freydis – Have Wind Will Travel

First Time With a Frenchman (Article in SAIL Magazine!)

May 17, 2017anniedike

There she is, hot off the press!

Man … I look a little TOO excited! But, it is exciting! Another article penned by Yours Truly, Author Annie, in SAIL Magazine, this time their Multihull Sailor edition, covering our Atlantic-crossing in 2016 on the esteemed Captain Yannick’s 46′ Freydis. I had a lot of fun with this one from start (catchy title, no? ; ) to finish, tying together a memorable moment from each of our thirty days at sea across the Atlantic Ocean. I have included the complete text from the article below so you can read at your leisure, but definitely pick up a copy when you get a chance and see what a great job the folks at SAIL Magazine did with the photos and eight-page layout.

Phillip and I also had a great time making and sending Captain Yannick a fun video letting him know about the article (it was a total surprise) and how it appears he’s right up there with the Vagabonds now. Mr. Big Time!

There she goes, crossing the Atlantic Ocean herself, off to Nice, France to find her way into Yannick’s hands. Go, little magazine. Go! Let us know when she arrives Yannick!

Without further adieu … I give you:

FIRST TIME WITH A FRENCHMAN:

A Virgin Crew Sails a Catamaran from Florida to France

Dolphins and diesel fumes. A blood orange moon rising on starboard as the muffler melts on port. A taut, glowing veil before a sun that will shine down later on its wet, shredded remains. We were thirty days at sea. A virgin ocean-crossing crew aboard a French-built multi-hulled rocket, bashing our way non-stop from Florida to France. That was the plan anyway, before the tide came in. The actual unscripted voyage, however, with all of its detours and unexpected deviations, proved infinitely more memorable than our foolish man-made scheme as daily it was feats and failures and one of the most exciting, exasperating experiences of our lives.

In the Days Before One: Fate has twisted plans for our French Captain. With both retirement as a fighter pilot in the French Navy and his family’s next chapter as live-aboard cruisers on the horizon, Yannick has one solitary goal in mind: sail his 2005 46’ Soubise Freydis single-handed, non-stop from Pensacola, Florida home to Roscoff, France. Fate, laughing, devastates his boat with a lightning strike that suffers Yannick six costly months at the yard but also an impressive re-fit and a loyal, motley bunch to serve as his Atlantic-crossing crew.

Crew emerges first in the form of Johnny, a weathered sailor and diesel engine mechanic who helps Yannick repair his engines and who—at 71, still surprisingly healthy and with bucket in hand—seeks to scratch “cross the ocean” off his list. My boyfriend, Phillip, and I—slugging away on a devastating re-fit of our own Niagara 35 at the yard—catch wind the Frenchman on the freaky-looking cat is taking on crew and shamelessly ask for passage. Having crossed only in cavernous carrier ships to remote, scorned places in his youth as a U.S. Marine, Phillip is chasing his lifelong dream to cross the pond in a small boat. A tomboy turned lawyer turned “this sucks, I quit” vagabond so I can seize the very type of opportunity a trans-at affords, I sign on for fist-clenching adventure and blue water experience. Two weeks from cast-off, the newly-formed crew scrambles to replace blown windows, step the mast, test new sails and pack the cat with thirty days’ worth of food, safety gear and supplies in the sweltering Florida May heat.

Day One: Heat pours out of the starboard engine locker as Yannick lifts the lid two hours out of the Pensacola Pass, with the high temp alarm still ringing in the crew’s ears. Boiling the extracted thermostat reveals impaired coolant flow and installation of a new one affords us a slightly high, but steady temp on the Lombardini albeit with a “lot of piss,” I note. The Captain finds it comforting enough to keep motoring across the glassy Gulf and amusing that the first language I start to pick up on is Diesel, not French.

Day Two: “It’s French for ‘Cheers,’” Yannick tells us as the crew “Santés” over an immaculate steak dinner in the cockpit. The motoring, while monotonous, affords us beautiful satin sunsets in the cockpit and leisurely time for quid pro quo French-English lessons. “Well how should I say it?” Yannick asks when I snort at his post-dinner inquiry of “How are you going to clean your dirty body?” Chuckling, I reply, “Would you like to take a shower?”

