem stepping up to the plate and owning my mistakes, but I’d like to stop making them. I will share my latest mistake with you… and the mistake I am about to make. I have a schedule to keep this week… and mom is in quite a mood this week.

 

Compounding Mistakes

I understand, that on the ocean, on a yacht in the ocean, all authority and all responsibility begins and ends with the Captain. This is the burden of responsibility that I cannot duck.

In the following I am not trying to duck my ownership of this last Jibe, I am trying to show it’s pieces. Experienced ocean captains know, disasters at sea are built from a bunch of small mistakes that suddenly compound quickly. It’s why we are sometimes uptight about stuff.

So for the last two weeks I had a new baby beginner crew onboard. I had been investing a lot of effort into training her to be useful to help me on the yacht. I understand that from a new crews point of view, all this can be a lot to take in so fast, overwhelming. I have been trying to go slow for my last crew, to give her the time she needs to learn, but mother never once allowed us a nice easy training sail in the last two weeks, rough everyday.

The last sail a few days ago I had to get my crew back up to Jolly Harbour to catch her cab ride back to the airport, and I am awaiting my next crew Brendan from the UK. I have done the sail from Falmouth in the south up to Jolly Harbour a few times now, even done it alone. We sailed it again last Saturday in sporty conditions to keep a schedule, crew flight home Sunday.

The theory was, it would be downwind to beam reach into lee of the island. So despite 20+ knots of winds and 5-8 foot waves from behind, following seas are usually not so bad.

If you sail on the ocean for a while you notice that every so often you get harmonic waves, a series of 3 sudden waves much bigger than the rest.

 

As we came out of Falmouth I had my crew up on deck to help me raise the mainsail under blue skies in rather rolly conditions and against sporty winds. She did okay, we screwed a few things up, had to fall off… come around and try again but eventually we got the reefed main up and fell off downwind.

The tricky thing about coming out of Falmouth is that you have to run dead downwind for a while. You either turn south and head offshore towards Goudaloupe and expose yourself to bigger waves and swell, OR try to stay tucked into the coast for some protection. There are shallow waters around there and reefs to avoid.

In the 5-8 foot waves we eventually, working as a team, got the main sail raised. My crew made more mistakes and I could tell she was getting helmet fire.

Helmet fire is a term coined by fighter pilots when your brain has to process to much information too fast, like a computer that gets overwhelmed your brain overloads and cannot function.

My crew got helmet fire so I brought her back beside me at the helm and just told her to relax. She needed time to process. I will solo sail to give her a break.

I was still working at the helm to process the big picture and figure out what we needed to do to stay safe and get where we wanted to go. Mentally it was complicated, but not new for me. Crew was resting, Captain was both filming the adventure and thinking her way thru the situation. I needed to make a bunch of vector calculations with wind angles, waves angles, course and protected waters vs too shallow waters. Blah Blah blah…

I get my crew to help me do a controlled jibe once we get what I calculate to be a good distance offshore where I feel we can safely run broad reach on the other tac. Together we execute a good controlled jibe. I sit my crew down to rest as I take over to solo sail again.

I am calculating…

I decide we will be okay on this course, we will make it around the reefs ahead, tight and just barely but with just enough room… where we can then bear off…   but we are tighter to a dead run than I would like to be. It is rolly out here from behind and this is causing the yacht to pitch and roll quite a bit.

I need to tie on a preventer.

 

Everything seems fine.

its a bit sporty but nothing new for WildChild and I, I know we can do this and once we get around the corner everything will be just peachy keen again, only 5 miles to get there.

The boat is on course and the wind angle is between dead behind and 20 degrees off to the starboard side. I have run like this hundreds of times before without incident, you just have to watch it and be careful.

My crew is sitting behind the helm resting her brain and watching the show. Everything seems fine.

I have Auto pilot doing the steering.

I unclip my tether and go forward into the main cockpit

I sit on the port side coaming, on the side where the boom is over my head. I clip my tether into the port side jackline and I am just about to go up on deck to tie on a preventer line. A preventer line connects the boom to the high side toe rail so that in the event the wind accidentally gets around behind your mainsail for a minute, it cannot jibe itself. It is a safety measure to prevent accidental jibing.

Then it happens…

In 60 more seconds I would have had the preventer on and been back at the helm.

The sudden harmonic swell lifts WildChild up and begins surfing her forward. The dominant wave period is about a boat length and a half, that’s bad. As WildChild’s bow is burying itself in the wave trough and the ass end is being pushed forward faster than the bow, the yacht begins to twist sideways to the left.

This causes her to begin twisting to the left, which brings the winds around to the backside of the main sail. Super very bad.

It does not really even matter where the wind angle is now. The weight of the boom itself, now thrust up into the air sideways to the mast is going to be affected more by gravity. The jibe cannot be stopped now.

I am sitting helplessly on the port side coaming as I watch my girl begin twisting to the left and roll on her side in the wave. There is nothing I can do in this second. Its too late.

Slow motion horror

IF I was at the helm I could have steered hard over to prevent this, but I am not at the helm, my crew is, and she is a novice, doesn’t understand what is happening or what to do.

BAM…. 

The boom crosses over hard and slams into the taut starboard running backstay which absorbs the force. Nothing breaks…

Three bad seconds… three small mistakes have just added up to a horrible hard jibe on my girl.

My girl is tough like me, she shakes it off without damage…

but…

The autopilot has been overwhelmed and has kicked off.

WildChild does not correct her course and return to heading… nobody is steering… she keeps turning to the left…!

She is trying to round herself up…!

OHH FUCK…!

