 | From Ocean Navigator #131 July/August 2003 |
Adhering to simple guidelines allows voyagers to handle heavy weather.
In short, we did just about everything wrong. However, we firmly believe that adhering to some simple guidelines takes the uncertainty out of one of the most important voyaging concerns: how to handle heavy weather.
The Little Things incident occurred 18 years ago. I’ve since acquired a 41-foot aluminum sailboat, Élan (by chance found for me by my good friend Benny, the owner of Little Things). It’s rugged, designed for bluewater travel. I also lucked into a serious sailor-mate for life, and after some financial consolidation and planning, we’ve spent the last eight years crisscrossing the Pacific in the course of an open-ended “working circumnavigation.”
The worst weather I’ve seen offshore since Little Things was the very next week as a crewmember aboard the 70-foot swordfish longliner Rush, hauling gear and fish, the deck nearly constantly awash. My eyes bulged at times as I hung on to avoid being sucked overboard or slamming into dangerous deck equipment, and I was bundled in foul-weather gear. Yet, in the eyes of my veteran crewmates, fresh from the Grand Banks in the North Atlantic, the Caribbean tropical storm conditions were a day at the beach. Covered with scars and tattoos, shirtless and sporting colorful new surfer shorts just purchased in San Juan, they laughed and joked casually, even during waist-deep surges of white water.
Since that time, despite meandering thousands of open-ocean miles between Florida and Australia, including four passages between New Zealand and the tropics, we’ve seen no sustained winds of more than the high 30s while at sea. I’ve always said I’d rather be lucky than skillful any day, and we do our best to load the deck in our favor by attempting to choose ideal seasons and weather for passages. We also possess a complete set of heavy-weather gear and a pre-selected plan of action for when the stuff hits the fan. It’s all ready to go, and we will not hesitate to use it. This enables us to relax knowing we’ve done everything in our power to ensure our safety, whatever comes our way.
Before we discuss particulars, however, let’s drive one point home. The most critical safety factor comes prior to departure and during a passage: Don’t make offshore passages during hurricane season in the tropics and subtropics. Choose a hurricane-free destination or very secure location on the margin of the storm zone and stay in port.
Secondly, arm yourself with knowledge. Get familiar with receiving and interpreting your own weatherfaxes, and with the large-scale, long-term weather rhythms of the piece of ocean you intend to cross. Some of the best advice I’ve received came from high-seas commercial fishermen familiar with an area and from veteran long-distance voyaging or racing sailors with local roots. Don’t confuse the issue by getting caught up in the herd mentality of a passing sailboat clique or by listening to a large number of radio gurus rehashing and interpreting the same data you downloaded hours ago. If you choose to participate with a weather interpreter, like one of the volunteer SSB or ham coastal stations that monitor and advise sailors for given areas, pick one who is consistent and experienced with the zone of interest.
Be wary of long-distance instructions from satellite-data interpreters-for-hire residing a continent away. Make your own decisions. Many of the paradigms for specific routes promulgated among annually arriving groups of sailboats simply aren’t true. Blind adherence to poor second-hand information has been the undoing of numerous sailboats over the past decade. Hey, we’re all sufficiently slow to hit a bad low even with precautions – we’d just like to know our own decisions put us there.
A proactive sequence
Let’s look at the development of heavy weather offshore and the appropriate response. In light conditions, we fly full sail. As the wind increases, we reef. Generally speaking, we put in our first reef at 17 to 21 knots, a second reef at about 25 knots, third reef in the high 20s to low 30s, and go to storm trysail and storm jib for 35 knots and above, either reaching slowly or hove-to.
For downwind headings, we go with a reefed genoa only, as tiny as possible for optimal boat speed on wave faces. For conditions too severe for carrying sail, one first-line defense option is to lie-to our parachute sea anchor under bare poles, particularly when sea room to leeward is potentially limited and if weather data indicates the system will pass before it becomes a survival storm. In the case of some combination of a down sea heading toward port, sufficient sea room, and a potential survival storm situation, our choice of gear is a drogue.
