Carrera is participating in the three races of the CYC Center Sound Series
in 2000.
The first race, Blakely Rocks, features winds up to 20 knots and a 20 N mile course. That was a fun day of sailing!
The second race was the Possession Point race, a 27 N mile race to the Satchet Head bouy and back to Shilshole. Carrera had visited Satchet Head before, during the Foulweather Bluff race in 1999. Two days before the race Ray (Carrera's co-owner) called me and reminded me that he could not drive for this race. That was fine by me, the winds were forecast at calm to 5 knots. One day before the race the weather forecast changed dramatically, calling for 25knots from the South in the morning subsiding to 10-15 by afternoon. I started calling everyone I knew, because I did not have a foredeck person experienced enough to handle a spin in 25 knots for this race. After calling around for hours, I got nowhere.
Race day started with me filling up on gas and assembling my four crew. We had no fordeck person. We got out on the water and it wasnt blowing 25 knots. It was maybe 15 or so and I was pretty confident we could go a fair way N to Satchet Head without having to jibe at all. So we started across the line at 9:40, reached across the line on starboard and hoisted the .75 oz spinnaker. We settled in for what would be a very long dead-down run up Puget Sound. We kept up with Aliens Ate My Buick, and Crime Scene (Deviant) the entire way up the Sound. At first we were surfing fine and had the boat under control easily. The boat was rolling a bit in the large seas, but everything seemed fine. We were smoking as we passed just astern of the Edmonds - Kingston Ferry, and broke through his wake easily.
About 2 N miles North of the ferry, the wind started gaining strength. We noticed this as the boat started picking up speed. Where before we had been surfing waves occaisionally and only sometimes breaking into 10 knots speed, now we were surfing continuously and making 10 regularly and sometimes 12- 13 knots. The boat became increasingly hard to handle. This was stronger winds than Port Ludlow, which I had sailed shorthanded with only 2 other crew in up to 25knots. We still had not jibed, and were making a good course for Satchet Head. But the boat was now very squirelly, even with all weight aft and dead downwind with waves directly behind. The wave period was very short, and the rolling motion of the boat was increasingly hard to correct. We started talking about dousing the spinnaker real soon, as this didn't seem safe anymore - might as well get the jib up now, get everything cleared for the mark rounding. We had mentally commited to dousing and were talking to each other about the sequence of events that needed to occur when it happened - the boat rounded up.
People keep asking me if my mast actually touched the water when I tell them I broached. I don't think it did, but that didn't make the feeling any less serious. As Pete said later, he just was sitting aft of the tiller when the boat went over and he saw alot of water coming right at him. Rachel blew the spinnaker sheets, and the boat dumped all its air and righted, broadside to the wind. I gained control of the rudder and got us under way under main again. In those 30 seconds, the spinnaker had wrapped itself, the topping lift and some halyards hopelessly (we would find later) around the forestay.
The sitaution was not immediately clear. Sure, we had wrapped the spin, but that hasnt prevented me from unwrapping it in the past. For the next 10 minutes the crew wrestled with the crazed spinnaker, trying to unravel it from the forestay. Without unwrapping it we had no hope of getting it down or getting a jib up. Without either of these things we could not beat to windward effectively. And now, very close to a lee shore, things became clear - I dropped the motor in, we took the main down, and reached across the Sound toward Edmonds. We were not going to be able to get this spin down without going up the mast, and we were not able to go up the mast in these seas and the still building wind. We had to get to some shelter.
Close to Edmonds the wind was still building and we had already been motoring for 30 minutes or more. The wildly flagging spinnaker, slamming in the wind, was making a horrific sound - I expected it to shread and tear away from the forestay any time. But it didnt. When we got close to shore we looked for options with binoculars, but nothing was really obvious. We had two choices - motor against tide and wind to Edmonds, 3-5 miles South, or go with the wind and current North to Everett, where we hoped to find some sheltered waters. And so we went North.
Just East of the Whidbey Island ferry terminal is a huge abandoned pier. We reconoitered this and decided it was our best option - the only other to continue North several more miles to a marina. We tied up along side the lee of the pier and I went up the mast on the only halyard we had remaining that was not tangled in the forestay, the main halyard. I spent about 30 minutes untangling first the topping lift, then the spinnaker, then finally 3 halyards. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief, it was 1:30 in the afternoon.
We decided that the noble thing to do was to sail back to Shilshole. At 2, after some lunch and relaxing out of the wind, we set off for the 15 mile beat back down the Sound. We flew the 98%, for comfort sake - no one was into working or hiking anymore. Everyone was cold. We sailed long tacks for the next 4 hours, until we were South of the tanks at Edmonds and the wind finally abated enough for us to drop our motor in and motor for the marina. The boat was shipshape by the time we entered Shilshole, and Pete gave Carrera an honorary toot on the horn. It was 6:30 pm. The race standings recorded us as DNF, but as a crew we finished first.
What could we have done to avoid this? As a skipper and crew, we on Carrera made three key mistakes that cost us not only a DNF, a long day and alot of work, but a threatening situation.
What could I have done better?
Alex, Carrera #32