Day Three: Showers of glitter trail behind them as they zip and glide through the dark waters below the bow. Yannick and I forge a lifelong memory during a midnight shift change when we are mesmerized by a pod of dolphins slicing through phosphorescence. Forty-six feet away from the chugging engine on starboard, their breathy puffs and water lapping on the hull are the only things we can hear.

Day Four: “Did you hear an oil alarm?” Johnny asks, raising his head and greasy hands out of the starboard engine locker, a silk sheet of saltwater behind him, trying to figure out why, at 5:06 a.m., the starboard engine shut down on its own. Replacing a clogged fuel filter proves an easy engine fix. Making drinkable water with a faulty water-maker proves not and starts the slow parade of minor equipment failures and boiling of the Captain’s blood.

Day Five: Blood rains down from the fighting tuna on his hook as Phillip thunders “Fish on!” to the crew. Soon, boat sushi is bouncing in our bellies during a swift, sweaty two-hour stop in Key West for fuel, ice, water, “And a not so crappy can opener!” Yannick shouts, orchestrating our pillage from the boat as the crew shoots into the town like darts.

Day Six: Rain darts into Yannick’s eyes at the mast while he directs the crew’s first attempt reefing as a squall off the tip of Florida brings winds over thirty on the port beam. A merely intense but brief storm proves fortuitous as the crew learns their many mere discussions about safe practices did not serve them near as well as drills would have. The afternoon is spent doing reefing drills where the Captain has made separate reefing instructions for each crew member and taped them up at his/her designated post.

Day Seven: “Post A connects to Post B,” Yannick reads from yet another manual. I watch in half-admiration, half-exhaustion as the Captain flutters from one boat project to the next, cleaning out the elbow of the starboard engine exhaust, tapping new holes in the water pump, even sawing a chunk out of our only cutting board to make a mount for the windex that allows it to account for the fancy rotating mast on the Freydis. “That’s fine,” our head chef, Phillip, grunts from the galley. “If you use it all, I’ll just cut on the counters.”

Day Eight: Cans jump on the counters. Teeth jar in mouths. The bashing of the water on the hulls of the catamaran is like a nervous system message so strong it bypasses your brain. Muscles flinch without instruction. The crew grows accustomed but never comfortable with it. When two hundred nautical miles are slaughtered in a day, we know: with the bashing comes bumpy but beneficial speed.

Day Nine: “It is used, primarily, for speed,” Yannick says, trying simultaneously to learn and teach the crew the purpose of his rotating mast, one with so much windage it can be trimmed like a sail. Strictly monohull sailors, the crew stares at him dumbly, not nearly as intrigued by the ability to use the mast as a fourth reef as the initial inquiry that started this free physics lesson: With a rotating mast, what happens if you overtighten the shrouds?

Day Ten: The shrouds continue their murderous shudder with each crash of the boat. As non-catamaran sailors, the crew knows not how tight the shrouds on a Freydis should be but, as mere sailors, they know they should not be so loose as to vibrate and clang to their death with each romp of the boat through the Atlantic. The Captain sends satellite messages to professionals, checks hourly the chain plate on the port side and tears through texts on rig tuning.

Day Eleven: “Tuning must be done very slowly,” Johnny and I chuckle to ourselves, cotter pins in our teeth, wrenches in trembling hands, as we tighten the shuddering shrouds on each side the following morning and wonder how anyone could possibly do this quickly. Coupling this “slowly” advice from a rigger back home with a turnbuckle thread measurement from the previous owner, Yannick supervises the rig tuning and we slowly ease the shuddering of the rig underway.

Day Twelve: While underway on a cat, it is a myth you do not have to stow anything. Bowls slosh off counters. Wine glasses topple (but are quickly refilled) as the crew members “Cheers!” a record 243 nautical-mile day and peak boat speed of 19.5 knots. Steady winds of twenty-three and eight to ten-foot rolling seas entrance as the catamaran climbs and skids down each magnificent wave.

Day Thirteen: “Magnificent,” Yannick sneers as he eyes the melted end of the muffler Johnny has extracted off the port engine at dawn. Phillip and I now know we were wrong in thinking the eased winds and smooth motoring the night before had been a gift as we now cough up plastic melted fumes while clambering out from our port berth. Undeterred, Yannick earns his “MacGyver certificate” for the trip by reassembling the melted exit point of the muffler with the PVC tiller extender arm for his outboard, a blow torch and some hose clamps.

