Para-anchor Olympics

Today was a good day. Initially. Winds got down to 15-22 knots apparent at 150 degrees downwind. Waves were 12’ but mostly behind and calmed down to 6-8 ft by the afternoon. We had just the jib out, as we have a broken car on the main and we might as well be tender with it. Looks like we made 200 nautical miles in 24 hrs between 9am and 9am this morning. Little birdies visited us and everything.

But wait, Mel remembered something from her last trip. They had birds visit them back then, but because of what always seemed to happen afterwards, Mel named one of her visitors The Little Birdie of Shit Weather.

And so imagine Mel’s chagrin when Greg relieved her from a nice, uneventful watch and said, “I want to deploy the para-anchor, and we should do it now, while it’s nice and daylight.”

Well, dammit! Some sailors, both men and women, when faced with bad weather one cannot outrun, relish these moments. Aha! A true test of one’s wit and fortitude! This is living!

Mel loves that for them.

Mel, however, is of the ilk whose stomach knots up when she visualizes all the fiddling with lines and canvas and walking about on a tossing boat that has to happen in bad weather. I mean, to her, the medical ICU was her most stressful rotation in her internship — there was a lot of fiddling, and a lot of dying anyway.

Fortunately, the stakes are much lower with this particular sailing conundrum. Greg can describe the situation better, but this is what Mel understands it to be. Tonight, winds are going to increase to up to 40 knots, be more on our beam, and we might get big beam seas. What this means is a lot of tossing and turning side to side. Our catamaran might even heel. Ewwww. So we could either run downwind, not necessarily towards Bermuda, for up to a couple of days, possibly hand-steering the autopilot at times, and climb up and down the 12-20 ft waves. Or— we could deploy our sea anchor and “rest” for a couple days. Ah, much less macho, and it has the advantage that Captain Greg can try out a sailing gadget.

This sea anchor thing is a very expensive parachute and 500 feet of line. You throw it off the front of your boat and it is supposed to allow you to just sit in the ocean without any sails or engine on. At least Mel thinks you do that, as she was at the helm the whole time trying to keep the boat pointed into the wind in big waves while she heard Greg, on the trampoline and out of view, huffing and puffing on the headset for 2.5 hrs. Our first deployment didn’t work for some reason and so we had to haul in all 500 feet of line, redo something, and then send it out again. Mel would ask Greg what exactly happened, but he is passed out in the bunk at the moment. And right now the front of the boat looks like it does when we are on a mooring ball, with ropes on cleats, headed out into the darkness in front of the boat.

Boy, this would all be a lot less scary if we had a moon and could see the outer space around us.

Doing this has successfully kept Mel awake during her watch. She is now just sitting in the saloon, exhausted after gunning the engines with a helm wheel that won’t lock anymore, watching the boat move nowhere on an iPad. Mel wouldn’t say the boat is not moving at all, however. There are lots of waves coming from all directions and we are bouncing around just like we were before. The para-anchor is supposed to neutralize some of these waves with “eddies”. Hmmph, says Mel. I’ll believe it when I see you actually show up, Mr. Eddy…

Blow comes through at two or 3 AM tonight. Will keep you posted. For our family tracking our progress, don’t worry if the boat doesn’t move. It’s supposed to be like that. I know it’s weird.