Day 11 (Gale in Johnstone Strait)

Today was a very telling day. It was the first day that we really sailed in really heavy weather and got to see how the boat stood up to it. This of course would be very important to know if I have any chance at all of someday sailing her around the world, and I wasn’t too worried about the boat, I had done enough research and read enough accounts of Pearson Tritons going through hell and back unscathed (one Pearson Triton was double circumnavigated), my only concern was how the mom would react to possibly a very wet, wild ride. It was also to be a major turning point for me both as a sailor and as a person.

            All these questions would be answered early in the morning as we picked up the anchor at 4:00am, after a night spent in the cockpit fretting over how we were holding and the proximity of the rock, and headed down Sunderland Channel under power, and with only a 10 knot headwind and small chop, we began to get a bit too optimistic about conditions in Johnstone. By the time we actually arrived at the junction of the two bodies of water, it looked bad.

As we tried to power straight into the waves, we had the engine at full RPMs, and still were only making a couple of knots through the water, when a much bigger problem presented itself. This was that as we pitched into the seas, nearly burying the bow, and having the decks constantly awash with at least an inch or water, the engine in the trough of the waves would dip completely underwater. Each time it did this it would slow and start to splutter, but it always came up running like a champ. However, we decided it would be wise to rig at least the storm jib on the inner forestay. I worked as fast as I could up on the wildly pitching foredeck, and even committed the shipboard sin of cutting a line to free the running backstays. The little heavy storm jib was eventually hanked on and the sheets run aft, and none too soon, for just as I was starting to clear the halyard, we took an especially big set of waves and the engine, submerged for the nth time now, finally died. Luckily we were able to get under way sailing immediately, and as soon as the sheets were brought home and winched iron-taught, I leaned over the transom, preformed the ritual swearing at the engine, and lo and behold, it started up again on the first pull, ready to go. This was the first and last time that the engine has died on us so far.

Now, with some canvass on her, and angling across the waves instead of into them, Darwind came right back under control. In the 20-25 knots of wind, she healed over nicely, just shy of putting the rail under, and began to slice through the waves at five knots. On this first tack, we headed out into and across Johnstone strait, sailing nicely until we reached the far shore where the wind increased to a moderate gale force and the seas built up over 4 feet. It was then that I turned a corner in my life and really knew that this is what my life is going to be.

I was standing at the helm, with one hand on the tiller, gripping it with an easy but firm grip, feeling the water rush by and moving the rudder in unison with the waves passing under the keel. The other hand was forward, gripping the handrail on the aft end of the dodger, balancing myself as the boat took each sea easily, being momentarily slowed in the troughs as she hit the wave ahead, then lifting her bows and heeling over as she picked up speed, before coming back down into the next wave, throwing two sheets of spray over the bows, the windward one curling back to wet my face. Then the forward hand would come off the dodger to wipe the spray out of my eyes and we were off again. All of this was happening in the ten seconds or so between wave crests, but throughout the two tacks, out and back into the gale, time seemed to slow for me, and my universe grew smaller and smaller, until all I knew was the boat and the next wave; that was all that mattered. I was totally focused, in a way that I’ve never been before, and I loved every minute of it. For all the boat or I cared, this could go on for days.

Understandably however, the crew did not fall into quite the same rapport of wind and waves and boat, and we almost gave up and tucked into Port Neville only a few miles up the straight, but just as we were nearing the pass, the wind started to go down, the chop dropped to only around 1 or 2 feet, and we continued on our way. Eventually we even had to drop sail and continue under power due to a lack of wind, where less than an hour before we had been sailing at five knots under our smallest sail in a moderate gale. The rest of the sail went by nicely, we made a steady five knots over ground with a helping current, and by 10:35am, we were tied up at the Port Harvey docks. Only six hours had gone by, on most summer days I wouldn’t have even woken up for another hour, yet I had grown immeasurably, I knew that I was ready, that the boat was ready, and I wanted it all, the calms, the storms, everything…