It is very important, that we stop steering in this sequence at the hove-to mark. We’re safely in the wheelhouse, keeping watch, monitoring the radar and radios, sipping microwaved hot soup and coffee, while the self-tending vessel rides out the storm. This shields us from a host of physical and mental hazards, resulting from the exhaustion and exposure of hand steering outside in severe conditions. The other important point is that we reef early, deploy early, and readily heave-to under any conditions if we need a break. We’re not in a hurry; we sail for comfort and safety over speed, and we avoid specific, time-related destination agendas that might pressure us into less-than-ideal passages. Here are two examples of this approach.
One very dark night found us beam reaching in heavy conditions through the heart of the Tuamotus, a vast archipelago of atolls in the eastern central South Pacific, bound from Raroia to Makemo. The weather got progressively more nasty, with nearly continuous squalls and an average wind speed of 37 knots. Sandwiched between low-lying atolls and strong, unpredictable currents, we chose not to heave-to. Up went the storm trysail and storm jib. We immediately went from overpowered – lurching and crashing along – to a relatively smooth beam reach at 3 knots, the Aries wind vane steering a perfect course. This put us in to Makemo in easing conditions at slack high tide at 0900, perfect for entering the lagoon pass.
Years later, we were in a situation where we had ridden an immense high-pressure area northeast from Auckland to within 240 nm of Niue. The center passed southeast of us as the system kept strengthening, and soon we were punching into rapidly growing seas, close-reaching in the 35-knot northeasterlies of the squash zone. As night fell, average wind speed was 36 to 39 knots, gusting fairly often into the low 40s. Nuku€˜alofa, Tonga, our next intended destination after Niue, was nearly dead downwind. So rather than continue bashing upwind simply to hold to our schedule, we dropped and lashed the mainsail and turned west-southwest under a small piece of rolled-in genoa.
Had we been farther from port, we’d have deployed storm gear, because the sea state inexplicably exceeded the wind conditions by quite a wide margin. Wave tops began to break fairly heavily around us here and there by midnight, and whoever was on watch would frequently take over from the wind vane to avoid risking a broach. We could see land by sunrise, which also illuminated some healthy-sized graybeards. I was continuously hand steering at this point, flying only a tiny piece of genoa, enough to give us some maneuverability on wave faces easily twice the length of our hull. Occasionally, I noted heavily breaking tops in the area, and I hand-steered away from several peaking wave sections that threatened. We got lightly pooped twice, briefly transforming the cockpit into a frothy aquarium, and full control required considerable body weight on the tiller at times. On the way into Piha Passage, we went by the island freighter Ikale headed east offshore for nearby Eua, the small ship completely disappearing in shrouds of spray during the biggest passing swells.
Not long after the airing of a television show about the 1998 Sydney-Hobart disaster, I spoke with the co-operator of a 65-foot steel ketch engaged in sail charters to the sub-Antarctic islands south of New Zealand. She was very familiar with strong weather conditions. Her analysis of the aerial footage emphasized the safety inherent in deep-reefed travel over storm seas, with enough speed to bob and weave, steering and avoiding the worst of the breaking waves. Very small differences in vessel position on wave faces can have immensely different results for consequent vessel trajectory, as any surfer can tell you. This strategy worked for a number of participants who came through the storm safely. On the other hand, some of the boats that left more sail up and bashed along on a straight course got trashed. The panoramic helicopter footage also highlighted the fact that over wide expanses of sea in the storm, the waves were quite manageable. But from time to time, an immense wave would rear up and break heavily. Many storm accounts discuss how everything was under control for hours, until all of a sudden, a particularly huge wave came along and ruined the party. Caught in extreme conditions, this is the wave from which we must protect ourselves.
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Capsize protection
Like most aspiring voyagers, we pored over the literature on handling heavy weather before we left on “the big trip.” We read accounts of lying ahull under bare poles and towing warps. Some folks obviously got away with the former strategy and lived to write about it. We’ve since completely rejected this possibility under any circumstances for our own heavy-weather use. It’s counter-intuitive: If you paddle a kayak or surfboard out through the breakers, what happens if you turn sideways and sit there in response to an oncoming wave? You capsize. On a larger scale, I don’t know any captains who develop a sudden urge to steer beam-to in steep, treacherous seas.
