Narratives

Capsize at Cape Horn

Administrator — Sat, 24 Feb 2018 18:31:50 +0000

Capsize at Cape Horn

Administrator Sat, 02/24/2018 - 18:31

In this reprinted article from SAIL magazine, CCA member Rich Wilson shares the tale of a terrifying capsize at one of the roughest patches on the water.

Read the article here.

Passage East (excerpt) by Carleton Mitchell

Administrator — Fri, 09 Feb 2018 17:41:50 +0000

Passage East (excerpt) by Carleton Mitchell

Carleton Mitchell

Administrator Fri, 02/09/2018 - 17:41

Narratives

Excerpts from Passage East (the skipper/author’s log of the 1952 transatlantic race aboard his yawl, Caribbee)

By Carleton Mitchell

Racing a small yacht across the North Atlantic is not entirely a technical feat nor even an adventure in the classic sense; but it is a great emotional and physical experience for those involved – moments of exhaustion and exultation, of cold fog and blazing sunshine, of hard driving and maddening drifting. And always watch after watch the routine of living and shipkeeping goes on, day and night, with never a sense of monotony…

But waiting beyond the last buoy are the timeless elements of what I think of as the Sailor’s Three-Deck World: the surface of the sea, the atmosphere above, and the hidden depth below. Together they have influenced every voyage since man first ventured onto wide waters. A Bahamian fisherman squinting at the sky as norther clouds gathered once observed, “You eats what the cook serves”…moments of fatigue, discomfort, frustration, and apprehension, intermingled with elation, laughter, and just plain joy in the way of a boat with wind and wave. Such memories are timeless…

There is no sensation in the world to equal driving to windward in the open sea with just the right amount of breeze. Too much wind builds too big a sea and the boat labors and plunges and is stopped; too little breeze lacks the feeling of power and the exhilaration of speed…This is it; this is what we came for. It all won’t be as good as this. But as Sherman Hoyt once said after a miserable session off Cape Fear; “You’ve got to take the bad nights to get the good days.”…This is life at sea – reality, tangible problems to meet as they arise. All my doubts about hazards and expense and the rest are gone now we are underway, and they won’t return…

We are still close-hauled with conditions little changed from yesterday, except it is sunny.

We are still close-hauled with conditions little changed from yesterday, except it is sunny. At dawn we swept the ocean with binoculars but could not see any sails. So we are alone. The others are somewhere over the curve of the horizon, each little ship an entity unto itself. It is somehow a wonderful thing to imagine: five white sails against the blue vastness of the Atlantic, five crews completely cut off from all other men on this planet, accepting a certain amount of risk and hardship simply for the love of an intangible. There is nothing comparable except possibly the compulsion that drives men to climb remote mountains…

In the after stateroom I found the saddest spectacle in this round of the eternal battle of men against the sea. Dick Bertram, still nine-tenths asleep, was trying to get into his pants. He began on the windward settee, feet braced again the bureau aft and the bulkhead forward, but each time he arched his back and lifted his fanny to slide the pants under, Caribbee would dive and he would have to grab the edge of the bunk to keep from being catapulted to leeward. Finally he surrendered and slid across to the other settee…Such minor tribulations are hard to convey to a landsman, and especially the cumulative effect of them. Everything becomes an effort: dressing and undressing, preparing and eating meals, getting into or out of a bunk, even brushing the teeth or going to the toilet. As the weather worsens during a gale and the seas get bigger and more irregular, every job for self or ship becomes progressively more difficult and tiring…Thus the old saying that “the ship will take more than the crew.” Long before a boat is overpowered the men aboard can become too fatigued to handle her. It is something a skipper must always remember…

There was never a more beautiful night. We came on deck at 11:00 to find brilliant moonlight, the horizon so clearly defined it looked like the glow of coming dawn. The few puffy clouds drifting overhead seemed to be lighted from within and the path of moonlight across the water was almost blinding. Is there anything more fascinating to watch than the play of moonlight at sea? Anything more infinitely varied than the patterns of light and shadow? And especially when the track lies directly astern, so it lights the wake, emphasizing in tumbling disturbed water the sensation of speed. We roll, we boil…

. I was just a-settin’ and a-dozin’ and not a-botherin’ nobody when the old go-fast bug came a-sashayin’ up and bit me hard.

