Never Again

Newport to Bermuda

Setting The Scene

Deb and I have decided that it’s time to return the boat to the West Coast. 

So, after one more great summer on the East Coast, it was time to get the boat to Bermuda and then on to the Caribbean for a final “goodbye tour”.

Our initial plan had Debbie heading back to California while I sailed to Bermuda with Kim Comfort and Doug Sabetti.  However, as our target date of October 2^nd came and passed, we had to delay due to tropical storm Philippe taking direct aim at Bermuda and projected to arrive during the same timeframe that we would be arriving.

Eventually, we were delayed so long that both Kim and Doug had other commitments.  I had lost my crew and was having no luck recruiting replacements when my brother Bob contacted me and offered to help!

We saw what looked like a great forecast for an October 10^th departure and he flew in the night before to help me out.

(Two people may seem like a crew on the small side, but Bob and I sailed Bermuda-Newport double-handed a few years back.  I had sailed Newport-Bermuda double-handed a couple of years earlier with Doug Jorgensen, and we had sailed with three crew between the two places twice.  It IS shorthanded, but our past experiences convinced us that with a good forecast, we would be fine.)

It’s too bad that that once great forecast disappeared and was replaced by one that was far less desirable and very complicated.

Below is the story of our passage.  We will not be making any more late-season deliveries to Bermuda!!

Monday -10/09

We left the dock at 9:05am.  Five minutes late.  Pretty good for me.

Generally, it was an ok, but uncomfortable day. The winds were in the teens just forward of the beam with big waves left over from the previous day’s storm.

The most interesting part of that first day was sailing through the offshore wind farm that is under construction.  Those doing the Bermuda Race next year should double check to make sure their charts are updated.

The day passed without incident.  I even reheated Chicken Parm for dinner.  All was as it should be.

Tuesday – 10/10

The wind dies. This is strange since all forecast models (GFS, EURO, and HRRR) say we should have mid to high teens from just aft of beam. 

Instead, we have next to nothing?  Something is not right….

Later that morning,

Gibb Kane (Long time friend, guardian angel, and CEO/President of Routing Advisory and Technology Services for Adventuresome Senior Sailors, otherwise known as RATSASS) warns that HRRR model now shows areas of 30+ knots in Gulf Stream??  Other models show smooth sailing. 

We are already on the edge of not getting to Bermuda in time to beat next storm. Gibb suggests we might want to consider taking our delay now North of the gulf stream?

But we have very little wind?  Everything that we were seeing was below forecast.    Delay would cost us 1.5 days minimum and who knows what else might change. We decided to press on in hopes of getting to Bermuda before the storm. 

Really big mistake. Huge!!

Midafternoon wind increases to high teens. Exercising an excess of caution, we double reef the main. 

Late afternoon wind increases to low twenties. We have caught 2-4 knots of positive Gulf Stream current so no turning back. The seas are getting big.  We roll up the jib to take it easy on the boat and crew. 

Sunset, winds now 25+. Big problem!!

The roller-furled jib starts to unfurl from the top!! Seriously not good. It creates an hourglass-type wrap halfway down the head stay. We try desperately to deploy the jib hoping to reverse the process at the top. It’s blowing really hard. Jib shaking the entire boat.

Really really not good. 

Running out of options. Wind building. Sun setting, it was difficult to imagine much worse. 

We decided that the only option is to hold the bottom of the jib (lower half of hourglass) in place with tight jib sheets and then gybe the boat around in the direction opposite to the unfurl direction to undo one bad wrap at a time.

If this doesn’t work, we are out of options and will lose the rig. 

Bob drives. I hold jib sheets. Bob does two or 3 complete 360 turns. The gybes are not pretty. In fact, they are fairly terrifying, but it starts to work. Finally, the bad wraps are gone, the jib deploys as it should, and we roll it back up properly. 

Massive relief!!  

But the conditions continue to worsen…

An hour later the jib starts to do the same thing!! Shit. We catch it early. This time I drive while Bob works the jib sheets. I think it took two gybes. Things become blurry here. Just one wrap is left, and I provide Bob with a loud and inspirational speech about the life-ending consequences of what happens if he can’t grind faster. Bob lets me know this speech is not effective and somehow continues with his heart rate pushing 100%.

It finally clears!!  Saved again.

