The Worst Sailing Day of My Life
May 16, 2009
Groundhog Day had been a disappointment. But I was not ready to give
up. So a few days later, I noted that the river currents were
subsiding. The flow at Elizabeth was 7,000 cubic feet per second and
12,400 at Natrona. By the time I arrived at the marina, I was
disappointed to see that the current was still running at a slow walk,
but the numbers were saying that it had to be slower than Groundhog
Day.
This time I was alone. It was heartening to find that I could move
the boat from its trailer, rig it and get it launched all by myself.
Once again, I paused to take stock. The winds seemed good. The
forecast was for 15 mph winds from SSW. I measured erratic winds,
however, coming more from the South East, gusting up to 12 mph.
I set off for what was about to be the worst sailing experience of
my life.
As before, the winds drove the boat over the water. And as before,
no matter what I did, I could not gain against the current.
I began to look more closely at the wind. It was coming roughly from
the South. That meant that its flow was obstructed by a large hill
looming over the river. The wind, I surmised, might be whipping around
through a small valley, aligned with the West End Bridge. It would flow
across the river in front of the valley, along it at the marina and who
knows what in between. To gain on the current, I needed to sail into
that wind. But once I'd gained a little, its direction would change.
I'd lose power and sit trying to settle a flapping sail.
These changes of direction were becoming hard to follow. Then the
erratic character of the wind took its toll. It would drop, leaving me
to drift back with the current. When it would pick up again, it would
be coming from an entirely different direction. My sails would be set
incorrectly and they would flap about inconsequentially. Or worse, I
would have the mainsheet cleated (fixed), so that a good puff of wind
would tip the boat right over.
That was very disturbing and it happened twice. It is one thing to
tip a sailboat in a windy lake surrounded by other pleasure craft. It
is another to do it in a river, alone, with a current that is carrying
you inexorably away, in a channel that an hour or so before had carried
a large barge.
It proved to be easy to right the boat. I'd had plenty of experience
righting an especially tippy little sailboat over thirty years ago in
Sydney harbor. On the Bravo, there's a righting line underneath. You
haul on it and the boat rises majestically like Neptune from the deep,
shedding great currents of water, while you take a dunking. You then
haul yourself back onto the boat, bedraggled and dripping.
I was now getting quite rattled and I put back into the marina,
whose magnetic pull I had never really escaped and began to take stock.
Perhaps, I began to wonder, the nay-sayers were right. You shouldn't
sail on the river. It's just foolhardy. You'll only get yourself into
trouble.
The one thing I wanted to avoid was tipping. So I hatched a plan.
The beauty of a roller furled sail is that it can easily be "reefed."
That is, you can partially roll it up so that its wind catching area is
greatly diminished. That is how you keep control of a sailboat when
there is too much wind for the full sail. I'd lost my appetite for
bravery. I set off again, this time with a reefed sail, proceeding with
great caution. It would now be much harder for a puff of wind to tip
me. But it would also be harder for me to extract enough power from
lighter winds to make headway against the current. The river was
winning.
Alas, I just could not keep track of the direction of the winds. On
the southern bank of the river, opposite the marina, there is a row of
docked barges. I eventually found myself pressed up against them by the
wind. The wind was coming from the south, but it was whipping so fully
round the hill and barges that it was now coming from the north. I was
trapped, I mused, in the ancient sailor's nightmare: a lee shore. That
is one toward which the winds blow, carrying boats to wreckage and
sailors to their doom.
I was now completely befuddled. Nothing was working. I furled the
sail, drew out my paddle and began a slow, laborious and shameful
paddle across the river, against the wind and current back to the
marina.
Every nautical tradition speaks of deathly traps for sailors. On the
Rhine, the maidens of the Lorelei sing their song to lure sailors onto
the rocks. Ulysses sailed his ship between Scylla and Charybdis. He
became the hero of legend because he succeeded where so many wretches
had failed. As I struggled to navigate my boat, awkwardly juggling
paddle and rudder, I was one of those wretches.
John D. Norton
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