I don’t know when in my sailing career it happened to me, this craving for speed. I was just a-settin’ and a-dozin’ and not a-botherin’ nobody when the old go-fast bug came a-sashayin’ up and bit me hard. And it took. From a lazy character who would just as soon loll in the cockpit watching Portuguese men-of-war sail through his lee I became the wild-eyed type who laughs demonically as the lee rail disappears and looks around for something else to set. So long as the boat is moving I’m happy; when she slows, I die. A terrible thing to confess. Yet now I pity the cruising man I used to be: you get more real sailing – more the real feel of wind, and sea, and a boat – in a week of racing than in a year of cruising…

Bulkheads creak and groan, and the sound of water rushing past the hull at my ear has a new note. Parachute spinnakers are efficient brutes, but the strains they set up are incredible. Often I wonder how wood and metal can be engineered to withstand the strains imposed. Despite my prayers for strong fair winds here endeth the period of relaxed calm. Beating to windward at sea can be wet and uncomfortable, but things are always under control; forces can be accurately judged and strains evaluated. But running off before it is something else, the most difficult and delicate test of seamanship. But seamanship, as Uffa Fox once pointed out, is only another name for common sense – the latter commodity not entirely compatible with ocean racing…

The cold misting rain has not let up…A swell has set in from the north; it is colliding with the remains of the southwesterly swell of yesterday and causing something of a bobble. Hurts us in this light windward going. It is hard to keep up racing tension. Came on deck earlier to find a cockpit bull session, all hands laughing and talking, the helmsman casually joining in. So for once I turned heavy skipper and “broke it up” Navy style. Now feel embarrassed although I know everyone in their hearts agreed with me…Caribbee has been sailed as conscientiously as any boat I have ever been aboard even for a short race…But this transition has made our spirits sag, and consequently lowered our racing efficiency…we would never forgive ourselves if we lost by minutes and could think back and remember where we ourselves had thrown away hours…

Wind Waves at Sea points out that a seaman “may never, in a lifetime, encounter waves of the great heights…even if his voyages regularly cross and recross the stormier parts of the oceans in stormy seasons.” Yet always behind the calm there is the threat, the latent power, the implacable and impersonal force. On Caribbee, sailing out into the stormier latitudes of one of the stormiest of oceans, we had to be prepared for whatever the gods might have in store – as have all sailors since the first ship ventured forth on wide waters…

[W]hile fishing vessels larger and far more heavily constructed than Caribbee would theoretically shorten sail, we carry everything that can be hung from the masts…Which makes me consider the somewhat fantastic nature of ocean racing. Here we are, nine men, driving a fragile complex of wood, metal, and cloth through driving rain and building sea, a thousand miles from the nearest harbor; no one to see or admire or applaud; no one to help if our temerity ends in disaster. We exceed the bounds of discretion, even go beyond what we know is good seamanship – those basic lessons passed down through generations of men who have fought the oceans. In us all there is a devotion to the somewhat formless and unspoken ideal of simply keeping the boat going at her maximum speed, a dedication which carries us beyond considerations of personal comfort and even safety…

The ritual of morning stars is one of the most beautiful moments of the day: the navigator standing ready, at first a barely discernible silhouette as he identifies his prey by altitude and azimuth. Then an almost imperceptible glow begins to dissolve the weld of sea and sky, and gradually the line of the horizon becomes distinct. The day grows lighter, and the dimmer stars fade. The sky goes from black to gray, and slowly assumes delicate shadings of yellow and pink. Patches of foam from breaking crests appear gray against the darker gray of the sea, as though the water loathe to give up the stored blackness of the night. “Stand by!” suddenly calls the navigator. “Stand by!” you repeat, mumbling seconds as the hand of the watch scurries around the dial…”Mark!” There is urgency in the command, the sense of communication of a precise instant in the eternity of time...You record hour, minute, second, and the altitude, and the musical names assigned the stars by the ancients: Vega, Kochab, Altair, Capella, Jupiter, Dubhe, Aldebaran…Somehow it is a wonderful way to begin a day, a combining of old mysteries and modern precision. And you always feel grateful that again you are fixed on the earth’s surface in relation to all other objects: to the islands, to the continent, to the reefs. Somehow you feel less alone…