Once again, the jib is deployed but it’s now close to a steady thirty knots and we are not going to repeat this process.  The wind is building, we need to lock things down. 

The display below shows where we were and what we were dealing with.  If you look really closely, you’ll see that it is wind overlayed on the Gulf Stream current.  It’s not a pretty picture.  This HRRR forecast is the worst yet, and the other two weather models continue to show that we should be fine.

They lied!

Here is that same timeframe but with only the Gulf Stream.

It won’t be easy, but the jib must come down. 

So…we start the engine and slowly bring the boat up to a wind angle that is slightly off the wind. I go forward to the bow and Bob works the jib halyard from the cockpit. 

It’s an “exciting” ride on the bow but I am clipped into our safety lines and only a few waves come over the bow. 

We start to lower the jib but the friction created by the wind pressure means I have to pull the jib down foot by foot.  It takes a while.  I offer Bob more encouragement to ease the (*&*(#@ halyard.  Luckily, the jib comes down inside the lifelines and I manage to keep the luff gathered up forward. 

Suddenly we are hit by a huge wave, the bow leaps up, depositing me in the air while it begins its journey down into the trough of the wave. As I descend the bow submerges and I come down into two feet of water and am washed back 4-6 feet!!  My life jacket deploys!!  

Once again lucky to be heading almost right into the waves, so when the water recedes, I am still on the boat!!

(Later Bob points out that I am the only person that has had his lifejacket deploy at both ends of Morpheus!)

Now, looking somewhat like the Michelin Man, I work on securing the jib to the inside of our lifelines. Eventually, I was able to get three sail ties secured and start my way aft to safety. 

Wait there’s more…

Earlier I had noticed the leeward lower shroud seemed a bit loose. When I grabbed it on my way aft it was VERY loose!  WTF?  The mast must have been pumping like crazy in those waves. Upon closer inspection, I saw that neither the lower nor upper shrouds had been properly re-installed with cotter pins to keep the lower section of the turnbuckles from working loose!!  When it rains it pours!!  

I carry cotter pins onboard and was able to go below grab a few and then return and properly tighten the shrouds and install new cotter pins. 

(BTW – this is hugely embarrassing for me that I did not catch this mistake earlier!  We know someone who lost his rig for the very same reason earlier this Summer.  It escaped my eye, and that of the rig inspector that checked us out prior to departure!)

It’s now 8 p.m. and while our immediate troubles seemed behind us, our forecast info was suggesting that we’d have 30+ knots and possibly more until sunrise. 

It had already been challenging, we had a long night ahead of us and the strong possibility that the weather could get worse. 

I decided to reduce sail completely and motor ahead just fast enough to allow us to keep the bow pointed 20-30 degrees off the wind and waves. The current was taking us right towards Bermuda. No need to rush. We dropped the main which was captured by the jacklines and stack pack and then wrapped a spare jib sheet around both the boom and sail from mast to clew. 

This turned out to be a very good move. 

We continued our go-slow strategy just trying to keep things together and avoid any additional issues.   

I went off watch for a three-hour nap while Bob sat under the dodger with the autopilot remote in hand keeping our bow just off the wind.

A couple of hours later, while sound asleep I heard a very urgent call from Bob. Down below things seemed good, but Bob was clearly distressed.  I jumped up, asking to be told what the problem was. Bob said he couldn’t keep the bow into the waves, and it was being blown to leeward. I asked what the windspeed was and heard 15. That seemed to match what I was sensing down below, but not his level of stress. So, I asked again.  15 knots??  NO, said Bob, Fifty!  I said “Five Zero” knots!!??  50 knots????

Bob says YES FIFTY!!  

Holy Shit!!

We shift positions and I “drove” for a while. We are in the middle of an intense squall. Hard to tell but it looked like a total whiteout. All I could think of was Captain Ron and the movie quote “It’s just a squall. They come on you fast, and they leave you fast!”

Why was it hard to tell?? Well, I guess I’ve totally forgotten to mention the absolute lack of any moon. It was so so dark out!! So dark that eyes open, or eyes closed, it all looked the same.

Except that is when the lightning that was all around us lit up the sky.  This squall came with an extra helping of lightning and to me, that is the scariest stuff because you just can’t do anything about it.

Anyway, the 50-knot squall did pass very quickly and we were back to dealing with gulf stream waves and 22-30 knot winds for the next few hours.  

At least the current was taking us in the correct direction at 1-2 knots. 

