Sail Trouble
Have you ever tried to take in sail manually on a fifteen metre cat in a storm in the dark? Don’t. Well, don’t let yourself get into a situation where you have to. If you’ve got to do it, you’ve got to do it. And to think there used to be folks who sailed these things just for the fun of it!
We were beating upwind*. It was blowing a good stiff breeze, white horses just catching the last of the light, but it hadn’t been blowing long and the sea hadn’t got up much. Dark and threatening with heavy clouds, but we’d got plenty of sea room and we weren’t worried. She was wide and stable, so we were flying along under full sail.
Then the rain hit us, and big squalls. No surprise there, of course. The waves began to get bigger, and she began to jump about a bit. Still no surprise, but Chris sensibly decided it was time to roll in a bit of sail. She spilt the wind and hit the button. Whirr – phht – whirr – phht – silence. And the lights had gone out in the cabin, too. We didn’t know exactly what had failed in the electrics, but something had.
In the dark I scrabbled in the locker under the cockpit seat and found the little handle to wind the sail in manually. I hooked myself onto the safety line and scrambled up onto the cabin roof to the foot of the mast. Fitted the handle into the socket in the boom and wound like there was no tomorrow. Then the sail stuck – something jammed in the boom? In the dark and the pouring rain, I couldn’t see what was wrong. I inched my way along the boom to try to find the problem, but the boom was swinging about and even with a sand-textured finish, the top of the cabin was slippery in the wet. A moment later I was in the drink.
I’d got a lifejacket on, of course, and I was on a safety line. But it’s still no fun. It’s still damn cold, and you still breathe a lot of water. And it seemed to be ages before Chris was hauling me back into the cockpit.
And we still had three-quarters of a sail up, and it was developing into a real storm. What now? We were very afraid the mast was going to break, and then we’d be drifting and lucky to be found in time. We could cut the sail loose and save the mast, but then we’d be drifting anyway. We just hoped against hope that the mast would survive the storm.
* If this is meaningless to you, see Beating Upwind.