Middle of the night mishap

After leaving Mangonui at 7pm the seas gradually became rougher and rougher.  We said goodbye to the lights of Karikari Peninsula and headed off towards North Cape.  As we approached North Cape with head to wind, we needed to tack and at the exact time we were undertaking this manouvre, we were slammed by a fairly heavy, rain ladened squall.  Zero visibility, driving rain, gusting over 40 knots with the addition of thunder and lightening. 

We clawed our way to windward, under engine and staysail, for two long hours before clearing North Cape.  Visibility was as black as the inside of a cow.  We made the call to put the staysail away but as we went head to wind to furl the sail, we came around too far and in the pitch black, 2.5m swells, fighting all the elements, we lost our sense of direction and fell right off the wind.  It took half a minute or so, with the staysail backed to re-establish ourselves. 

 Furling in under these hideous conditions we managed to twist and jam the staysail on the furling.  And then we popped a circuit breaker!  It was back to stripping the forepeak of the musical instruments, baggage, other bits and pieces put there for storage, move out the mattress, to then get to the circuit board under the floor boards. When you are on board, under these conditions, everything takes twice as long and it’s exhausting.  Being in the bow was the equivalent of sitting on a bucking bronco!! The lesson to be learned from all of this,  is that the helming crew is to concentrate on helming alone and a second crew member to be monitoring the furling system.  Sharing the responsibility may have helped to avoid the above scenario. All of these learnings are shaping up our winning team.

Remember we were working under seriously tough conditions, rough seas and big rolling swell with whitecaps. Unfortunately you just can't capture the sea conditions and the photos do not do justice to the actual realities.