Matt and I were sitting safely in his living room, sipping whisky and burning stogies and talking about last season on Cambio and next season’s plans.
Matt is a teacher here in Niagara and only has July and August off full time and weekends, but there’s plenty of sailing to be done and he’s good at it.
Matt was on board during the July 20 storm https://sailingcambio.com/2022/07/20/the-storm/ and the two of us worked as well as anyone I’ve ever worked with in harrowing storm situations. I like the phrase, “The wind hit us about 30nm down the lake and we couldn’t go upwind due to breakages, so we sailed a broken boat 100nm down Lake Ontario to a safe harbour.
The metrics for this storm were a sustained wind of 43 knots, boat speed of 14.2 knots, and following waves of up to 8 meters, or in the range of 24 feet. The wind and speed are right off the instruments, but It is hard to estimate wave height. I just turn around when I’m at a top of one crest and picture 4 six foot men standing on their shoulders from trough to crest. That’s about 24 feet.
I’ve already written about the first storm I had a bad experience with. It was in 1991 and involved a 24’ Shark sailboat, 60 knot gusts and 24’ waves. Sharks don’t usually have instruments so I don’t know how fast we were going before, well, disaster happened. But it was fast. The short story is that I broached, was washed off my sailboat 8 miles offshore and had to swim into shore. The whole story is here in the log: https://sailingcambio.com/1991/09/21/washed-off-my-sailboat/
I recall one ‘interesting’ crossing from Oakville to St. Catharines with Judy Kingsley. We had just stopped and got a bucket of KFC chicken and the sunset was fabulous as we left the dock under spinnaker. The sun went down, so did the spinnaker, and we followed a compass course to St. Catharines. There was great chatter and lots of talk among Judy and I on the Shark that was fairly newly mine. The waves built in the dark from the west and we were battered on the starboard quarter until we turned west to surf. We just accepted that we’d have a couple of hours of uncomfortable surfing motion in big waves and then have to turn right to get into the harbour. The wind shifted North and that helped us when we turned towards the harbour but we were still surfing down waves. I don’t recall how big, but big.
The harbour pours out quite a bit of volume and when the wind hits it head on from the north huge standing waves park themselves at the entrance to the mouth of the harbour. We surfed a lake wave and plowed right into a harbor current wave. I held on to the tiller. There were 9 standing waves to hit with short fetches between them. And suddenly we were though and speeding up the channel under main and jib. As we went by the yacht club where a party in full festivity, someone yelled, “Look at that, someone’s coming in under sail!” then I heard “They must know what they are doing!” That’s when I got nervous. Then I heard a familiar voice yell the name of my boat “Humbly!” but Judy and I were policing lines and getting ready to dowse the jib and head into a very small space between two boats along the wall. We got there, didn’t hit one boat very hard, and breathed a sigh of relief when someone on land grabbed the forestay and we flogged the main and got it down. It was all a mad flurry of activity.
The lines were away, the sails tied down or stowed and I looked at Judy’s face. Then I looked at the carnage on the decks. The bones from the KFC bucket had been left on a bench and we’d forgotten them in the dark. It looked like a mad dog had gotten a hold of the bones and they were all over the cockpit. Judy and I could just laugh somewhat maniacally. It was an interesting crossing.
Four more storms come to mind, defined as ‘being followed by 4 men standing in the trough of a wave’, or 24 feet waves and appropriate winds, and all except one in Lake Ontario. Nothing awful happened in those storms except an exhilaration and great fellowship among the crew and a build up of experience that almost certainly helped me in the two storms where ‘shit happened’.
On deck and to be published sometime this spring will be that last storm, in a delivery of Richard Hinterhoeller’s Niagara 31 with two other doughty sailors chasing a storm down Lake Erie. Stay tuned!
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