I found this photo on Sailing Anarchy, a really neat site if you’re into sailboats and racing. The site says, “Oracle’s AC72 took on a 25-knot (gusting higher) afternoon in San Francisco Bay today, and it all went wrong when a big gust sent her over on her side. The wing broke up leaving something of a yard sale behind as she was towed back to base.”
The America’s Cup sailboat from Oracle capsized today in the bay outside our downtown cove. Harmony heard about it somehow. Just yesterday we saw it slowly glide past the entrance to the park, and today it crashed and burned.
It was a day where I would not want to be caught out in. Here the boat spun and rolled and bucked at anchor, the tight wire rigging shuddered like a twanged bowstring and shook the mast’s hip like Elvis.* (There actually is a bit of a backward ‘hip’ bend in the mast in the middle, called a rake, which apparently is helpful in maintaining the mainsail’s shape.) My wind turbine spun as fast as an electric saw (and thank the fates did not fly apart), and the dinghy-soaked long sleeved shirt Harmony had clothespinned to the lifelines flapped and grasped furiously for a hug.
For me this day was out of the question for going out in the weather. It’s the forceful front we had seen on PassageWeather coming our way when we were moored in Fort Bragg last week, and which we left there two days early in order to beat to San Francisco. To the Oracle crew, this was an expensive day, a dangerous day. It was probably also a great day of learning. They know that they next time they get this new boat in this weather, they should not use that tactic again.
We aren’t quite so bold. We can’t afford the risk. If we do get caught in a situation like the other day, consider this: the best boat, with the best crew in the nation – maybe the world – was toppled. The difference is that they can treat a capsize like a bad day, even a good one. We don’t get that.
Our boat’s design is one of a kind. There are no forums to learn tips and tricks for safely getting the most out of your boat. In fact, every decision we make during sailing has the risk to topple us, or even break us. The sea has the capability to be stronger than every boat that’s ever taken to it. Our continuing challenge is to ride the edge without overtaking it. If we want to learn how Serenity sails, we have to do it from a fresh beginning.**
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Out on the ocean, before we put up the sails, first we have to read the wind and waves. We have to decide which of our three foresails to raise.
The big jib: vast, white, heavy, and makes you blind on one side.
The little jib: safer, slow or stopped in low winds, well-practiced.
Or the spinnaker: airy, colorful, powerful, and for extremely calm situations ONLY.
Next we decide how tall to raise the main – how many reefs – and whether or not we will be tring to go directly upwind or downwind. Either of these complicates the lines and procedures (in other words, deck work) we’ll need.
Once the right sail combination has been debated and decided, we must also try to predict the future weather as we move through our own little personalized pocket of the coastline, and we must be prepared for things to change for the worse. This will generally cause us to step down on whatever sail combination we selected from the outset, rather than embark on all the frantic and wild actions required of a quick change later on.
Well, sometimes we do. The decision of sails is one of the areas on which we tend to differ emotionally. When neither of you are expert sailors, coming from different sources of study on the subject, most of our sailing opinions rise from places of deep feeling. Harmony is usually the representative of the more bold point of view where we should try to ‘do it all the way’. Oftentimes my approach is generally from along the lines of, ‘Would we be sorry?’
Most times we come to a good alignment that works out like we expect. Those are the days we enjoy most but don’t usually write home about. Sometimes though, we do it my way and end up hobby horsing for an hour while the boom tugs on its reins restlessly. Sometimes we do it her way and the wind bats us around like a toy, and one of us ends up climbing onto the pitching deck, hereafter referred to as the Rodeo, to rope down our wild and powerful sails.
But sometimes when we do it my way we end up peacefully bobbing next to a pod of whales for an hour. Sometimes, when we do it her way, we learn what the three of us are capable of.
Through all this our knots are faster, our line runs on deck more logical, our feet surer, and our sails shape closer to perfection with the benefit of hours on each tack to observe, theorize, and adjust. We are learning the movements of Serenity’s body. I have long been of the opinion that you can learn a lot about a person by the way that they walk. The same is true of a sailboat. She does the dancing, your hand on the tiller is only a guiding hand on the hip. Learn her way, and you gain access to all her agility, all her grace, and all her skill.
Some people would say that her shape isn’t right. She’s too sleek. Her keel is too narrow and deep. Her rudder is too vulnerable and responsive. She is not a tank.
No. Serenity is an orca with an eagle’s wings. Do you see it too? She has so far encountered the sea with an eager enthusiasm – almost joy. As we ride on her back, this is sometimes exhilarating and sometimes scary, as I imagine it would feel to live on such an animal.
Despite her injuries over the years, the ways her body has changed with her seasons of age, I wouldn’t choose another creature, another girl, to bring us to our new life in the Next Places.
We have yet to have the perfect sailing day, where the seas are calm and the wind is strong and steady. It’s teaching us plenty, but I think we all ache to spread our wings.
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*Harmony might instead compare it to Beyonce, but that’s because she’s one of those weird people who still watches music videos. Weird huh?
**This is also playing out with our electricity. We ride tenths of a volt in our battery bank constantly, trying to figure out with confidence when our batteries have reached the point of no return – halfway dead. We have to live our lives in such a way to prevent this. It’s not easy. We both have laptops and i-things, which feel in constant need of recharge on one or another. We have the fridge always riding a line of cold enough, not cold enough, and too costly to run no matter whether we need it or not. We also have the electronic sailing tools like the radios, the handheld GPS (which runs off the house bank), our lights and the Doctor, whose bill increases the more vigilantly you make him work. Our fancy new battery monitor’s readings are more like a riddle inside a crystal ball for us to interpret.