It is strange but I feel in the last few days we all have a different attitude about this race. At first there was constant speculation about the other boats, their qualities and potentials, and how they would be sailed. In a sense, for the first few days, we were sailing hard because we were racing the others, a purely competitive sensation. But now I believe our concentration is solely on Caribbee. It has become a fetish to keep her moving as fast as possible; it has also become our greatest pleasure. She seems to us so wonderful, this supposedly inanimate object, we can do nothing else. She has carried us almost across an ocean, kept us safe and comfortable, responded to our every demand, forgiven our excesses. In return, we have learned her whims and desires, and are will slaves to both…

No aspect of the sailor’s world is more mysterious to the landsman than the practice of navigation. To find a precise point in the trackless waste seems neither art nor science, but magic. Yet in no other sphere of progress has the continuity of development been so clearly based on the heritage of the past, nor has the accumulated knowledge been so universally shared by men of all races, creeds and nations. The word navigation stems from the marriage of a Latin noun and verb: navis, a ship, and agere, to move or direct. Its progress has been essential to the development of every maritime civilization. In Europe, the first glimmerings of scientific navigation began with the introduction of the compass, although men had already made long voyages without its aid. There is considerable evidence that an expedition of Phoenicians circumnavigated Africa 600 years before the birth of Christ. There is also evidence the Greek Pythias of Marseilles reached Iceland and beyond 200 years later. Meanwhile the Polynesians found their way from island to island in the vast reaches of the Pacific by crude but accurate diagrams of the stars, and Norsemen regularly traded across the breadth of the North Atlantic by computing latitude from the length of the sun shadow cast along an oarsman’s thwart by the gunwale of the ship…[T]he simplest implements of voyaging are compass, lead, and log. With these men still find their way for long distances in many parts of the world, practicing a type of navigation more art than science, “dead reckoning.” “Dead” is a contraction and corruption of “deduced,” where the ship’s position is a matter of deduction after consideration of all possible variables – compass error, current, leeway, and even human fallibilities of the helmsmen…Landsmen probably do not realize that for smaller vessels there has been no basic advance in navigation since that first voyage of Cook, with the possible exception of radio reception as a check on the timekeeper, and establishment of lines of position. Loran, radar, automatic position-computers, and all the other gadgets are for large steamers and ships of war, not anachronistic little vessels of wood and canvas. Instruments have been improved, tables have been made more complete and simpler to use, yet the tools and techniques are essentially those of two centuries ago. And let fog or storm hide the sun and stars, and even sextant and chronometer become useless, forcing the sailor still farther back down the ladder of centuries. Navigation is then no longer a science, but an art, and a prayerful one at that. Thus still, for the small-boat sailor, a landfall at the end of a long passage has a quality of suspense, of thanksgiving, and will continue to so long a little ships sail the seas…

For once a clearing sky did not kill the breeze. We go beautifully. Everything sparkles – the water, the sky, even the air. As I sit in the lee side of the cockpit and look ahead I am reminded of a similar day and circumstance; the recollection is so vivid if I could not place it exactly it would worry me until I did. For in ’49 we had precisely similar conditions when Caribbee left Kalmar, Sweden, for the tiny Danish island of Chistiansö. We came out into the Baltic from behind Öland Island carrying this same balloon jib, sheeted the same way, and the glint of sun across the water was the same, the curl of the bow wave and the toss of white foam off to leeward was the same, and so was the look of the sky and the feel of the air and the heft of the breeze. And we reached down the sunlit Baltic then as we are now reaching across the approaches to the English Channel, with the same feeling of unreality that goes with making dreams come true. Life can offer no more…

It suddenly occurs what a wonderful way this is to end an open-water passage, driving along for a landfall on a clear night at 8 knots, decks dry except for spray forward, sails patterned against the stars, a wide path of foam under the counter. No other sensation could match it. This is why we can never stop, we who once know the lure of the sea.

Sherman Hoyt in Command

Administrator — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 04:47:57 +0000

Sherman Hoyt in Command

John Rousmaniere

Administrator Thu, 01/25/2018 - 04:47

Narratives

By John Rousmaniere, The New York Yacht Club: A History © John Rousmaniere

When Harold Vanderbilt in 1930 turned his considerable energy and talents to the America’s Cup, he chose longtime CCA member Charles Sherman Hoyt as his chief advisor. “I have never sailed with a more proficient yachtsman,” Vanderbilt wrote of him.

