Blog from Family Affair

by Paul Michael, July 12th, 2012

My wife is familiar with my cell phone calls from the sea or hospitals that start with, "honey, I'm okay, but…"  Today was one of those days.  The crew and the boat are fine, but we had one heck of a day.

I navigated us south onto the western edge of a gale off California.  It's nice to be able to dial in the kind of weather you wish to sail in.  A few degrees of heading to the east and we're headlong into a 35+ knot gale and pukesville, a few degrees to the west and we're in calm seas and can't sail fast.  I aimed us for the 25 knot wind mark and we hit it.  Then it hit us.   

We sailed through the previous night heading about 190 degrees true, still skirting between the gale and high pressure. The winds held steady at 20 to 25 knots and we sailed under jib and single-reefed main.  At daybreak the shift opposite me elected to try the smaller asymmetric spinnaker.  I was just waking up at 6am from my 10pm to 2am midnight watch.  As soon as the spinnaker caught the wind, it knocked us down.  A knockdown is the granddaddy version of a round-up. The boat is completely on its side.  The boom is dragging through the water and the mast nearly touched the water as well.  The rudder is out of the water and useless.  You must quickly eliminate the source which holds you down and do so without placing shock loads on your mast.  I sprung up on deck ill-dressed but with my lifevest/PLB on.  I took the helm from Tom so he could go forward.  We got the spinnaker halyard lowered and crew pulled the sail on deck.  Under main only, I managed to build some speed and!
 pump the helm on the swells to get us back downwind.

Our second moment of excitement came at 11am when I was helming with our smaller spinnaker and a single-reefed main.  We were trucking along in double digits when the downhaul separated from the spinnaker boom.  The boom shot up into the air and the spinnaker ballooned into a big scoop high up in the air.  We were flat on our side again.  We had the engine running in neutral to charge our batteries.  We got the spinnaker down within minutes and continued our journey with the jib for a headsail.  We lost a lot of speed, but counted ourselves lucky and didn't want to push the boat further until we edged a little further into higher pressure and out of the wind.  Dan just came down off watch.  I ask him how balanced the helm was with our new sail setting.  He said it's like driving a fire engine from the 50's with hard tires and no power steering.

All during our events, we were very safe and worked well as a team to get back on our feet.  We were at all times in our life vests and tethered to the boat.  All of the ISAF Category 1 safety requirements required by the Vic-Maui race committee really make sense and paid off today.

We haven't seen any life out here in the big blue desert with us except some intrepid birds.  One was like a large sparrow and darted low on the waves.  We haven't seen one of those since about 150 miles off shore.  The only other life we see now is the occasional albatross.

Just like the two Voyager spacecraft that are still probing where the edge of our solar system and interstellar space is today, I am happy to report to our Seattle friends that we have finally sailed out of the clouds.  The edge lays 800 nautical miles to the southwest of our wet city.  We thoroughly enjoyed our first starry night.

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