Day Fourteen: Hands clamp and tug the head of the spinnaker as she billows ethereal and enormous in the water behind the starboard transom. Her halyard cinched only in the winch but not clutched at the mast allows the sinister waters of the Atlantic to suck her down between the hulls and drag her all the way back to the stern. Yannick, in a sacrificial attempt to salvage both the sail and the rudder on starboard, emerges blood-spackled, dripping on its remains splayed out on the trampoline, wet, twinkling and tattered.

Day Fifteen: “Tattered glittery skirts,” I hear Yannick telling Phillip as he hunts for a hard drive. Mourning the loss of our spinnaker, Yannick claims, will be eased by a video he and the other wearisome pilots used to watch during long hours on the carrier ship. It is a four-hour rendering of the glittered, scantily-clad, cosmetically-enhanced women who populate the neon-lit night clubs of Ibiza, and he is right. We find ourselves immensely comforted by thumping pink panties.

Day Sixteen: “They’re my Paris panties,” I explain as Yannick eyes a pair of rather fifth-grade looking underwear with little Eiffel Towers and “Bonjour’s” on the lifelines. “I bought them special for the trip,” I say with a smile as Laundry Day proves special bonding time for the crew and reminds us all how truly few blue-water days we have left.

Day Seventeen: Left, only left. It freezes the wheel only when Yannick turns left. The ten-year old electronic auto-pilot on the cat starts to show its first signs of wear when it refuses to disengage when de-powered and allows steering only to the right in what the Captain dubs “ratchet-fashion.”

Day Eighteen: “Hand me a ratchet.” Yannick’s requests come muffled from the starboard engine locker as the auto-pilot’s housing refuses him any attempt for disassembly or repair underway. Auto-Turn-Notto will die. Soon. All we can do is watch and listen as each mechanical movement of the wheel is followed by a grind and squeal.

Day Nineteen: “Whee!” I can’t help it. Gleeful squeals leak out of me at the top of each wave. The boat moves underneath me like a stallion galloping at speeds equal to the 22-knot winds that hold during my entire night shift. But when a wave kicks the the stern out and shoves us almost ninety degrees off our heading, the thought that it might soon fall on me to right us, I stop squealing and decide to get my bearings.

Day Twenty: Bearings and bolt threads that were once intact and operating in the cavity of the auto-pilot now pour out into a pile of metal dust on the salon table. “R.I.P. Auto” reads the log book as I head up to hold my first night shift hand-steering. “Dress warm. Wear gloves,” Phillip warns.

Day Twenty-One: Warning him we “should not do it” would have been better, but the crew knee-jerks initially and simply tells the Captain we “can do it” as he struggles to decide whether to hand-steer the remaining eight or nine days to France versus stopping in two days when we reach the Azores to repair the auto-pilot. A stern discussion between the fighter pilot and the Marine results in a wise decision to stop our non-stop voyage mid-Atlantic.

Day Twenty-Two: “Mid-Atlantic Yacht Services,” she answers over the sat phone as the crew books a slip at Horta Marina and schedules auto-pilot repairs with MAYS fifteen hours out from the Azores. Morale soars as we see whales and our first sighting of land in sixteen days and immediately tanks when bad injectors on the starboard engine cause it to shut down an hour out from port.

Day Twenty-Three: I’m on port with the big “boat-saver” fender as we shove off from the hundreds of colorful, weathered boat insignia on the Horta dock. After nine incredible days downing beers at Peter Café Sport, exploring volcanos, and indulging on impossibly fresh cheese and beef from the very cows chewing cud and watching you eat from the hillside, we leave the Azores under port engine alone but steer our catamaran north to France by daintily clicking buttons on a screen.

Day Twenty-Four: The screen lights our faces as the crew indulges in book after book, movie after movie, matinees, even double features in beautiful fifteen knot winds on the stern. Crossing an ocean with a functioning auto-pilot makes even devil’s work too much for our idle hands.

Day Twenty-Five: My hands are tied. Yannick has outright busted me. “Oh, it’s a time change day,” he says in a mocking high-pitched voice. “Oh, we need to conveniently jump forward an hour again during Annie’s shift again,” as he squints his evil French eyes at me. Putain! Time change occurs during Phillip’s shift that day and I take revenge by choosing My Cousin Vinny as the movie that night as it seemed, among our rather impressive 500GB hard-drive of movies, the most … American.