Always called Sherman in honor of his granduncle, General William Tecumseh Sherman, he was a master of any boat he sailed, wherever and whenever she sailed. He started out in small boats and often led the New York 30s and 6 Metres in local and international championship regattas. Shifting to the new sport of ocean racing in middle age, he did so well in the Fastnet Race — he was skipper or first mate in three winners between 1928 and 1935 — that someone cracked that the best way to win the race was to first shoot Sherman Hoyt.

Stories about him were legion. During the 1935 transatlantic race, the 70-foot wishbone-rigged ketch Vamarie was running fast before a small gale, her sails held out by preventers, when her professional captain, Alexander Troonin, fell off the bow. The boat ran him over and spat him out in her wake. Vamarie had no engine, but that did not bother Hoyt, who was steering. He put the helm hard down until the sails were aback and braking her to a halt. Gathering sternway, he brought her bow off, got her underway again, jibed, and with the spinnaker flailing and the main boom and spinnaker poles in pieces, brought the ketch head to wind alongside Troonin, who was back on deck less than ten minutes after going overboard. Hoyt’s lengthy small-boat experience had trained him in the art of getting a feel for the wind and the boat. Still, it takes another level of genius to pull off such a feat. Sailing and seamanship appeared to come naturally to him.

So did fond and confident relations with other people. In England he sometimes raced in the royal cutter Britannia with King George V and Queen Mary. He told a story about her that has been related by a friend who heard it often, Fred Hecklinger: “It seems he was alone in the main saloon, eating some lobster salad, at a time when Queen Mary was occupied rearranging her clothing in a nearby water closet. The boat rolled unexpectedly, and the royal personage became somewhat unbalanced while seated on her throne. And due to a faulty latch on the door, Her Majesty came tumbling out into the main saloon not altogether properly dressed.” Sherman rushed to her aid, but was unsure of what to say. Not the Queen: “Mr. Hoyt, I do believe that you are more embarrassed than I.” Hoyt finished the anecdote with the comment that this probably was the first time that a Queen of England had got down off her throne before an American.

Everybody loved him. “Sherman Hoyt the whole yachting world has heard of, and I will say no more than that it is all true,” wrote Sir Fisher Dilke, who had found Harold Vanderbilt such difficult company. “He is also the greatest fun to be with. A slight, trim figure with brilliant black eyes, a skin as tanned as any I have seen, and a vast peak to his hat all set off his gay clothes to the utmost.” An English yachting journalist who knew Hoyt well from his many visits to Cowes, John Scott Hughes, described him this way: “Sherman is a smallish chap (not the ‘little runt’ he sometimes describes himself), highly charged with some extra special essence of vitality.” Hughes compared Hoyt favorably with an American general he also knew, calling him “a pocket-sized, seagoing Eisenhower” showing the same “amiable belligerency, intense tip-toe alertness, and all pervading impression of power.”

Defending the Cup

When Vanderbilt and Hoyt first sailed Enterprise in 1930, it was Hoyt who had the most Cup experience. Ten years earlier he was in George Nichols’s afterguard in Vanitie when she lost the defender trials to Resolute. The club then named him its official representative as the observer in Shamrock IV. As he watched the British gain a two-race lead and then fall apart, Hoyt became convinced that such a boat required a skilled, all-commanding captain, not the traditional Cup dual command shared by a syndicate manager and the helmsman. “Naturally I expect such a man to delegate authority and many details to subordinate members of his organization,” he told W.P. Stephens, “but the helmsman should be supreme and be responsible for the general policy.”

Hoyt found such a man in Harold Vanderbilt. The yachting historian Ian Dear praised “Vanderbilt’s flair for molding a team regardless of his own personality.” A team, and also a boat: Enterprise was 1930’s most innovative J. With winches and half her crew below deck, she seemed to sail herself and was dubbed “the mechanical boat,” suggesting that the skipper was “the mechanical sailor.” Some people wondered, in fact, if Vanderbilt had feelings. Your author’s father, Jim Rousmaniere, told about sailing in Vanderbilt’s Vim on the N.Y.Y.C. Cruise in 1940. One day the other 12 misread the circular and was just getting sails up when the starting gun fired, yet Vim kept racing. “The crew became uneasy. I looked at Rod Stephens and he looked at me, and he went aft and said, ‘Mike, we can’t do this.’ Rod told him Vim should go back and ask for a restart so there would be a real race.” Vanderbilt, said my father, showed not the slightest understanding of what Stephens was talking about. He eventually was persuaded, Vim sailed back to the committee boat, the race was restarted, and Vim won.