While anchored securely one year at Great Barrier Island off New Zealand’s North Island, we listened with broken hearts to the rescuer side of VHF conversations taking place not far offshore. A descending tropical low had abutted to a strengthening high, not uncommon in this area during late November through December, deepening into an unnamed 70-knot storm with gusts to 88 knots. One family of four, still well offshore, had been rolled repeatedly. A helicopter successfully rescued them from their battered, foundering hull. Another couple, only 10 nm off Cape Brett, had also performed more than one 360° roll, and at 0400 opted not to wait for a daylight helicopter rescue – they’d take their chances on the rescue services of a large containership on standby. The ship dutifully maneuvered alongside in the horrendous conditions and fired down two rescue harnesses. No one knows exactly what happened next, except that one harness came up with the male captain, the other came up empty. The sailboat was never seen intact again, almost certainly crushed under the ship, and the captain’s female sailing partner was lost. Both boats were “lying ahull under bare poles,” no heavy-weather gear deployed, no proactive plan.
So what does work? I interviewed a number of sailors who successfully weathered some of the worst areas of the infamous Queen’s Birthday Storm by towing automobile tires. The idea is to orient the bow downwind, to minimize strain and go with the flow, while controlling one’s progress on passing wave faces. The crews were adamant about the critical nature of space between the tires and the stern (about two wave cycles back), and the number and size of the tires for the vessel in question. Some Kiwis have this down to a science – I asked them what I’d need for our boat, which is 15 gross tons, and they rattled off very consistent answers on the size and number of used radials I ought to chain together for the tow. They all described the visible “sucking action” of the tire array as strain maximized, lifting the transom up and through the tops of foaming wave crests. This strategy, however, requires lugging bulky, black, oxidized tires around with you.
A more compact solution is to use any of a number of commercially produced storm drogues that employ a lone drag device, often single cones or strap baskets. When streamed from astern, the intention of these drag devices is to cut down on boat speed for a vessel heading to leeward in big seas on steep wave faces. Examples of these devices include the nylon webbing-based Galerider drogue; and fabric-based drogues like the Sea Brake, Delta drogues, and drogues from Shewmon. (See Sea anchors and drogues on page 46.) In many heavy-weather situations, a drogue can be an effective way to keep a boat under control. Using these devices does require that the boat be actively steered or it could be rolled, can broach or be pitch-poled.
|
After the 1979 Fastnet Race disaster, retired aeronautical engineer Donald Jordan began development on a different approach to a drogue drag device. Rather than a single resistant device counteracting the force of the breaking sea, why not moderate and dampen the load with a series of cones strung out and submerged along a lengthy rode, with no active steering required? The U.S. Coast Guard-commissioned study of the utility of Jordan’s new device, now termed the Jordan Series Drogue (Hervey, Carol L. and Donald J. Jordan. 1987. Investigation of the Use of Drogues to Improve the Safety of Sailing Yachts. U.S. Dept. of Transportation Report No. CG-D-20-87, available from the National Technical Information Service, Springfield, VA 22161). By the early 1990s, the JSD was available, either complete or as a kit to make up oneself, from Ace Sailmakers. However, not all vessels have the structural requirements for safe use of the JSD.
Sea anchors
What if your boat doesn’t have the structural strength aft to handle a JSD, or your transom or cockpit configuration makes deployment dangerous? Parachute sea anchors have also undergone considerable development in the wake of ’70s and ’80s storm disasters. These large chutes are, like series drogues, deployed on long, weighted rodes designed to center the device at least two storm-wave cycles away. Unlike drogues, however, the vessel rides bow-to. Particularly in extreme conditions, this results in higher loads on the boat, more violent snatching and yawing (particularly for monohulls), and a slower drift speed compared to drogues. We found characteristics of the parachute sea anchor sufficiently compelling to carry one aboard. It seems to be the more popular choice for fishing boats and other vessels with large-volume work cockpits and substantial, flat, aft-facing wheelhouse surfaces. And testing indicates that for multihulls, properly designed sea anchors may rival the effectiveness of the JSD for preventing breaking-wave capsize, though the forces imposed on the vessel will be greater. Operators testify that sea anchors have saved a number of vessels in severe conditions. They are also highly useful for “parking” in a variety of non-survival rough-weather conditions.
