Storm Tactics

A storm at sea is something every sailor fears. So far all Ive experienced in that regard have been brief squalls - once we saw the wind reach 36 knots - and a couple of times when winds were rising steadily towards 28 or 30 knots, along with a rising sea through a day sail along the coast.My anxiety level slowly rose with the windspeed but we reefed sail - sometimes later than we should have and at other times when it turned out to be unnecessary - but thats the learning curve, and everything turned out fine. Someone who had done masses of ocean voyaging calculted the amount of time they sailed in really bad weather was, from memory less than 5% of the time, and I recall reading a Blog following a yacht doing a complete circumnavigtaion during which they didnt experience ANY seriously adverse weather - you can check for yourself on bumfuzzle.com - the boat was a cat sailed by a young american couple who've now sold the cat and bought a Combi Van! It was a fun blog to read nut now theyve sold the boat and are having a baby! The point is that unless youre in the Southern Ocean you might not have to deal with storms very often, but you absolutely must know how to prepare and respond and have the right equipment for a storm if you do, and lots of this is covered in the Safety at Sea course. There also lots of books and stacks of websites and message Boards and the like where opinions and options and experiences are discussed endlessly.

Essentially as conditions detriorate and wind force increases, you have to prepare the boat in advance - such things as clearing the decks, stowing and making secure every movable item below, getting food, and then progressively reduce sail, change to storm sails and then bare poles if necessary.You need to think of ways to slow the boat down if sailing even under bare poles, and if it all becomes impossibly bad because of exhaustion or the state of the sea,you can stop the boat by heaving to with or without a sea anchor, or lie a-hull. This is how I understand what the books and Gerry Fitzgerald tell me. So what this all means is you have to be able to reef the sail, you have to have storm sails and you have to have a drogue or sea anchor.

On Sapphire you could take in a single reef and roll up the headsail. There was also a trysail but no track to pull it up on. So I decided she needed a second reefing line put on and a track for the trysail. Everything I read suggested you also needed a specific storm jib rather than just a partly rolled in headsail, and furthermore it should be on its own inner forestay - which Sapphire did not have. The reason for having a storm jib on an inner forestay is that when its in use it brings the "centre of effort" further aft toward the "centre of lateral resistance" - these terms refer to theoretical points at which the sail acts on the boat, and the boat interacts with the resistance of the sea - and by being closer together, the boat is more stable. Or something.

The thing about an inner forestay is that if you fit one - preferably removeable by the use of a "Highfield lever" - you will also need "running backstays" to support the mast at the point where the inner forestay will attach. It took me quite a while to work all this out and find out exactly what running backstays were, but I guessed I must be on the right track when the guy at Sydney Rigging that I emailed asking for a quote wrote back agreeing with my plans and offering to meet me and do the work. After meeting me on the boat one friday afternoon he told me they would make a tang first and I would have to get Adam to fit it before they could do the rest of the work. And I thought "What the hell is a tang?"