Smooth Sailing & the Forstay Saga

Latest Position: 11/30/08 1547Z 26 39.814S 50 32.221E

A good day today with the winds shifting a bit but still enough to make decent headway. So far the good weather seems to be holding and the seas have been calm. I am feeling good and passing the time listening to my french language tapes, reading some and doing small jobs on the boat. I sat down to write out the end to the story of my time in the Indian Ocean when my forstay let loose.
For any who may have missed the first part of the story, I have reposted it here with the end of the story following...

Indian Ocean Trouble:

It was about 10pm and I was sailing along under genoa alone. (I have been saving the repaired boom only for necessity.) I was going between 6-7 knots in a nice 25 knot Indian Ocean trade on the aft quarter. I had just layed down in my bunk and was awake listening to the sounds of the boat working when I heard a flapping noise on deck. It sounded like a flying fish or maybe a bird so I didn't bother to check it. A minute later, the motion of the boat changed. I went up in the cockpit and saw that the gennie was way too far off the boat. At this point my night vision hadn't quite kicked in yet. I thought that maybe the furling line had snapped and it had come all the way unfurled. I switched on the spreader lights and found my gennie 15 feet from the boat held by the furling line and the sheet. It looked like a spinnaker. As I looked at it I knew that I was in for one of those adrenalin-filled sleepless nights. The first thing I did was to grab the spinnaker halyard and fasten it to the bow for mast support. So I put the furling line around the winch and fell off the wind a little to take the wind off the sail. This worked pretty well except now I had to go and wrestle a flogging genoa over the lifelines and lash it to the deck. Around 1am I finally got it lashed down on a 1/2" thick U-bolt right behind where the forstay is fastened to the deck. It was under control enough to call my dad to see if he had any advice. He called some of the riggers who had worked on Intrepid in Marina del Rey and they thought that I should loosen the aft stay to give the forstay some slack to try and reattach it. I went back up on deck to try to furl the sail and after 3 hours I got it furled to 1/4 of it's size. It was 4 am and I was getting a little too tired to be on deck so I pulled up the main with a reef in it and went to sleep....


Indian Ocean Troubles (Part II):
After the first night I had managed to partially furl the sail and secure the furler on the deck. The next morning I went to work and by sundown I had managed to completely furl the sail and got it reattached to the forward chainplate by using a couple of shackles to extend the forstay. By the end of the day it was almost as good as new and I was sailing along with full main and my patched boom. After this I had 24 hours with no problems and smooth sailing. I was able to keep up a good 6.5 knots average with about 25-30 knots behind me. This was not to last. At about 4 in the morning the following day the forstay let loose again. The nut had come loose from the bolt that was holding the furler to the shackle. With the heavy winds the sail was unfurled in no time. This time it was much crazier up on deck. I was often burying the bow of the boat in waves and it was all I could do to keep from getting thrown off. After a couple of hours I was able to get the furler lashed down to the deck but somehow during all this the forstay snapped inside the furler and had knotted itself inside. I couldn't pull down the furler or spin it. By the end of the day I had managed to get the bottom 2/3 of the sail furled but the top 1/3 was still flogging. Each time the sail filled with wind it would slam the rig. It was agonizing to watch this happening and not knowing how much more damage was being done. I had been studying the charts a couple of days prior and knew I was coming up on an Island called Rodrigues. After talking to friend and world sailor, Rob Jordan, who had been there, I decided to pull in so I could deal with pulling down my sail out of the wind. I was still 200 miles out from Rodrigues so it was back to work on deck. I was able to wrap a spinnaker halyard around the roller furler and that helped stop the top of the sail from flogging so much. That night the lines holding the furler to the deck snapped. The full weight of the top third of the sail went on the spinnaker halyard that was wrapped around it. I had had 2 lines wrapped around the sail and they both had chaffed completely through and broke. Now after I had wrapped the spinnaker halyard around the furler a couple of times I didn't have enough rope to make it back down to the deck. I clipped it on to the pulpit and now with the weight of the sail on it, the pulpit bent all out of shape in seconds. By the time I got it relashed to the deck, the pulpit was a mess and all the lifelines were slack. I was completely exhausted and though the stiuation was not good, I didn't have the strength to do anything else. I went down below for some sleep not knowing waht to expect next. In the middle of the night the wind dropped from 25-30 to 15 knots and in the morning I was able to wind shadow the genoa with my mainsail. The sail had completely stopped flogging. The seas had also calmed down a bit and it was a good quick sail into Rodrigues around 4 that afternoon. I have posted in previous blogs about my 30 hours in Rodrigues and the repairs done in Mauritius.
Now I am 1/3 of my way to Durban, South Africa out of Mauritius. I have nearly crossed my second ocean and I am officially on my way home!
Cheers,
Zac

PS Check out Zac's Store for the new 2009 calendar!