It was during this watch that I realized we had friends and relatives at home possibly watching us drifting with the current. No doubt they were concerned, so I started working on contacting them. 

In the big waves, our new Starlink was useless and could not connect. But I had Iridium Go as a backup for email and used Sailmail to let folks know we were unhappy but safe and relatively sound.

Gibb Kane had been following us closely. He and my wife Debbie were very happy to hear we were ok. It turns out that Gibb had already notified the Coast Guard that we might be in trouble.  According to him, their response was “Boy, they are really far away”. 

Anyway, the remainder of that night proceeded without incident as the winds slowly dropped into the mid to high teens.

Wednesday – 10/11

Go slow day.  Both of us clearly recovering from post-traumatic stress of the day before. 

That previously mentioned BIG low-pressure system was forecast to spin off the Carolina’s coast that night and pass right over Bermuda.  The strong winds attached to this low were forecast to extend almost 200 miles north of Bermuda as it passed Friday afternoon/night. 

After the previous day drifting in the Gulf Stream, we clearly were not going to beat that system to Bermuda.

Our plan for the day was to sail towards Bermuda but to stop well short of where those winds would be. 

We spent the entire day sailing under only double reefed main in 12-18 knots of wind. We were slow!  But that was fine.

Our combined progress during Tuesday and Wednesday ended up being approximately 80nm!!  (We are normally doing 170+ miles a day without trying!)

Thursday – 10/12

This was supposed to be our arrival day.  Instead, it became our go-nowhere day.  

When the sun rose on Thursday morning we had made just about as much progress as we wanted. So, when the wind dropped to low single digits, we were happy going nowhere.

Later we sailed/drifted for a few hours to the east, and then a few hours back and a bit more to the west.

Little or no progress towards Bermuda was made on this day. I was a little worried about Bob’s state of mind when he came below after one watch laughing and saying he’d just spent three hours “Bobbing Around”. He really thought that was pretty funny!!

We didn’t make much progress, but we did have a plan. 

Stall and stay above latitude 36N until 6am on Friday morning when the wind should fill in and the storm will have passed just enough for us to head to Bermuda safely.  Then full speed downwind towards Bermuda. Don’t spare the horses!

Why?  Well, there was yet ANOTHER low spinning off Georgia that was going to pass close to or north of Bermuda on Sunday.  Its arrival was forecast to be less than six hours after our projected arrival time.

No rest for the over-stressed!!

We re-hoisted the main.  And then hoisted the jib, rolled it up, and waited for our chance to head towards Bermuda!!

Friday – 10/13  (Friday the 13^th, how appropriate for this trip!)

Best sailing day of the trip.

From midnight until about 6am there was never more than 5 knots of wind.  But right on schedule at 6 a.m. the wind began to fill in as the low-pressure system passed by below us.

The forecast winds were supposed to be in the 22-30 knot range for the entire day. Winds would be a bit less to our West on the way in, so rather than immediately heading for Bermuda (we were still very gun-shy) we sailed to the west for 5 hours before “chicken gybing” and sailing some fun downwind angles in 22-25 knots under double reefed main and jib. The top speed was Bob at 15 knots.

The only issue with the “go west first” strategy was we wasted some time that could have been spent pointing right at Bermuda, and that next low-pressure system was on its way!

Saturday

Early Saturday morning, the winds dropped to single digits as we were approximately 100 miles short of Bermuda. 

Time to burn some diesel!!

Now the race with that next approaching low was on.  It looked like we had a 4–6-hour lead on it and that’s the way things finished.

Sunday

Due to a one-hour time change, we arrived in St. Georges, Bermuda must after midnight on Sunday.

We had sailed on 7 calendar days for a trip that should have taken 3.5-4 days, and our work was not done.

Luckily, Bermuda Customs had us anchor out rather than bring the boat into the Customs dock.  We were told to dinghy in to clear customs in the morning.

The only problem was it was supposed to be blowing 25-30 knots when the sun rose on Sunday!!

So, we had to do the following all before our first dark n’ stormy.

• Assemble the Fortress storm anchor.
• Anchor
• Get the dinghy on deck
• Inflate the dinghy.
• Get the outboard engine up from down below and install it on its stern mount.

It wasn’t until about 3am that we got around to those dark n’ stormys, but they have never tasted so good!!!

Thanks Bob!!