We purchased an 18-foot model from Para-Tech Engineering Co. Both the JSD and sea anchor aboard Élan are ready to go in short order any time we’re on passage. We’re happy to say neither has yet to hit the sea.
All of us must be prepared to deal with severe conditions. This means possession of proven heavy-weather equipment – that does not require active steering – rigged and kept handy for deployment. It means having a proactive attitude and a plan of action. Don’t hesitate to employ it, and do it sooner rather than later in deteriorating conditions. n
|
Scott and Wendy Bannerot, authors of The Cruiser’s Handbook of Fishing, are currently in Australia as they voyage the Pacific.
Since that time, despite meandering thousands of open-ocean miles between Florida and Australia, including four passages between New Zealand and the tropics, we’ve seen no sustained winds of more than the high 30s while at sea. I’ve always said I’d rather be lucky than skillful any day, and we do our best to load the deck in our favor by attempting to choose ideal seasons and weather for passages. We also possess a complete set of heavy-weather gear and a pre-selected plan of action for when the stuff hits the fan. It’s all ready to go, and we will not hesitate to use it. This enables us to relax knowing we’ve done everything in our power to ensure our safety, whatever comes our way.
Before we discuss particulars, however, let’s drive one point home. The most critical safety factor comes prior to departure and during a passage: Don’t make offshore passages during hurricane season in the tropics and subtropics. Choose a hurricane-free destination or very secure location on the margin of the storm zone and stay in port.
Secondly, arm yourself with knowledge. Get familiar with receiving and interpreting your own weatherfaxes, and with the large-scale, long-term weather rhythms of the piece of ocean you intend to cross. Some of the best advice I’ve received came from high-seas commercial fishermen familiar with an area and from veteran long-distance voyaging or racing sailors with local roots. Don’t confuse the issue by getting caught up in the herd mentality of a passing sailboat clique or by listening to a large number of radio gurus rehashing and interpreting the same data you downloaded hours ago. If you choose to participate with a weather interpreter, like one of the volunteer SSB or ham coastal stations that monitor and advise sailors for given areas, pick one who is consistent and experienced with the zone of interest.
Be wary of long-distance instructions from satellite-data interpreters-for-hire residing a continent away. Make your own decisions. Many of the paradigms for specific routes promulgated among annually arriving groups of sailboats simply aren’t true. Blind adherence to poor second-hand information has been the undoing of numerous sailboats over the past decade. Hey, we’re all sufficiently slow to hit a bad low even with precautions &mdash we’d just like to know our own decisions put us there.
A proactive sequence
Let’s look at the development of heavy weather offshore and the appropriate response. In light conditions, we fly full sail. As the wind increases, we reef. Generally speaking, we put in our first reef at 17 to 21 knots, a second reef at about 25 knots, third reef in the high 20s to low 30s, and go to storm trysail and storm jib for 35 knots and above, either reaching slowly or hove-to.
For downwind headings, we go with a reefed genoa only, as tiny as possible for optimal boat speed on wave faces. For conditions too severe for carrying sail, one first-line defense option is to lie-to our parachute sea anchor under bare poles, particularly when sea room to leeward is potentially limited and if weather data indicates the system will pass before it becomes a survival storm. In the case of some combination of a down sea heading toward port, sufficient sea room, and a potential survival storm situation, our choice of gear is a drogue.
|
A sea anchor seen in the water during testing. In order for a sea anchor to work properly in holding the boat bow to the seas, it must be the right diameter for the size of the boat. It is very important, that we stop steering in this sequence at the hove-to mark. We’re safely in the wheelhouse, keeping watch, monitoring the radar and radios, sipping microwaved hot soup and coffee, while the self-tending vessel rides out the storm. This shields us from a host of physical and mental hazards, resulting from the exhaustion and exposure of hand steering outside in severe conditions. The other important point is that we reef early, deploy early, and readily heave-to under any conditions if we need a break. We’re not in a hurry; we sail for comfort and safety over speed, and we avoid specific, time-related destination agendas that might pressure us into less-than-ideal passages. Here are two examples of this approach.