Yet Vanderbilt did occasionally reveal a touch of vulnerability. In his book about the 1930 Cup, Enterprise, he acknowledged that he came into the match knowing that most Americans wanted him to lose the America’s Cup. He understood. “None desired to lose it permanently, but merely temporarily to relinquish its possession, perhaps partly because they felt that we had held it long enough, but largely because of their love, their sympathy, their admiration for that grand old sportsman, Sir Thomas Lipton, who had spent so many years and so many millions in a futile quest.” He admitted to sharing those feelings. Vanderbilt was a boy when he first met Lipton, at Newport in 1899. Now, thirty-one years later, his Enterprise thoroughly dominated Shamrock V. Well ahead and nearing the finish of the last race, Vanderbilt handed the wheel off and went below to write in the log: “And Shamrock V, where is she? We look astern. She is about a mile behind, a badly beaten boat; not only in this race but in all the others, except possibly the first. Our hour of triumph, our hour of victory, is all but at hand, but it is so tempered with sadness that it is almost hollow. To win the America’s Cup is glory enough for any yachtsman, why should we be verging on the disconsolate?”

Another vulnerability of Vanderbilt’s was his sailing ability in certain conditions — and again he admitted it. Mostly he was confident. Frank Snyder, a future N.Y.Y.C. commodore, learned that much during his first exposure to the America’s Cup in 1937. In an oral history interview with Peggy Lord in 1999, he told how his family’s powerboat came into Newport after one of the races. “We rounded Fort Adams and came into Brenton Cove, right off of Harbour Court but very close to it, and we watched Ranger come in under sail. She sailed down before the wind almost to Newport’s docks and then Commodore Vanderbilt put the helm down and swung the bow into the wind. It looked to me like she went for ten or fifteen minutes before she stopped. And he shot the mooring as if Ranger was a little 16-foot boat, and—I tell you honestly—the bow of Ranger stopped right over the buoy. I have never seen that exhibition of sailing.”

Yet when steering upwind in light air, Vanderbilt was uncomfortable and, he was sure, ineffective. There was no weather helm and his preferred stance at the wheel, standing behind the binnacle with a mate down to leeward calling the jib, made him unresponsive to wind shifts. He discovered that Sherman Hoyt, the natural sailor, steered extremely well in these conditions, kneeling on the side deck with one hand on a spoke so he could see the jib. Whenever the wind became light enough to set one of the big, full genoa jibs of that time, Vanderbilt always passed the wheel to Hoyt. This was just one rule in Vanderbilt’s disciplined system of racing a sailboat. Hungry for information and advice, he organized his afterguards into committees who advised the designated tactician. His tactician in 1937 in Ranger, Olin Stephens, told how he and the other members of the afterguard “conferred continuously, away from the skipper, so that I would be ready without a second’s delay to answer Mike’s tactical questions, such as, ‘Should we tack or keep going?’, ‘Hold high or drive?’”

In assigning so much authority to others, Vanderbilt may have been compensating for another weakness of his own, which was a tendency toward indecisiveness when he was not leading the race. After watching Vanderbilt for many years from his position on the Race Committee boat, Gherardi Davis observed in 1928 that while Vanderbilt could do little wrong when leading, when behind he could waver. Davis put it this way: “Vanderbilt sometimes stutters.” He added, “I think he knows this.”

Holding their Breath

Vanderbilt and Hoyt came into the 1934 Cup match in Rainbow after almost losing the defender trials. Their opponent was the very fast Endeavour, with a skipper of considerable resourcefulness, T.O.M. Sopwith. These were very different men. Fisher Dilke, who sailed with both Vanderbilt and Sopwith, compared them this way: “The American, cold, efficient, scientific, most accurate, and subordinating everything, including himself, to the overpowering desire to produce as fast a boat as he could within the rule. The other of a warmer temperament, more impetuous, and allowing his natural vivacity fuller play. No less scientific or efficient but, though carrying an afterguard with talents as great as those on Ranger, centralizing action a good deal more in himself than did Vanderbilt.” To put it another way, the American was the CEO, the Englishman Sir Galahad. Because the first was the typical N.Y.Y.C. defender, and the second the typical challenger, the story of the 1934 America’s Cup match summarizes in a nutshell how it was that the New York Yacht Club held onto the America’s Cup for 132 years.

