Or…how not to take down your spinnaker in several painful steps…or, Summer Vacation, part deux.
Of course make our best effort to take as much of our vacation in the summer on the boat – with Junior Sailing now crowding the schedule we generally end up with one towards the very end of summer.
This year we decided to go North again. After having such a great time going up to Gloucester and Provincetown and already having “done” the Vineyard and Nantucket this year we figure a new venue or three was in order. So the plan was to head North through the Cape Cod Canal again and visit Salem and the surrounding areas. My parents elected to accompany us on this trip as well, something they’ve done for part of a vacation but never the entire week. But first we planned to meet some friends on Block Island for the initial weekend of the vacation.
My wife is fortunate to have several sailors for partners in her medical practice, it helps to have them understand things which are ordinarily insensible and incomprehensible to non-sailors. the one thing we’d never managed to do though was get all three of us in one place off shore with out boats. So this year we did it, and a lovely time was had by all with dinner being cooked on Evenstar and good company held way into the evening.
We stayed through until Monday morning on Block Island – which was a nice change of pace since it is usually a weekend trip, enjoying a leisurely Sunday on the island was a pleasant novelty.
Monday was a nice brisk day for sailing, though it was to be a downwind Southwesterly from Block Island initially, the wind was slated to start turning North later that evening. So we left Block Island, rounded 1BI and set the Spinnaker.
/* Technical Interlude for the non sailors in the audience*/
As mentioned elsewhere spinnaker (more correctly, it’s a “Gennaker”) on Evenstar is a HUGE sail. A giant parachute of nylon with blue and yellow to match the Swedish flag, think of a parachute than can pull a 26 ton boat. While used for sailing “off” the wind, or down wind, the cruising spinnaker is still not really used for going DEAD down wind. That is a fairly slow way to sail it, you get better speed towards where you are going sailing a little upwind from dead down, even if you are not going directly at your mark. To get to your mark you need to zig and zag across the wind, just like going upwind except the wind goes from side to side across the back of the boat, not the front – this is called a Jibe (or Gybe), rather than a Tack which is when the wind crosses the bow.
Gybing involves moving the spinnaker to the other side of the boat somehow, one must do this to keep it filled.
The Spinnaker has a long sock covering it when not in use. To hoist it, one pulls the sock enclosed spinnaker up the rig looking like a giant sausage, then one pulls another line that lifts up the sock, exposing the spinnaker to the wind. The wind fills the spinnaker, and off you go. Taking it down, one must collapse the spinnaker by putting the main sail upwind of it, then hauling down on the sock so it covers up the spinnaker again like a sleeve, then you drop the sock.
All this is to give you a vague sense of what is about to happen.
/* End of technical interlude */
The crew of Evenstar had not, at this point, successfully Gybed the spinnaker. The reasons are several, most notably we hadn’t had the need to yet when it wasn’t emergency enough to just bag up the sail. There are a couple of ways to Gybe a sail like this. The least elegant and most lubberly is to pull the spinnaker into the sock like you are dousing it, then throw the suasage to the other side of the boat and re-set it. Given this plodding lubberly possibility, well we couldn’t do THAT.
Instead we opted for an “Outside Gybe”. This entails letting go of the sheet that is holding the sail tight and letting the sail fly outside the boat’s rig in front of the bow until it flips around, then you use the sheet on the other side to trim the sail in.
Believe it or not, we executed a beautiful outside Gybe on our very first try.
All hell didn’t break loose until a few minutes later, when the jib sheet popped out of the self-tailer on the primary winch.
Ordinarily having a sheet pop out of a winch is a nuisance, not a disaster. Generally the sail flies free, and as soon as it stops peeling rope out and starts fluttering in the wind you can grab the line and haul the sail back in. Sure it slows you down – but what is a tactical disaster in a race boat is a disaster in a cruising boat only in the sense that you must put down your drink to deal with the situation.
My wife has fast reflexes, unfortunately in this case TOO fast. With a runaway sheet on a boat the last thing you want to do is grab it barehanded. I have several sets of leather gloves with the palms ripped right out of them from grabbing runaway sheets, and scars from rope burns where the lines touched me. Unfortunately my wife made the mistake of grabbing for the spinnaker sheet when it broke loose.
The good news is that her injuries were not severe and we did recover the sheet and get the sail reset, however she is a physician and does surgery. Our biggest concern was whether she’d heal in time to work. However, we also realized that it probably didn’t make sense trying to keep flying the spinnaker (literally) short handed so we decided to douse it for good. This is where it got ugly.
In taking the spinnaker down, we made a critical mistake which allowed it to collapse and wrap around the headstay, badly. With my wife injured it was on me to deal with it. Eventually I got it off, but not without using my rigging knife to cut the sock loose of the sail. Nothing was lost over board and no irreparable harm was done, however THAT sail wasn’t going up again this vacation.
As the day progressed the wind veered more and North and picked up – we were now facing a LONG upwind motor-slog up Buzzard’s Bay, followed by more of the same going across Cape Cod Bay the next day. With one member of the crew down to the use of one hand we opted to head to Cuttyhunk for the night rather than slog up Buzzard’s Bay towards the Canal as was our original plan,
Discussing it that evening we decided that discretion was the better part of valor. Facing two more days of strong Northerlies with a crew not at full capacity (my parents, while there, are not sailors…) did not sound especially appealing. Especially taking into consideration we were planning new harbors, new anchorages and new destinations. So the call was made to limp to Oak Bluffs, pick up a mooring and probably stay the week. This was appealing also because my dad isn’t so mobile getting on and off the boat – a readily available harbor launch would spare him the indignity of getting in and out of the dinghy all the time.
Cuttyhunk, anchored outside in a Northerly you ask? Yeah…it sucks. A lot. For the first time anchoring we dragged – my guess is because we set before the full Northerly blew in, and the rotation at anchor to a true North direction pulled out the CQR and it did not get a chance to reset. Of course it was in the middle of the night, but fortunately I was monitoring it and was awake. Also being a week night and crappy weather to boot there were only a few boats around so we were able to reset pretty quickly.
Having already “done” Oak Bluffs here, I think is should suffice to say it was a very pleasant, mellow week. Lot’s of ducks, beaches, and walks in town. We took a trip out to the break through at Katama Bay while we were there – now THAT is an impressive piece of Mother Nature’s handiwork.