One very dark night found us beam reaching in heavy conditions through the heart of the Tuamotus, a vast archipelago of atolls in the eastern central South Pacific, bound from Raroia to Makemo. The weather got progressively more nasty, with nearly continuous squalls and an average wind speed of 37 knots. Sandwiched between low-lying atolls and strong, unpredictable currents, we chose not to heave-to. Up went the storm trysail and storm jib. We immediately went from overpowered &mdash lurching and crashing along &mdash to a relatively smooth beam reach at 3 knots, the Aries wind vane steering a perfect course. This put us in to Makemo in easing conditions at slack high tide at 0900, perfect for entering the lagoon pass.
Years later, we were in a situation where we had ridden an immense high-pressure area northeast from Auckland to within 240 nm of Niue. The center passed southeast of us as the system kept strengthening, and soon we were punching into rapidly growing seas, close-reaching in the 35-knot northeasterlies of the squash zone. As night fell, average wind speed was 36 to 39 knots, gusting fairly often into the low 40s. Nuku’alofa, Tonga, our next intended destination after Niue, was nearly dead downwind. So rather than continue bashing upwind simply to hold to our schedule, we dropped and lashed the mainsail and turned west-southwest under a small piece of rolled-in genoa.
Had we been farther from port, we’d have deployed storm gear, because the sea state inexplicably exceeded the wind conditions by quite a wide margin. Wave tops began to break fairly heavily around us here and there by midnight, and whoever was on watch would frequently take over from the wind vane to avoid risking a broach. We could see land by sunrise, which also illuminated some healthy-sized graybeards. I was continuously hand steering at this point, flying only a tiny piece of genoa, enough to give us some maneuverability on wave faces easily twice the length of our hull. Occasionally, I noted heavily breaking tops in the area, and I hand-steered away from several peaking wave sections that threatened. We got lightly pooped twice, briefly transforming the cockpit into a frothy aquarium, and full control required considerable body weight on the tiller at times. On the way into Piha Passage, we went by the island freighter Ikale headed east offshore for nearby Eua, the small ship completely disappearing in shrouds of spray during the biggest passing swells.
Not long after the airing of a television show about the 1998 Sydney-Hobart disaster, I spoke with the co-operator of a 65-foot steel ketch engaged in sail charters to the sub-Antarctic islands south of New Zealand. She was very familiar with strong weather conditions. Her analysis of the aerial footage emphasized the safety inherent in deep-reefed travel over storm seas, with enough speed to bob and weave, steering and avoiding the worst of the breaking waves. Very small differences in vessel position on wave faces can have immensely different results for consequent vessel trajectory, as any surfer can tell you. This strategy worked for a number of participants who came through the storm safely. On the other hand, some of the boats that left more sail up and bashed along on a straight course got trashed. The panoramic helicopter footage also highlighted the fact that over wide expanses of sea in the storm, the waves were quite manageable. But from time to time, an immense wave would rear up and break heavily. Many storm accounts discuss how everything was under control for hours, until all of a sudden, a particularly huge wave came along and ruined the party. Caught in extreme conditions, this is the wave from which we must protect ourselves.
Capsize protection
Like most aspiring voyagers, we pored over the literature on handling heavy weather before we left on “the big trip.” We read accounts of lying ahull under bare poles and towing warps. Some folks obviously got away with the former strategy and lived to write about it. We’ve since completely rejected this possibility under any circumstances for our own heavy-weather use. It’s counter-intuitive: If you paddle a kayak or surfboard out through the breakers, what happens if you turn sideways and sit there in response to an oncoming wave? You capsize. On a larger scale, I don’t know any captains who develop a sudden urge to steer beam-to in steep, treacherous seas.
While anchored securely one year at Great Barrier Island off New Zealand’s North Island, we listened with broken hearts to the rescuer side of VHF conversations taking place not far offshore. A descending tropical low had abutted to a strengthening high, not uncommon in this area during late November through December, deepening into an unnamed 70-knot storm with gusts to 88 knots. One family of four, still well offshore, had been rolled repeatedly. A helicopter successfully rescued them from their battered, foundering hull. Another couple, only 10 nm off Cape Brett, had also performed more than one 360� roll, and at 0400 opted not to wait for a daylight helicopter rescue &mdash they’d take their chances on the rescue services of a large containership on standby. The ship dutifully maneuvered alongside in the horrendous conditions and fired down two rescue harnesses. No one knows exactly what happened next, except that one harness came up with the male captain, the other came up empty. The sailboat was never seen intact again, almost certainly crushed under the ship, and the captain’s female sailing partner was lost. Both boats were “lying ahull under bare poles,” no heavy-weather gear deployed, no proactive plan.