Day Twenty-Six: “Try not to act so American.” Yannick advises us as we approach Roscoff. “No selfies, eat slow, wait for the check, and don’t revert to Spanish when you can’t recall your French” he looks at me. “We know the difference.” Fun, lighthearted discussions about our expected arrival in two days seem to jinx us as the day ends with a rather harrowing hoist of the Captain up his seventy-two foot mast after the main sail came flying down on its own inexplicably around dusk. We suspect the topping lift, inadvertently left taut, may have chafed through the main halyard. This mystery, however, is instantly tabled when the Captain’s descent brings worse news: the rig is compromised. The troubling shuddering of the shrouds earlier in the trip has caused five of the sixteen wires on the starboard shroud to snap just below the swage at the mast. Worried a wind-filled main or worse, change to a starboard tack, could dismast us, the crew decides to remain on a port tack, flying only the genny for the remainder of the now four- to five-day trip. Yannick spends the night poring over rigging textbooks and catamaran specs.

Day Twenty-Seven: Yannick spends the morning documenting potential cracks at the base of the mast and re-tightening the spinnaker halyard we ran to a starboard cleat in case the shroud goes. I find him later standing in silence, his heavy head laid against the bulkhead in his berth. The crew tries to rally le capitaine with the cinematic masterpiece that is Hot Tub Time Machine and succeeds when we settle upon Yannick’s mantra for the trip—“I’m on my waa-ay. Home sweet home!”—blasted at decibels that could be heard from Roscoff, rounding out the movie’s final score.

Day Twenty-Eight: I score no sympathy points from the Captain in my plight as I pass him at 2:00 a.m., flashlight in hand, on my way to the port engine locker. I can’t decide whether I want to prove or disprove my mind’s wild concoction—down in the auditory carnival that is my berth—that the port engine has become submerged, fallen out and left a gaping hole in the hull of the boat. Yannick laughs when I seem vexed at the sight of a completely safe, dry engine and says, “Tonight, I’ve only slept twenty minutes.”

Day Twenty-Nine: Twenty ships surround us in the English Channel. The radar screen that has offered only an empty halo around our boat for weeks is now filled with dozens of vessels. The excitement of the night shift is bittersweet as we all know it is our last on this trip. In an amazing show of endurance and inspiration, the boat and Captain, equally tired and compromised, carry on, both fighting their way to France.

Day Thirty: Fighter pilots scream by in a heroic show of unity seeing their former comrade coming home by way of sailboat across the Atlantic Ocean. Yannick waves heartily at them from the bow, his smile so big I can see it from the stern. A small crowd cheers as the crew and boat see it, the finish line, the final feat in sight as we prepare to dock the gallant Freydis in Roscoff. Yannick’s son’s is the first voice we hear in France as his small, powerful pipes rip through the air: “Bonjour Papa!”

Skype with Capt. Yannick

November 16, 2016anniedike

If you have seen our Atlantic-crossing movie, I know you want to meet this man.

We’ve had so many followers and Patrons ask me so many questions after watching the movie: “Why non-stop?” “Why did you have so much trouble with the engines?” “What other spares would you have brought?” All valid questions that Phillip and I are happy to answer, but who better to ask than the Captain? Yannick definitely loves to talk about his boat and the lessons learned from the Atlantic-crossing and he has graciously agreed to offer up some of his time to share those with you, my followers. He is a very interesting man, with many diverse talents and pursuits and I’m excited for you all to get to know him better.

So, here’s the deal. We can only handle so many on a call. Just like the Patreon Skype session with Phillip and I discussing the Atlantic-crossing, we will open it up to the first ten folks to sign up. First come, first serve. Reach out to me in a comment below, or on Facebook or via email. GO! I will record the Q&A session like I did last time and share later with you all here so everyone will get the benefit of the discussion. Also, I will share with anyone who signs up to participate but who has not yet seen the Atlantic-crossing movie a link to view the movie for free so you all can watch it over Thanksgiving (while I’m voyaging to Isla Mujeres!) and start deciding what you would really like to ask Capt. Yannick about the voyage. You can also rent the movie ($2.99 on YouTube) here or Patrons get free viewing. The call will be Thursday Dec. 1st at noon, CST. (As Yannick is seven hours ahead, this seemed to be the only reasonable overlap of time that wouldn’t force him to give an interview at 2:00 a.m. his time. My hope was that any 9-5’ers who wanted to participate could take lunch at your desk and jump on the call.)

