The dream keeps trying to turn into a nightmare

While the yard guys were still working on the boat, we flew to California to help our daughters get settled in their colleges and pick up Oliver, the cat (the only member of the family who hadn’t moved so far, since we left him under the care of the new owners of our house). The alternator issue was still waiting for parts when we came back to the boat.

A week later the parts arrived and we had a functional although still not entirely finished boat, so we recruited an experienced friend, Leslie, to help us move the boat South and nervously got underway. It’s not going to be the pleasant, laid-back and slow harbor-hopping that we intended, because we lost the summer to all that waiting and it’s starting to get cold up here.

After a short leg to Booth Bay with almost no incident (just some alarms going off, lobster traps being dragged by unconventional means, and the watermaker refusing to pay the debt it has accumulated with us) we pointed the bows to Cape Cod.

At dusk it started to drizzle, wind and waves started to pick up, and things got a bit rough, but other than a lot of noise and some rolling and pitching, we were safely making good progress under sail.  Oliver, however, was in full freak out mode, and Kathy was concerned about him to the point that she helped him keep balance on his way to the litter box.

[Warning for non-sailors: sailing jargon ahead. The jib is a head sail, head means toilet, but the jib is not a toilet sail, even though it has a head.]

Around midnight hell broke loose. The jib sheet broke and the jib started flogging furiously and uncontrollably under 25 knots of wind. We settled on a plan to lower the jib and stow it in the port hull, passing it through the head’s hatch. We started the engines to point upwind, Leslie poked out of the hatch like a prairie dog, Kathy got ready to release the jib halyard, and I went to the foredeck keeping my head down to avoid a whip from the sail, and tethered myself to a strong point. I tied a line to the jib’s tack and threw the other end to Leslie, opened the tack shackle and started pulling the furious beast down with all my strength. It didn’t move at all. That was because Kathy was still searching for the cleat that held the halyard. Once she opened the cleat, the jib reluctantly accepted to come down, but it wasn’t easy and I suspected the luff was getting damaged as I forced the sail down. After Leslie tamed the bottom half of the sail through the hatch, I had to cut a safety wire and unscrew a pin to release the head shackle and get the top half through the hatch. I succeeded, but focusing at close range while going up and down wildly with the waves did me. I returned my lunch to the sea. By the end of the ordeal all four of us (cat included) ended up seasick and executing one version or another of the feeding the fish or shouting to submarines act.

The rest of the night was quite gloomy, with everyone cold, wet, seasick and exhausted, and the cockpit a huge mess that nobody wanted to spend energy in tidying up.

The aftermath: the luff tape was in fact damaged, the clew block disappeared (I later found in the trampoline the remnants of the shackle that held it; the whips were strong enough to break it), and the jib had a 3-foot tear, probably caused by the flying block.

The cause: the jib is rigged for self-tacking, but whoever decided to attach a double block instead of two independent single blocks to the jib car made a bad choice. The jib sheet came out of each block at different angles, so it didn’t run smoothly and ended up chafed.