July 26, 2004--Mistakes We Made

In 1965, when we first started cruising offshore in MAGIC DRAGON, we were very ignorant of weather phenomena. We had sailed the British Columbia Coast for a few years, just looking at the weather as we went along, sometimes listening to weather forecasts but not really believing in them since they were so often off the mark. We sailed to San Francisco and on to Hawaii for the winter, leaving when we were ready to go. We took the weather as it came. On the return trip, we again left when the time seemed right to get back to BC for the summer. After over a week on starboard tack in the trade winds, we came near the latitude of Vancouver, where we lost the wind.

So we started motoring on course on the calm ocean. We motored for nearly two weeks on that calm ocean, all the way to Victoria. We made our approach to the Strait of Juan de Fuca in the fog. So calm was it, we were able to use our bubble sextant to get a running fix from the sun. It was visible overhead although the horizon was not.

The morning after our night landfall, one of our first visits was to the Met Office. What was the weather doing? How come this interminable calm? What calm? Said the man on duty. We looked at the weather maps of the previous couple of weeks. Seems we had entered a large high that was moving east at six knots and stayed with it all the way. Had we motored north or waited for a day or two we would have found favorable winds...

Our weather ignorance got us into another predicament in Mexico two years later. After nine months cruising down to Acapulco and back up the Sea of Cortez, we were in Guaymas, ready to sail south to Panama and the Caribbean. But the port was closed, due to an offshore hurricane to the south. Eventually the weatherman announced that the storm was dissipating and heading out to sea, and we were able to get our clearance. So off we went--although the sky looked purple and menacing--thinking that we might get favorable winds to La Paz. We didn't listen to the afternoon weather forecast that said the hurricane was now headed for Guaymas and increasing in intensity. Just before dark, we were sailing in a light wind, close hauled with our 180% drifter flying, when I noticed a wall of white spray approaching on the water. I called Jane, who was asleep, and ran forward to cast off the drifter's halyard and let the sail fall in the water just as the wind hit us.

MAGIC DRAGON, with her mainsail hardened, was laid over on her beam and pointed into the wind. It must have taken us fifteen minutes or more to bag the genoa and a long time too to reef the mainsail. Spume was flying horizontally. We could not hear each other even when shouting right into each other's ears. All the battens and batten pockets were shredded off the mainsail before we had it reefed. We couldn't run before the wind because we had limited sea room to leeward. But we discovered that MAGIC DRAGON would keep her head into the seas, pointing at ten or fifteen degrees off the wind with just the top of our mainsail left unrolled. (We've always had the tops of our mainsails made of heavier cloth.) Not the classic "helm a lee" where a boat slowly sails back into the wind after a wave has forced her beam onto the seas, the beast will instantly spin back into the wind. The moment the wind catches her mainsail, she heels over, so that the center of effort driving the sail is way out to leeward and she spins to windward on the spot until the sail can spill the wind again.

The wind and sea got wild that night. We had to douse our dodger aft, as it was impossible to fold it forward. We lay on the cabin sole, the only tenable place in the motion that the seas inflicted on us. The noise was deafening as breaking waves crashed on deck and solid green water washed over the deck. I went out in the cockpit a few times in the night only to realize that there was nothing we could do but hope that nothing would let go. I watched breakers come crashing onto our bow, dumping green water four feet deep on deck. This water and the flying spume would drive down our deck, hit the windshield and bounce up past the cockpit without spilling inside it. In the middle of the night MAGIC DRAGON was spun on the other tack, but since we had the helm lashed amidships, nothing happened; she just heeled on the opposite side when recovering her head--and, below, we slid across the floor. We ate a whole hand of bananas that night, discovering that they taste the same on the way in as they do on the way out.

We have no idea of the force of the wind we were in, but it blew 100 knots in both Guaymas and La Paz. In the early morning, as the wind abated, we could see the faint loom of lights that had to be Guaymas. We had been blown sideways out and back without losing much ground. Our ten-foot fiberglass dinghy was still lashed on deck, but it had been flattened, leaving a big H crack in its bottom. Its oak thwarts and rub rails were smashed. When we sailed into La Paz, we learned that some of the boats in La Paz and Guaymas had sustained more damage than we had, with broken bow rollers, blown sails, cleats pulled from decks and much more...

With MAGIC DRAGON, we have the option to let her stand on her twin keels on receding tides, providing that we can find a bottom that is hard enough to support her. Her center of gravity is well forward on the base of the keels, where they are narrow and offer little bearing surface. However, over the years we have found many such hard bottoms to check zincs, clean prop, or repaint antifouling. We always try to make sure that the beach is firm enough beforehand. One year we tested Matauwhi Bay's inner beach near Russell, NZ. It felt like a solid shell and gravel base that we thought would be firm enough to support DRAGON and let me work on the propeller. So on the night's high tide we motored into place and waited for the tide to recede. We did not get back to sleep that morning on the forward bunk. The beach crust gave, and MAGIC DRAGON slowly dipped her bow as the front of her keels sank into mud. At low tide, MAGIC DRAGON looked like an ostrich trying to bury her head with her big stern pointing at the sky. We'd have needed a tall ladder to reach the propeller. Many people apparently were surprised to see a boat in such an undignified position. We stayed away so as not to have to give too many explanations...

Usually we choose a Spring Tide for our groundings, particularly back in the days when we scrubbed and anti-fouled the bottom on the beach. However we sometimes forgot that King Highs are usually accompanied by Ultra-low Lows. After floating off and anchoring for the night to rest after our labors, then spending the following morning putting the ship to rights, we sometimes opted to go gunkholing. Having two steel keels makes us a bit cocky about where we go. As a result of our nonchalance, we have more than once dragged our newly painted keels through mud or gravel in places that had always been of adequate depth in normal tides...

If you never do anything, you'll never make any mistakes. All we can hope to do is learn from our goofs. Trouble is, as the years go by we tend to do increasingly dumber things. It's hard to choose the worst, but one that springs to mind is powering through a rainy night with hatches closed and the 'crystal palace' over the cockpit zipped up, leaving the alternator regulator on MANUAL setting rather than on AUTOMATIC as it should have been. Jane awoke below decks, put bare feet to the cabin sole to find the floor was hot over the battery. We threw open hatches (the rain had stopped) and unzipped the clear plastic carapace. When we opened the floorboards, it was to find that the battery was shooting 'steam' from every orifice. Our voice boxes felt gritty for days. We have no idea why we didn't blow ourselves up, or what permanent damage we may have done to our bodies. We like to think it gave the 12Volt battery a new lease on life, though we can't say the same for ourselves...

Some years ago, when testing our newly devised homebrew roller furling mains'l, we sailed into a quiet anchorage for the night, rolled our sails, put on the anchor light, and began toasting the success of our new furling system, only to discover that we were drifting. We'd forgotten to drop the anchor...