So what does work? I interviewed a number of sailors who successfully weathered some of the worst areas of the infamous Queen’s Birthday Storm by towing automobile tires. The idea is to orient the bow downwind, to minimize strain and go with the flow, while controlling one’s progress on passing wave faces. The crews were adamant about the critical nature of space between the tires and the stern (about two wave cycles back), and the number and size of the tires for the vessel in question. Some Kiwis have this down to a science &mdash I asked them what I’d need for our boat, which is 15 gross tons, and they rattled off very consistent answers on the size and number of used radials I ought to chain together for the tow. They all described the visible “sucking action” of the tire array as strain maximized, lifting the transom up and through the tops of foaming wave crests. This strategy, however, requires lugging bulky, black, oxidized tires around with you.
A more compact solution is to use any of a number of commercially produced storm drogues that employ a lone drag device, often single cones or strap baskets. When streamed from astern, the intention of these drag devices is to cut down on boat speed for a vessel heading to leeward in big seas on steep wave faces. Examples of these devices include the nylon webbing-based Galerider drogue; and fabric-based drogues like the Sea Brake, Delta drogues, and drogues from Shewmon. (See Sea anchors and drogues on page 46.) In many heavy-weather situations, a drogue can be an effective way to keep a boat under control. Using these devices does require that the boat be actively steered or it could be rolled, can broach or be pitch-poled.
After the 1979 Fastnet Race disaster, retired aeronautical engineer Donald Jordan began development on a different approach to a drogue drag device. Rather than a single resistant device counteracting the force of the breaking sea, why not moderate and dampen the load with a series of cones strung out and submerged along a lengthy rode, with no active steering required? The U.S. Coast Guard-commissioned study of the utility of Jordan’s new device, now termed the Jordan Series Drogue (Hervey, Carol L. and Donald J. Jordan. 1987. Investigation of the Use of Drogues to Improve the Safety of Sailing Yachts. U.S. Dept. of Transportation Report No. CG-D-20-87, available from the National Technical Information Service, Springfield, VA 22161). By the early 1990s, the JSD was available, either complete or as a kit to make up oneself, from Ace Sailmakers. However, not all vessels have the structural requirements for safe use of the JSD.
Sea anchors
What if your boat doesn’t have the structural strength aft to handle a JSD, or your transom or cockpit configuration makes deployment dangerous? Parachute sea anchors have also undergone considerable development in the wake of ’70s and ’80s storm disasters. These large chutes are, like series drogues, deployed on long, weighted rodes designed to center the device at least two storm-wave cycles away. Unlike drogues, however, the vessel rides bow-to. Particularly in extreme conditions, this results in higher loads on the boat, more violent snatching and yawing (particularly for monohulls), and a slower drift speed compared to drogues. We found characteristics of the parachute sea anchor sufficiently compelling to carry one aboard. It seems to be the more popular choice for fishing boats and other vessels with large-volume work cockpits and substantial, flat, aft-facing wheelhouse surfaces. And testing indicates that for multihulls, properly designed sea anchors may rival the effectiveness of the JSD for preventing breaking-wave capsize, though the forces imposed on the vessel will be greater. Operators testify that sea anchors have saved a number of vessels in severe conditions. They are also highly useful for “parking” in a variety of non-survival rough-weather conditions.
We purchased an 18-foot model from Para-Tech Engineering Co. Both the JSD and sea anchor aboard élan are ready to go in short order any time we’re on passage. We’re happy to say neither has yet to hit the sea.
All of us must be prepared to deal with severe conditions. This means possession of proven heavy-weather equipment &mdash that does not require active steering &mdash rigged and kept handy for deployment. It means having a proactive attitude and a plan of action. Don’t hesitate to employ it, and do it sooner rather than later in deteriorating conditions. n
Scott and Wendy Bannerot, authors of The Cruiser’s Handbook of Fishing, are currently in Australia as they voyage the Pacific.
