Part 2: Back from the Azores

Part 2: Back from the Azores

© Copyright Peter R. Clutterbuck

I had originally planned on singlehanding back as a qualifier for the Singlehanded Transatlantic, but with the national press coverage on Severalles, plus the failure of our SSB, my family had got overly worried that we had disappeared in the Finisterre gale, and convinced me to doublehand back. John Chaundy agreed to join me. The start was on a hot sunny day, and our game plan was to beat Shockwave on the way back as she was the only boat that could beat us on corrected time. Spirit had won the outward leg on both corrected and elapsed time, but Shockwave was a day and a half behind on the outward leg, and had the capability of winning it back on the return leg. So we started behind her in amongst all the keelboats and water-ballasted monohulls, and watched to see which way round the 30 mile long island she would go. She went east, so we followed her out, launched our masthead reacher, and overtook. A school of pilot whales played around us. It looked like a good trip home. We didn’t need to push the boat to win the race back, which would ensure winning the round trip. All we had to do was avoid busting anything major.

The first night out, there was a big thunderstorm. In a squall, the spinnaker tack unclipped, and the snuffer jammed in the hounds. A thunderclap rolled overhead. We dropped it all over the nets in a hurry in a deluge of rain. We got the kite up again later that night . I was recovering in the doghouse area under the jet aircraft nacelle when John yelled "Whoa, whoa, losing it....

Peter...quick on deck.... lost it... let something go". We had two hulls flying under the kite in a pitch black night, and the rudder was grabbing air rather than water. It was time to let the mainsheet off and get the main hull in the water. It was a busy night, with the reacher up and down three times and the spinnaker twice.

The next night I saw a most beautiful sight, looking like a huge floodlit spinnaker on the horizon. I couldn’t believe that a yacht could have such a big kite, nor floodlights so bright. Then it started rising slowly above the horizon. It was the moon, quarter full! John saw something even more spectacular: a meteor hitting the sea in a shower of blue sparks. When the moon hid behind clouds, I lay on the nets on the weather side while the boat steered on autopilot, marvelling at the phosphorescence around the main hull, the daggerboard and the rudder - all neatly slicing through in a bright green glow - a sight that leaded sailors could never see.

Our SSB was working now, and we learned from the AZAB headquarters that QAB was 150 miles behind us becalmed, so it appeared that we had chosen the right side of the course, close hauled up the east side of the high. I went up the mast to take some film and video, and to check the rig. It was big mast, 62 feet high, with a 15” chord, and weighing a half ton, with the rigging and sails. We had adjusted the rigging to reduce the wobbling, and it looked solid as we creamed along at 12 knots close hauled.

At sundown the wind came up and we put a reef in. An hour later we were doing 12 knots, we decided to put in a second reef, furl the genoa and hoist the staysail. This dropped our speed to a safe 7-8 knots. I looked up the mast with our searchlight. It looked straight and steady. We had reefed early, at 20 knots true, as against 25 in our reefing schedule. I then collapsed in the doghouse, exhausted from all the deckwork. It was 11pm, and it was raining as the wind rose. It was pitch black again.

There was a deafening crash in the bow cabin. We must have hit something. John yelled “The mast has gone”. I thought it had broken the compression tube below the heel, and gone right through the bottom of the hull, judging by all the splintering wood noises from the bow cabin. I switched on our powerful aft deck floodlight. The mast and sails were laid over the side. I clipped on my harness and underwater headlight to slide down the forward cross beam and inspect the damage. The mast was broken just outside the starboard hull, the top 40 feet pointing straight down. One of the bottom spreaders was broken off, and the other busy grinding holes in the hull. The seas were now beam on and rising. There were two holes in the starboard hull, three in the main hull: one where the mast base had ripped out, one where the mast rotation spanner bracket had broken through, and one where the forestay had ripped through the foredeck and ripped off the pulpit. All appeared to be taking water. The broken mast was grinding pieces off the outer hull with big booming noises, hanging off a mass of halyards, reef lines, wire and so on. Visibility closed in. It was now raining hard. The seas were rising more. This was not forecast. The barometer was falling. The “Coast of Death” was busy accelerating the northerlies again.
Having got over the shock that we were no longer in the race, we set about saving the boat. There was now a wild motion without the mast in the steep cross seas. It was impossible to stand or kneel. We slithered around on the end of our harness tethers. We started cutting loose what we could with bolt cutters, and an emergency sawknife. There were over 60 points of attachment between mast and boat. We both got seasick, and weakened rapidly, unable to hold any food down, and grinding down to an exhausted stalemate, then having another go, wielding havoc with our toolchest and emergency gear. We could not pull the masthead up to the deck as it would have been 20 feet aft of the transoms. The gear over the side weighed half a ton, and would need daylight and a calm to retrieve. Daylight was 5 hours away, and now that the northerlies had set in, they could blow half a gale for weeks. We decided to try to salvage the staysail, boom and bottom 18 feet of mast.

