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Your sails are your Insurance

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GENTLE tradewinds were blowing off the village at Huahine, French Polynesia as the crewman secured the anchor, then attached halyards to the sails. The skipper held the tiller and motored the 35ft sloop toward the half mile long channel through the reef surrounding the island. Halfway through the pass, the motor died, stopped, quit. The crew, Chuck Ryan, a lifelong sailor from San Diego, California, watched bemused as the skipper dove below decks into the engine compartment. With barely a pause, Chuck laid his hands to the halyard and raised the headsail. He walked back to the cockpit, trimmed the jibsheet for a beam reach, then relaxed as the sloop gained way and the stem began to part the green waters of the 50 fathom deep pass. When the water around the boat had turned to the deep indigo of the open sea, now well clear of the reef, the engine was still completely silent. The skipper poked his sweaty head out of the companionway hatch, looked around, glanced up at the sails and said "Gee, that was a good idea!" Home and dry? Fifty knot gusts roared into the open roadstead at Cabo San Lucas, Baja California, catching the crews of almost 50 cruising boats on a raging lee shore right during the pre¬Christmas festivities - a time of year when this roadstead anchorage is nor¬mally blessed with warm offshore breezes. In the ensuing miHe'e, twenty-nine boats were washed ashore through the 14ft high surf. (In the aftermath of the blow we saw that two thirds of these boats had their own stern anchor lines wrapped around their propellers.) Dreams, boats and confidence were crushed. But, during the height of the storm, the crew of the Cal-40, Amola II hanked their storm staysail to the headstay, put a deep reef in their mainsail, then started their engine to motor to freedom before their anchor dragged and they too became victims. One of the stray floating lines left over from boats that had already dragged to destruction, snagged Amola's pro¬peller and her engine quit. The crew swiftly moved to hoist their sails. With the skills gained from dozens of races.

 

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