Thursday, Dec. 1st at 12:00 p.m. CST — Skype with Capt. Yannick

Who’s in? Yannick wants to talk to …

Ch. 13: Auto Turn-Notto

November 2, 2016anniedike

“You know, I knew it was going to be things breaking, stuff needing to be fixed, repaired, maintained, but I thought it would occur at a rate that I could keep up with it. If it’s like this all the time, it’s no fun.”

I quoted that right from my log that day. I remember when Yannick said it. He had just come out of the “engine den” beneath his bed on starboard yet again and was blowing off some completely understandable steam and frustration with the amount of systems on his boat that were giving him trouble.

Yannick’s engine den.

As I have said many times, while an ocean-crossing is going to be hard on any boat and luck has a lot to do with it, looking back on it, Phillip and I believe the reason Yannick was having to deal with so many issues was because his boat had not been sailed recently. She had been very well-maintained and newly refitted and upgraded, but she hadn’t been out on a passage in over a year. She hadn’t been shaken down. That’s what we were doing … for 4,600 nautical miles. And, while Yannick truly was a trooper through it all, facing one headache after another, like anybody would, he did have his “this sucks” moments. Frankly, I think he handled it better than I would have had it been my boat. I’ve had my moments …

And, sadly, after all Yannick had suffered so far (engine troubles, the watermaker, the generator, the spinnaker), the worst of our problems still laid ahead. The first of which started to rear its ugly head when we found Auto would turn-notto. I wrote about it to my Patrons in my mid-crossing Atlantic Log #3:

Atlantic Log #3: Auto Turn-Notto:

This is what it usually looks like when you’re on watch on Andanza. If the conditions are calm or otherwise manageable, the auto-pilot does all the work and you can easily kick back, hands free and read a book during your stint as long as you periodically monitor the conditions (wind speed and direction and engine temp if motoring) and do an occasional 360 to check the horizon for ships and obstacles (few and far between out here) or, more likely, rain clouds or squalls. Since we left Pensacola Bay on May 29th, the trusty auto-pilot has been holding us on a steady course to France about 99.94% of the time (give or take). The crew is very aware of our luck in this regard and happy to do anything which keeps “Auto” happy, fed and functioning to continue this trend. This would be a very different passage if we had to hand-steer this boat all the way across the ocean and we are very aware of that.

Through a freak series of events, we learned yesterday, however, that if Auto WERE to shut down unexpectedly, we might not be able to properly steer this boat. When we put Auto on standby yesterday to test something completely unrelated, we were surprised to find … Auto turn notto (to the left anyway). It was wild. Once Auto was on standby, you would turn five, maybe ten degrees to the left, then the wheel would tension up and become too tight to turn any further. You could turn to the right just fine but when you went back to the left you’d lost whatever ground you had traveled to the right, leaving only another five, maybe ten degrees then the same insurmountable tension. Yannick described it as “ratchet steering to the right.” Surprisingly, each time we re-engaged Auto, he would take over just fine and turn to the left with no problem—almost as if he was mocking us. “See guys. It’s easy,” he would say with a laugh.

Because Auto kept successfully re-engaging, it was kind of a not-yet-big problem. As it stood, Auto was working fine, but if he went out (and we all, of course, separately imagined this happening to us during one of our lonely night shifts), we would have a good bit of canvas up, with often 20+ apparent winds on the beam and only the ability to turn right. NOT a situation in which you want to find yourself. So began our hunt for the cause and potential fix.

We started with the steering cables and the chain behind the helm. A long series of turning, tugging, pulling and checking ensued only to find the tension was not in the cables. The afternoon continued with many focus group sessions, diagram-drawing and plenty of head-scratching. After several hours we finally determined it was the arm itself of the linear drive Auto that—for whatever untold reason—did not want to disengage and allow the quadrant to move freely to the left when both put on standby and turned off completely. That Auto is one stubborn dude!