Harold Vanderbilt was an extremely unhappy man on the afternoon of September 20

Harold Vanderbilt was an extremely unhappy man on the afternoon of September 20, 1934. In what he would call “the low point in my sailing career,” halfway through the third race against Endeavour, Rainbow trailed in the four-out-of-seven series by two races and in this race by six-and-a-half minutes. In light air under genoa jib on starboard tack, Rainbow inched toward the finish line 15 miles away with the challenger sailing, as Vanderbilt recalled, “right ahead, looking very small indeed.” Gazing at Endeavour’s counter was like looking into the maw of failure not just for him but for the club. The system ruled, and Vanderbilt handed the helm to Sherman Hoyt and went below. He would recall that bleak moment this way: “As far as I was concerned, the America’s Cup was on its way back to England. Three down and one to go against a faster boat was a little too much.” Over coffee and sandwiches, Vanderbilt struggled to rationalize losing the America’s Cup while the Royal Yacht Squadron’s observer, Sir Ralph Gore, politely murmured sympathies that surely were barely half-felt. In the end he decided that no matter how good a change of hands might be for yachting, he surely did not want to be remembered as the man who allowed it to happen.

On deck Sherman Hoyt was calmly weaving some wizardry to make this race, as he would say in his autobiography, “one of the most astounding ones of my experience.” In an all but total silence, broken only by whispers by his navigator, Zenas Bliss, and the occasional clink of a winch, Hoyt sat on deck, his eyes focused on the jib luff and his outstretched right hand lying gently on a spoke of the wheel. Keeping up a precise dead reckoning plot, Bliss told Hoyt that the wind had faired enough to convert the original beat to the finish almost into a close reach.

Although he was easily fetching the finish line, Hoyt headed up until he was almost closehauled. Exactly why he did that has long been a subject of dispute among America’s Cup fanatics. Hoyt later said he saw a bit more breeze to windward, while Vanderbilt believed he was compensating for leeway. But Hoyt’s thoughts were as much on Sopwith as they were on wind. Hoyt was a master of competitive psychology. “I am certain,” he later wrote in his memoirs, “that any who have achieved success as racing helmsmen have always made a careful study of their opponents and, insofar as possible, have taken advantage of any perceived weaknesses.” He had learned a great deal about Sopwith during his summers of racing in England. One of Sopwith’s weaknesses was an obsession with covering the competition. Another was his not entirely respectful and trusting relationship with his crew, and especially his navigator. When the professional crews of both boats disputed their pay over the winter, Vanderbilt negotiated a settlement with his well-trained team of Scandinavians. Sopwith, however, refused to make an accommodation with the twenty-six Essex fishermen who asked for compensation for their lost opportunities in the Channel while sailing Endeavour home in the fall. As a consequence, this demanding 130-foot racing yacht, with her 7,500 square feet of sail and wire sheets, was handled by a pickup crew of amateurs and professionals.

An unreliable crew was bad enough. Then there was the question of the navigators

An unreliable crew was bad enough. Then there was the question of the navigators. Zenas Bliss was a university mathematics professor and experienced racing sailor who had been hand-picked for the job by Sherman Hoyt. Over on Endeavour was a merchant navy officer, Captain William Paul, who had got the yacht across the Atlantic capably enough but knew nothing about tactical navigation (reportedly, he was unable to predict the apparent wind direction on the other tack). Even if Paul knew his job, as a professional seaman in a class-bound culture with a commander who lived by a chivalric code, he was not in a position to be taken seriously by Sopwith.