I am scrambling to unclip myself from the jackline and get back behind the helm to get control and fix this fast before we spin a complete circle and hard tac then jibe again in a few more seconds.

I grab the wheel and scan my instruments to figure out what else has happened… why is she steering in a circle?

I see the autopilot is off… that’s weird… I’m sure it was on and set…  did my crew turn it off..? No it doesn’t look like she has moved from her seat….   what the fuck is going on…

I am hand steering to correct the course, get us downwind but not cross the wind again. I order my crew to release the running backstay on the boom side, I let them both go loose. I am breathing heaving with the adrenaline rush fighting off the terror.

I fix it, get my girl back on course and setup safe again. No damage to the boat but my self esteem has taken a huge kick. This is clearly all my fault. My crew says if I was not wasting so much time filming the adventure and just concentrated on the boat and nothing else, this might not have happened….. maybe.   If I was not so mentally focused and distracted by the needs of my beginner crew it might not have happened either… maybe. If I was sailing with competent crew this definitely would not have happened. If I was solo sailing this probably would not have happened… maybe. No point in the woulda shoulda coulda except to increase my cautiousness in the future.

Lesson learned… turn further to beam reach in rolly seas until you get your preventer tied on then come back around closer to the run (wind behind) course that you need. Even though it meant we would have to head toward the mountains and the shore and the shallows for a short while. Super cautious and super safe is the better way to be as the captain.

Bad shit happens fast

This is sailing wisdom I have earned the hard way.

 

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Sailing to a Schedule

Mother nature has remained in a bad mood for the last three weeks now. Way up In Texas they are having a freak ice storm that is freezing the state as the polar vortex engulfs them. Canada is buried in snow. The Caribbean is having strong nasty winds and rough weather too. The planet is in a mood and it will not go away down here until next weekend.

I have mentioned before that my 90 day VISA has expired and needs to be renewed. The good news the cruisers here have gotten a concession out of the government of Antigua to allow cruisers to extend their visa’s during these Covid lockdown times without having to apply for residency, as was the previous process. They have made it easy for us with a shortened process and enabling us to get it done at the customs and immigration office down in Falmouth so we do not have to find the difficult to locate main immigration office in downtown St. John’s.

YAY… how super exciting.

Even better news… they have waived the late penalty fees for those of us on “the list”.

Even better I have an appointment down in Falmouth this Friday.

ohhh… wait…   I thought schedules were terrible things for sailboats…?

Also my next crew Brendan is going to be flying in from the UK today (Wednesday Feb 17th). So I need to be here in Jolly Harbour to collect him when he arrives.

Then I HAVE to sail around back down to Falmouth on Thursday. To be there for my Friday morning appointment.

Well no worries… I have made this sail several times now, its not that far, 12 miles along the coast about 17 miles tacking always upwind to get there. It only takes 4 or 5 hours to get there and I have all day to do it in. This should work out okay… right…?

It all sounds do-able… sounds like a plan.

EXCEPT….!

Mother didn’t get the memo…

It is not a coincidence that bad winds on Windy are depicted in red. Red is bad… everyone knows that. The winds down here are usually always a lovely green for easy sailing all year around. For the last three weeks it has been orange everyday, sporty starts over 20+ knots of wind. Hectic and stressful begins at 30+ knots of wind. I have done it before, I can do it, but it always sucks, always hurts, is always a terrible time.

This will be my new crews first day on the boat and first experience on WildChild. I am going to make him vomit for sure.

Poor Brendan… I feel terrible about doing this to him.

If you notice… on Thursday… like tomorrow… when I am scheduled to go sailing to Falmouth… notice its all red…  yeah… that’s gonna be bad. I am about to make a mistake smashing into 33 knots of winds and 9-14 foot seas to keep my scheduled appointment.

 

If you notice… the advanced wave data above…

Most new sailors and inexperienced sailors only think about waves as steady rhythmic things generated by only the wind. They only look at the “wave” forecast and seldom know how to do a more detailed analysis to understand what the actual experience will be like.

So notice above…  there will be average  9 foot waves created by the wind… but sometimes they will be added to the 5 foot swell coming from the north east and wrapping around the land mass. So sometimes the disorganized waves will be 9+5 feet high and sometimes they will be 9-5 feet small. So the real experience on the water will be 4-14 foot waves Thursday.

They have small craft advisories all week in Antigua.

Excessive winds we can deal with by reefing our sails. I will start out with the second reef in the mainsail Thursday morning and Probably only use like 30% of my genny. The winds will be gusty and unstable and up and down, but if you keep your sails reefed you should be okay…  the hard part is always the waves.

I can hear the chorus of old baby boomers reading this saying why don’t you just stay in Jolly Harbour and take a cab.

It must have been nice to live your whole life with lots of money. I will never know what that feels like. I will inherit your social debts though.

A cab will cost more than my VISA renewal. It will probably be around $60usd each way. I have not had an income for three years. Most of savings were stolen by an evil monkey a long time ago. I am not pretending to be poor. I am actually poor and getting poorer every month.

There are buses here… sort of. Northing like you first world people would think of as a bus. They are more like unmarked passenger vans without bus stops that drive around routes without schedules. In Antigua they are unreliable on the good days. I did try to catch a bus here once, waited an hour then had to walk. I couldn’t walk to Falmouth if the bus didn’t come or I did not flag down the correct unmarked van on time.

But it is possible… it could be an option.

Is a public van crammed full of people Covid safe?

I’m not sure yet what I will do. Sail… or try to bus…?

Let’s see what tomorrow brings…

 

Cheers Sailors

 

Captain Lexi

 

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