After some more configuring and brain-storming, we decided if Auto was to go out the proper procedure would be to remove the cotter pin and disconnect his arm from the quadrant so we could hand steer (to both the right AND the left!). Unfortunately this procedure will likely take place in a frenzied hurry while the boat is drifting off wind with canvas up and ratchet-to-the-right steering only. Again NOT a situation any of us are looking forward to but it is one we are prepared for and can handle thanks to some inspection, forethought and communication. Until Auto goes out, however (a prospect which may not happen) it is, as I mentioned, a not-yet problem. For now, we thank our lucky Auto karma and continue during the day to hold hands-free watches while devouring read after juicy read at the helm. It’s my watch now so you’ll have to forgive me, but I really must get back to this book: Horn Island Dream, written by our very own Pensacola small business owner at Intracoastal Outfitters, Wes Dannreuther!

“That won’t last another 500 miles.” Johnny’s not one to sugar-coat things. And he sure didn’t here.

He knew the fact that the auto-pilot arm would not properly disengage when we put her on stand-by was a sign the unit was deteriorating. No one disagreed with him, but we really didn’t have grounds to say otherwise. When Auto was on, everything was sunshine and hands-free steering. So we decided to not let it be a big problem until it WAS a big problem. The Sea Gods seemed to reward our faith by sending us a few days of sunshine, relaxing hours spent reading with fish on the line! Remember in the last segment when we told Johnny what to wish for on his birthday? It must have worked. Can you say: “FISH ON!”

Or better yet, get your “Sushi on!”

Yannick’s best tuna smile!

Soon the winds found us again, though, bringing steady streams of 20-25+, thankfully aft of the stern, and we were really bashing and crashing through some big seas.

The waves were set apart, mind you, with long periods in between so it wasn’t too rough but it did make for the occasional wicked bash on the catamaran floor and definitely a wet, spitting ride in the cockpit.

For that reason, Captain Yannick shut us all in the cabin and we monitored the instruments from the interior nav station during our respective shifts. All the more reason we were praying Auto would hold out there.

But Johnny’s prediction was holding true. It wasn’t 400 miles into Johnny’s predicted 500 that Auto started his “death squeal.” Yannick monitored vigorously and decided to take off the auto-pilot arm to see if he could disassemble the unit and perhaps repair it underway before it eventually died altogether.

Unfortunately he found the unit was crimped shut by the factory making manual disassembly and repair underway impossible. Yannick re-attached the arm and set to making an auto-pilot failure contingency plan as the unit squealed in the background. The B&G began to register “no rudder response” often, perhaps every 1-2 hours. But if you turned the auto-pilot off and back on, it would pick back up and work just fine. When this began to happen every half hour, however, Yannick knew it was done and all hands were ready and waiting on deck when the auto-pilot eventually gave out on the evening of June 16th.

Now, why did Auto die? Because he was 82 years old! In auto-pilot years that is. Yannick’s RayMarine linear unit had over 10,000 miles on him and he had already steered the four of us over 3,000 miles across the Atlantic, so, he really was on borrowed time. You couldn’t really fault him. He’d done his job. Like several systems on Yannick’s boat, it was simply time to replace or upgrade. Yannick knew he was going to have to do it, but whether or not to stop what was supposed to be a NON-stop trek across the Atlantic ocean to try and replace the broken auto-pilot in the Azores or have the crew hand-steer another 8-9 days to France and replace it there was Yannick’s dilemma. We all knew going into this voyage with Yannick, one that if you recall he was fully committed to make entirely on his own, that Yannick did not want to stop. He had even said this himself in the power point presentation he made for us to help us prepare for the trip.

Remember this??

But, also within this power point, Yannick set forth his four hopes for this voyage, one of which was that we all would:

I swear, that is straight from the Captain’s checklist. But Yannick also wanted to get his boat across the pond to France as quickly and safely as possible. This was no pleasure cruise. It was a yacht delivery with a strict mission and the crew was instructed to “have fun” within the bounds of that mission. No one faulted Yannick for this. No one said a thing when we sailed right past Bermuda. We had all signed up for a potential non-stop voyage. But, now, safety was playing a role in Yannick’s mission. Whether or not the crew could hand-steer the boat all the way to France (which we all told him we could and we all were committed to do if that was his decision) would not answer the more important question of whether or not the crew should hand-steer the boat to France. We all began to dress warmly, donning gloves, hats and full foul weather gear for our now far-more intense hand-steering shifts at the helm while this very hard decision fell on the shoulders of our Captain, Yannick.