So it was that three miles into the last leg of race three of the 1934 America’s Cup, Sopwith—still many minutes in the lead, still able to fetch the finish line if he headed up just a few degrees, but not trusting his navigator—decided on his own to come about onto port tack and sail over to cover Rainbow. Once the 140-ton Endeavour settled down on her new heading, which was a few degrees away from the finish, it took her many minutes to get back up to speed as her bow inched toward her opponent. “No one moved on board Rainbow, no one spoke, everyone was lying flat on deck along the lee rail,” Vanderbilt would write of this moment in his book On the Wind’s Highway. “The sea was quiet; the little ripples running along the side were quiet; the rig, the sails, the ship, the wind—all were quiet. Conditions were ideal for relaxation, yet everyone was tense, for everyone knew that a vital moment was at hand. Where would Endeavour tack? That was the burning question! Would she tack to leeward of us, ahead of us, or on our wind? I hoped she would try the latter.”

And that was exactly what Sopwith did. Very likely, as the boats neared each other, Hoyt reached into his voluminous bag of tricks and pulled out one of the oldest of them all—heading off a few degrees without easing sheets to suggest that he was sailing below the layline and, therefore, persuade the other boat to carry on. It worked. Endeavour crossed Rainbow’s bow and kept on going. When she eventually tacked to starboard to cover, Hoyt came back up and, within a few minutes, put Endeavour into his backwind. The challenger tacked again.

“How does the finish bear?” Hoyt asked.

“A point to leeward,” Bliss replied. Hoyt cracked off for the line.

Rainbow gained ten minutes on that second leg, never once coming about, while Endeavour tacked four times and lost ten minutes. “Rainbow’s Victory a Maritime Miracle,” shouted a newspaper headline the next day. The yachting journalist Alfred F. Loomis chose a different metaphor: Endeavour, he wrote in Yachting, had given the race to Rainbow “wrapped up in cellophane and handed to her on a silver platter with Sopwith’s compliments.” That platter was presented by Sherman Hoyt.

Evacuation from S/V Denali

Administrator — Thu, 25 Jan 2018 04:21:58 +0000

Evacuation from S/V Denali

John Rousmaniere

Administrator Thu, 01/25/2018 - 04:21

Seamanship

Narratives

One of the most striking boats in the Bermuda Race fleet in the late 1980s was a ketch-rigged 44-footer with her mainmast perched so far forward that she was unable to set a jib, and with a crew so tall they looked like members of a championship basketball team. She was named Denali because her owner, Larry Huntington, and his sons Matthew, Stewart, and Christopher (who often sailed together), had climbed the Alaskan mountain.

As Larry Huntington was going through Denali’s medical kit before the 1988 race, he debated whether he should renew the prescription for the antibiotic Methoxin until his wife, Caroline, told him that if the drug was ever needed but not on board, he would never be able to live with himself. Several weeks later, Denali was 250 miles from the finish when 23-year-old Matthew Huntington complained of nausea and began vomiting. A first-aid book indicated it might be appendicitis. Consulting the schedule for the race’s required rotating single-sideband radio watch, and also the list of doctors sailing in the race, Huntington found Dr. Peter Stovell on board Kittiwake. Stovell diagnosed appendicitis and instructed Larry to inject his son with the Methoxin every four hours. Stovell also urged that Matthew be hospitalized as soon as possible.

The options for evacuation were limited. Denali would need over a day to sail to Bermuda. An aerial pickup was a remote possibility. Even if it were safe for someone with abdominal distress, Denali would not be within the maximum 100-mile helicopter range from Bermuda until after dark.

That left evacuation by boat. When Huntington called the largest race entry standing radio watch, the 70-footer Karyatis, to request a radio relay to shore, her owner, Christos Kritikos, did not hesitate to offer to drop out of the race and carry Matthew to Bermuda. Kritikos joined a long roster of Bermuda Race skippers who offered assistance to vessels in trouble, usually by forwarding a message or by standing by a disabled boat until the arrival of a tow. Among them were Shorty Trimingham, Pierre du Pont, Huey Long (who interrupted Ondine’s record run for 16 minutes in 1976), and Emanuel Greene, whose Circe stood by a dismasted boat in the 1976 race for nine hours, 55 minutes. The race committee deducted assisting vessels’ times on station from their elapsed times (Circe ended up second in Class F), but in the case of the generous Christos Kritikos there would be no elapsed time because he was dropping out of the race entirely.

At 0100 Denali’s well-padded bow nudged alongside Karyatis’ after quarter, and Matthew stepped aboard with his brother Stewart. By the time Denali tied up at the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club marina late in the following afternoon, Matthew had been operated on and was ready to head out and risk much more than his abdomen on a motorbike.