None of the sails would come off, even after releasing and cutting the halyards. Their heads were 20-40 feet underwater. Most of the running rigging was slashed with the sawknife and the smaller wires with the boltcutters. We knew the three main wires were intact, and too big for the bolt cutters. The starboard one was under the mainsail and could not be reached. The port one had bent the chainplate and jammed the split pin, but could be released further up. The bar tight headstay with its furled genoa was causing the broken mast sections to grind away at the hull, and needed releasing immediately. The furling drum was sunk into a tiny recess below the deck and was very hard to access in port. At sea, at night in what looked like a rising gale, throwing up in the violent motion, it was almost impossible, but it was essential.

I tried for two hours to get the split pin out, first from the deck. Then I went through the bomb-bay doors and crawled forward in the 2 foot high sail locker to undo 8 screws and release the access hatch. There was room to get an arm through. Waves rolled in every few seconds as we attacked the system with hammers, vicegrips, hacksaws, boltcutter and allen keys. The pin would not budge, even though we were destroying it in the process. The allen screws were Loktited solid. We took the load off the distorted forestay plates by grabbing the furled genoa with two lines and winching up hard round snatch blocks. Everything was still jammed solid. We could not cut the wire as it was inside several layers of heavy Kevlar, and the furler foil. It would take two hours and many hacksaw blades. We attacked the split pin again. It was amazing to think that we would lose the boat if we didn’t get it out soon. The allen key wrench exploded into several pieces. My underwater headlight failed. We gave up exhausted. Miraculously, the other spreader had sheared off, and the mast was now grinding the topsides rather then the waterline. We decided to take a two hour break till dawn, and abandon ship if it broke up in the meantime. We were too fatigued, and were now having trouble just clipping and unclipping our harnesses as we slithered around. We risked making the situation a real emergency, and just had to have some recovery time. If we got the mast partly off it could pound holes in the bottom; and one of us could easily go overboard.

We collapsed below in our oilskins. The bow cabin was soaked with all the water pouring in through the leaks.

Items freed to jettison mast Tools used
1 10 mm Forestay 2 winches, vice,3 vicegrips, hammer, screwdriver, saw
2 12 mm Capshrouds Vicegrips
2 7 mm diamonds Bolt cutters
2 8mm runners Bolt cutters
2 6mm checkstays Bolt cutters
1 Inner forestay Vice grips
10 lazyjack attachments Undone/cut with sawknife
2 spinnaker halyards top section Cut Spectra with sawknife
2 spinnaker halyards bottom Cut Spectra with sawknife
1 Main and 1 genoa halyard Cut Spectra with sawknife
1 Staysail halyard Undone and pulled through (only halyard saved)
4 reef lines Pulled through
5 electrical cables Bolt cutters
6 sail slides Sawknife through multiple kevlar layers
1 cunningham Undone
1 Outhaul Undone
1 mainsail clew shackle Vicegrips
2 Genoa sheets 1 cut, one undone
11 staysail hanks Unclipped
1 furler line Undone
1 reef safety strop Undone

Total 60 points of attachment, 31 requiring tools such as bolt cutters, sawknife or vicegrips.