Fun little video I made for you all from the Atlantic-crossing movie footage capturing some of the heavy bashing we were doing those days and the unfortunate demise of our auto-pilot. The saga continues. Stay tuned!

Also, exciting news! We will be drawing our Andy Schell offshore voyage giveaway winner THIS WEEKEND. I will announce the exact time soon and we will try to live stream the drawing if we have good wifi on the hook, so you can watch us pull the lucky winner out of the hat. If you’d like to be IN that hat, opt-in! Become a Patron, read Andy’s FAQs and email me for a chance to win this awesome Gift of Cruising!

Ch. 12: Good Mourning for a Spinnaker

October 19, 2016anniedike

Johnny’s inspecting melted pieces. Yannick’s cursing in French. I’m coughing my way out of our berth. It’s 4:00 a.m. the morning of June 10th and the muffler has melted its way off the port engine.

Tempers and temperatures were high as heat spewed out of the port engine locker and Yannick fired off questions: “What happened?” “Was there an alarm?” “Did the engine shut down on its own?”

We learned Johnny, who had the 2-4 a.m. shift that night (or morning I guess I should say), had become becalmed toward the end of his shift. That made sense as the winds had continually decreased during my 12-2 and we were bobbing now in maybe 8 knot gusts. Ooohh. Johnny said he had cranked the starboard engine to keep us moving. She cranked fine but he did not see water coming out (good for Johnny for looking) so he shut it down. That, in and of itself, did not alarm anyone as we had been fighting a multitude of problems with the coolant system on the starboard engine since we left Pensacola. First it was a bad thermostat, then the cap on the SpeedSeal wasn’t allowing suction, then the exhaust elbow was clogged, yadda yadda. But, we had not had an overheating issue with the port engine … yet.

Johnny said he shut down the starboard engine and cranked the port. It cranked fine and was reportedly running fine and discharging water. It ran for a few minutes while Johnny handed over his post to Phillip who came on at 4:00 a.m. Johnny said he went down below to rest but when he got to his berth on the port side he could tell the engine did not sound right. Sleeping like a log right above it, I couldn’t tell you if it was making any sound at all, as I slept right through the crank. It was amazing what you could learn to sleep through out there. But, even if I had heard it, I’m not 100% confident I could tell you whether the sound it was making sounded “right.” Thankfully, Johnny was listening and knew what to listen for. He rushed up to the cockpit and immediately killed the engine. I’m sure Phillip gave him an awfully funny look but when it came to the engines, we trusted Johnny. The temp was in the red when he killed the engine although no high temp alarm had gone off. Don’t ask me why. We never solved that mystery. Johnny explained to Phillip that it didn’t sound right as he made his way down into the port engine locker. Heat and melted plastic fumes emerged when he lifted the lid. Cue Yannick, who wakes to the smell of boat problems.

Yannick was pissed. Understandably so. Those engines were driving us mad. He was stomping around, getting tools, asking questions no one yet knew the answer to. He brought the muffler out into the cockpit so we could all get a better look and even I (the muffler dunce) could see one end was completely melted off.

After further inspection, Johnny found the impeller was missing a phalange and he thought it had likely lodged just the right way, acting like a valve, and prevented water flow through the muffler which caused the engine to overheat.

A broken impeller was totally expected. Yannick had plenty of spare impellers. An impeller that would break, shoot a piece off and wedge itself in a way that would maim the muffler was not. But our Captain was creative. He and Johnny started mumbling ideas out about trying to rebuild the exit port of the muffler and Yannick stood with a mission in his eyes. He started walking around the cockpit looking quickly in lockers, under cushions, then finally overboard in the dinghy and he shot a quick finger in the air. “Aha!” it said.

Yannick pulled the PVC extender for the tiller on the outboard out of the dinghy and started lining it up with the muffler’s melted hole seeing if they were the same diameter. Just when you think she’s not, often times she is. Fate was on our side gentlemen. The PVC extender for Yannick’s outboard, a part that certainly wasn’t needed while we were 1,000s of miles from shore and a part that could be easily replaced once we got those 1,000s of miles behind us was a perfect fit for the muffler. All Yannick needed to do was form the muffler back around it to create an exit tube that would jettison the exhaust water overboard. While we were aware we could bypass the muffler if necessary, as it appeared Yannick’s PVC fix was going to work, we all decided to help him pursue it.

