Storms and Torn Sails: From Malta to Gibraltar

From Malta to Gibraltar ...We barely slept that night. I couldn’t because of the noise and the rolling; Andrey was bounding around the deck until three in the morning. A steady wind of 30–32 knots. We were sailing on a beam reach. That sort of wind is perfectly manageable for our boat; it only seems a bit frightening at first. Then you get used to the rigging whistling and, if it weren’t for the periodic bouts of seasickness that refused to let go, you could enjoy the wild gallop over the waves. Squall A squall gust coincided with a large wave coming from an unusual direction, the yacht heeled over and... The boom gybed—an accidental gybe. The preventer snapped. The wave passed, the boat began returning to her course—and the boom gybed back again. The result: a torn mainsail, nearly all the cringles ripped out, a roller broken on the boom traveller track, and the genoa furler jammed. Later, after we reached Spain, in Almerimar, we discovered that the gooseneck between the boom and the mast had cracked as well. Everything is held together with bits of cord now. The mainsail is wrapped around the boom. You should have seen Andrey wrapping it in a squall, sitting astride the boom... Every so often I go out on deck if the captain is nowhere to be found in the wheelhouse. And at that unforgettable moment I stuck my head outside, but... there was no one there. Unable to believe my eyes, I scanned the deck again, raised my gaze to the mast and, thank God, saw the captain astride the boom. Overwhelming exhaustion set in To get at least a little sleep, we hove to. The Nauticat heaves to well under mizzen, but our genoa furler had jammed, and because the headsail was still driving the yacht forward, she kept poking her bow out of the patch of turbulent water and immediately getting smacked on it—the bow, that is—by a wave. So hard that torrents of water swept across the deck and into the fairly high cockpit. We found an unconventional solution. To counteract the genoa’s forward drive, Andrey put the engine into reverse. Everything churned and roared as though we were racing at no less than 15 knots through raging waters. They hammered and broke somewhere beneath us with such terrifying force... It turned out we had remained in the same spot all night, hove to. Sleeping in the aft cabin was, like, totally impossible. The din from both the water and the rigging was horrendous, plus there was the heel. It was easier in the forward cabin, but I was too frightened to sleep anyway. In the morning the sea was still very rough, nauseatingly so. All morning we rewound the headsail furler—the genoa furler, that is—in the hope that it would start working. Andrey was at the bow, I was by the mainsail. By hand, he unwound a hundred metres of sheet and tossed me a lasso-like loop. I caught it and hauled the entire length back to him. Then he sent it back to me. And so on, endlessly. We laid out the word “eternity” in loops. Even after rewinding it and finding the point where it was catching, the genoa still refused to furl. Bewitched. The second stage of our resuscitation procedure was taking it down and hoisting it again. The spell on the sail was not broken until evening, when we had just about resigned ourselves to having to drop it onto the yacht’s deck while under way and in the wind. When we did this during the day, it was great fun and went by the name of “man versus wind.” I almost caught the moment when the corner of the sail reared up above the watery abyss with a person hanging from it and shrieking desperately (shrieking because that person was very nearly me). As it was, the whole operation went ahead in light mode: I caught the sail on deck. And while the captain repaired something else over there, I lay spread-eagled on top of it, feeling with every ounce of my weight that the billowing genoa was stronger than I was.