Could Have Been Catastrophic

Yesterday was a 24 hour nightmare. I wish it had been a dream so I could wake up and shake it off, but every bit of it was real and the consequences will follow us all the way to Hawaii.

We are currently 1,700 nautical miles from Honolulu. Under normal conditions, with Hazel carrying her full sail plan, we would have expected to arrive in about twelve days. After yesterday, that timeline is no longer realistic.

The day took a serious toll on Hazel, and her crew is exhausted but grateful to still be safely on deck. Several pieces of equipment are now unusable or beyond salvage. Many of you already know we broke our whisker pole earlier in the passage. Without it, we cannot run wing on wing downwind. Yesterday we added to that list the loss of our asymmetrical spinnaker, our Genoa, our spinnaker halyard, our Genoa halyard, and a starboard lifeline that snapped open at Zero Dark Thirty. That last failure nearly cost us Peter. I have never seen him shake with fear the way he did afterward.

All of these failures happened at different times over the course of the day. I will spare you the blow by blow, but we know the cause of each. None were preventable from the deck. The only way to address them would have been to climb the mast, and given the sea state, that was not an option. I made the easy choice to keep us on deck and accept a slower, safer approach rather than risk a life for the sake of speed.

To my sailing community back in Lake City, this part will resonate. What we think is good rigging from the service companies available in Minnesota and what actually qualifies as good rigging when your life depends on it are two very different things. This is a hard lesson learned, and Hazel now pays the price as we nurse her toward Hawaii.

The Minnesota service team crossed Hazel’s halyards aloft with her Genoa lines, skipped cotter pins both aloft and on deck for the roller furlers, and tensioned the standing rigging by guessing instead of measuring with proper tools. Many of these issues were corrected in Panama, but not all. They also repaired our sail’s sun protection with stitching that peeled off in thirty knots of wind. There are more examples, but you get the idea.

If you are sailing Lake Pepin, these are inconveniences. Offshore, they become dangerous. My advice, learned the hard way, is simple. If you are heading into open ocean, stop somewhere along the route and have a professional offshore rigging company inspect and repair your gear. If you can do it yourself, great. But once you hit your sixties, climbing a mast in a seaway is not high on the list of preferred projects. I have left that job to the pros. When we reach Honolulu, I will install permanent folding mast steps and only then will I go aloft.

At this point we have only the mainsail and staysail left in working condition. They are solid and reliable, but even with creativity, our speed is cut roughly in half in anything under eighteen knots of wind. Downwind sailing is barely an option. Will twelve days turn into twenty four? Time will tell.

I only wish we were pulling into Panama, Thailand, Malaysia or Mexico. Hazel needs extensive work, and I fear nothing in Honolulu comes at a fair market price. With that said, I hope we can find true professionals to help us source parts and get her back into fighting shape. Her list of needs is growing by the hour.

For now, we keep sailing west, mile by mile.

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Here I am with my life jacket on. I wear it most of the time, and whenever I move forward on deck, I clip in. You can see the whistle and the knife. My brother‑in‑law gave me the rigger’s knife, and I use it almost every day. It’s one of those items you keep on you at all times because you never know when you’ll need it. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to have a knife ready and accessible.

The whistle is mostly for Peter. As many of you know, he has some structural hearing challenges. If I were to go overboard and he didn’t see it happen, this whistle is my best chance of getting his attention.