Pacific Cup Day 7 Recap – More Lessons

We’ve been out here a week already, and it’s hard to believe. It looks like the past 24 hours saw us put another 192 miles behind us – by my calculations, sometime tomorrow we’ll rollover 1000 miles into the race and a good mileage halfway point for us to celebrate. Life onboard is fine, and I just saw the first flying fish of the trip, meaning that we must be getting further south, even though the cloudy weather isn’t as convincing!

We both knew that Pacific Cup would be a fantastic way to hone our skills with sailing Shearwater, especially our (rusty) racing skills. Spinnaker flying at night is one of those skills that we’re getting lots of practice with and where there are many, many lessons to be learned. The lesson today? How to survive a round-up, followed by an accidental gybe, and not break anything.

I was on watch, having just relieved Justin at 6am – we’ve kept our 3 hours on, 3 hours off watch without making adjustments for the time zone changes we’ll see more of as we go west. So, at 6am, we were still in complete darkness, under cloudy skies so the moon has not provided much help with sailing at night these past few evenings. The winds have been breezy – 16-24 knots, and the range has made it tricky as we want to stay powered up, but not be too overpowered as we reach southwest towards Hawaii. The boat was reaching well, in 20-21 knots, and it felt really comfortable. Because of our course, we’re reaching across wave sets – later on, we should be square to the waves and really get to enjoy surfing down them, but we’re not running straight down them yet. The reaching is difficult because the boat gets lots of apparent wind changes, plus pushes from the wave sets that can cause round-ups (a round-up is where the boat veers off into the wind and can’t bear off) if you aren’t paying attention.

So, we’re reaching along, and as best as we can tell, we get a big wind shift from the east, which apparently caused the boat that was already accelerating to head up more, and then suddenly, the boat was pinned on its port side with the main, staysail, and spinnaker angrily thrashing around. I was hanging in the cockpit off of one of our metal stanchion posts which hold the lifelines, trying to ease the spinnaker sheet and mainsheet to allow the boat to bear off and get off its side. At this time, I could hear the autopilot alarm going off, so I knew the autopilot was not helping anymore. Apparently, easing the sheets allowed the boat to bear off enough to get back upright, but right afterwards, the boat did a tailspin and accidental gybe – when the autopilot went offline, the wheel was hard to leeward to try to deal with the round-up issue, so once the round-up was no longer the issue, the wheel should have been straightened to avoid a gybe…but I did not get there in time. At this point, I started thinking if I really was going to go have to wake up Justin to get some help – I knew he was tired, but I was incredulous that he was sleeping through this train wreck…when suddenly he did appear – a half-naked man who leaped into the cockpit and started trimming the spinnaker.

I headed back to the wheel but realized my tether was over the mainsheet, meaning that when we gybed back, I would be either launched off the boat from the force of the mainsheet as the main flipped sides or something worse. Half-naked man unhooked my tether and tossed it to me, so I could drive to try to get the boat back on the correct gybe. At this point, we’re now enjoying the periodic flashes of the strobe light that is attached to our horseshoe buoy – it’s water-activated, so our attempts to submarine the boat have it operating. The scene plays out in short bursts of white light now – pretty surreal, as the cockpit contents are completely in disarray, the NKE autopilot alarm is going off, the sails – especially our beautiful, new A4 chute – are flogging madly, and there is a half-naked man hauling on the lines and yelling at me to get the boat gybed, but the boat is now pinned on it’s side (the opposite side from when this started).

So, we get the boat gybed back, and miraculously, half-naked man trims in the chute – this is a real miracle, as it seems like it should have wrapped around the forestay and been shredded by now…but we did have our spinnaker net up, so apparently, it did its job (the spinnaker is a set of lines we rigged up between the forestay and the mast that prevent the spinnaker from wrapping around the forestay. Essential on a asymmetrical boat, shorthanded, if you ask me). I’m handsteering, so the next order of business is to try to get the autopilot back on so that we can both deal with everything else. The controls were not working, and the autopilot display was blacked out. Half-naked man finally went below to put on a few clothes and his tether, so that we were able to switch places. While he was driving, I turned off the instruments and autopilot at the control panel, and then switched everything back on – and the autopilot started working again. What a relief – I reset the piloting settings to apparent wind, and we were able to deal with trying to improve the chaos around us.

Apparently, while the boat was rounding-up and accidentally gybing, Justin was below trying to get out – interestingly, he noticed that the sink faucet got turned on by another object hitting the lever, so in the turmoil, we might have lost precious freshwater if he had not noticed this immediately. We’ll keep the freshwater pump off at the control panel to address this.

So, we had yet another lesson in the challenges of flying a kite at night in breeze and waves. No breakages, thankfully. MVP awards to the spinnaker net, followed closely by half-naked man.

I’m gritting my teeth though, as I know we’re going to have to deal with squalls in the coming days…ugh. I’m still waiting for this “glorious tradewind sailing” to show up!

And a quick comment about the race. Our 192 miles was good, but not great. Middle of road for the Tuesday starters and not surprisingly, the 30 foot Wolfpack is fully lit up now and put 28 miles on us. They are in a class of their own. The rest are just racing for scraps. I’m really curious to see how the rest of race plays out. We are one of the more southern boats now, and it would seem now that we are getting lifted we should have a better angle. The question is will the winds be unusually lighter to the south negating the advantage of the better angle. We will find out soon enough.

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