Travel Reference
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northerly gale of some thirty to forty knots making matters decidedly worse. Talk about
Murphy's Law! God help us is all that my tired brain could think of.
I took one final look at the chart and unbuckled my safety strap. I was feeling very scared
and depressed. I knew we had to eat something. Night was falling, and Gavin was calling
in alarm from outside. The noise was almost deafening now, and the wind shrieked through
the rigging like some angry banshee. Waves were blatantly crashing into us now, as op-
posed to the odd freak one. I could tell we were traveling too fast through the water; we
had to slow ourselves down. I knew too well that if she sailed too fast down the front of
one of these mountains we could just keep on going down, and it would happen before we
could do anything about it!
“Come, let's get these anchors into the sea,” I said. Gavin was sawing away at the helm
and could not leave his station. He kept looking over his shoulder fearfully at the onrushing
water. “Jesus Christ! Fuckin' hell!” he would curse from time to time.
I clipped on my harness and took hold of the first sea drogue, the blue plastic funnel with a
steel ringed mouth. I secured the bitter end to the free Gibb sheet winch, made sure it was
very tight, and then threw it in the broiling water behind us. I paid it out smartly and was
shocked to feel how it grabbed hold of the anchor and almost snatched it out of my hands. I
let the rest go suddenly and, as it took up slack, it whipped hard against the winch. I prayed
the solid old winch mountings of stainless steel would take this strain. There was very little
noticeable difference in her speed. I then repeated the process with the car tire. This time I
braked the rope on the powerful mooring horn cleat on the afterdeck and paid out around
two hundred feet of this thick braided line. There was a lot of elasticity in this anchor line,
and as the last bight snaked out, I could see the line stretch from the drag of the car tire.
This time we could see a noticeable difference in her downwind rush. I left the old sail as a
last resort. I was afraid of a holy tangle up.
“Good!” I managed to shout, above the shriek of the gale. “That's slowed us down quite a
bit. I'm going to drop the main!” I yelled in Gavin's ear.
“Just be bloody careful, Jon! All we need now is a man overboard!” With that chilling
thought, I crawled my way up to the base of the mast, snapping my safety hook on the vari-
ous anchoring points along the way. Grabbing the mast, I hauled myself up into a standing
position and made sure that the boom topping lift had all the slack out of it, lest it fall down
and strike Gavin on the head!
I could see how tight the sail was stretched in the hard wind. We were basically on a broad
reach skating diagonally across the front of these savage seas, and the apparent wind speed
was somewhat annulled. I released its halyard from the cleat and dragged the sail on down,
fighting the binding car slides all the way down. Painfully slowly, I lashed the loose main