Johnny had the good idea to use hose clamps to help shape the melted end of the muffler around the PVC pipe as Yannick heated it and that really helped to sculpt the two pieces together.

An hour later, it was almost shocking to see we had a working muffler and a port engine running once again smoothly. Like it had never even happened. This feat naturally became the hot topic of conversation on the public MapShare entry that day for our followers via the Delorme and several of Yannick’s friends from France said it did not surprise them as Yannick apparently used to dress and act a bit like the famed MacGyver in his youth. That surprised us. Particularly the part about the mullet. But the more I mulled it over (no pun intended), I started to see a resemblance.

Yannick’s friends claimed he had earned his “MacGyver Certificate” for the trip and we all seconded that motion. If you can believe it (What? Yannick working on the boat? No!), this only seemed to fuel Yannick’s boat project fire and he spent the rest of the morning cleaning the boat, filling the tank with jerry cans stowed in the forward starboard locker and fiddling with different features on the B&G.

The man does not stop. Other than when he went on an occasional crash binge of Breaking Bad played through sound muffling headphones, I think this was the only time I found him passed-out mid-project.

Night Yannick.

Those days, during the first week of June, were definitely some of our wettest of the trip. We were flying! Bashing our way to the Azores in usually 20+ knots of breeze, averaging 200+ nautical miles each day. But, it was spitting rain and splashing us in the cockpit, with persistent cloud cover that prevented anything on the boat from drying.

And, I do mean anything. The clothes you were wearing. The clothes you just washed. The kitchen towels. Our bath towels. The linens. Everything was moist. My hands remained pruny for three days straight before the outer layer gave up and eventually started to peel off.

We also kept trying to shuffle this one “shitty towel” off on one another. Johnny had apparently come into the port head at one point to find it had fallen in the toilet. Yay! And, although I washed it, it never would dry and the toilet stench somehow remained. It hung in the cockpit for days as a reminder and Johnny, Phillip and I (who shared the port cabin) would ask one another: “Didn’t you have the towel with the gray stripe?” “No, mine was green.” Anything to distance ourselves from the shitty towel.

“That’s not my towel,” says Johnny.

After three or so days of wet drab, the winds finally laid down briefly, a sliver of sun peeked through the clouds and the crew was able to enjoy our first dry, calm dinner in the cockpit since Key West.

Thank our head chef Phillip for pork tenderloin, brussels sprouts and turnips. Yum!

It was good to see everyone together, squinting into the sun, but the beautiful sunset was a deceiving sign of what was to come.

I remember waking later that night (it was June 10th, I know, because Johnny’s birthday was the following day and the crew was planning a small at-sea celebration) to the sound of the sails shrieking. Below, in your berth, everything is amplified. It’s like a sound carnival. Normal squeaks and groans are twisted, amplified, perverted even, into frightening sounds of boat carnage. A wave crashing the hull is the engine falling out. The squeak of a line being sheeted in is the sound of the mast cracking over. If you are awake (which thankfully you learn to sleep through many of these) you cannot convince your mind otherwise without going topside to confirm. This is what I had to do that evening around 11:30 p.m. to re-assure myself the shrieking I had heard below was not, in fact, the sound of the sails ripping at every seam.

I found Yannick at the helm. A big smile on his face. “We’re making 12 knots,” he said as I came up. Was he concerned why I had roused and come topside? Was he worried about me getting sleep for my shift (which was coming up next)? Heck no! He was making 12 knots. Yippee! Yannick was right, though, it was fun up there. The winds were ripping and Andanza seemed to be romping like a giddy stallion. Nothing sounded scary up there. But, it wasn’t quite my shift yet and I knew I still had two hours of “fun” ahead of me topside starting at midnight so I didn’t stay long. “I’m going to get 12 more minutes of sleep,” I told Yannick as I made my way back down below. And surprisingly, I was able to fall back asleep rather quickly, even amidst all the bashing and shrieking. When my phone alarm went off at 11:50, it felt like someone was pulling me up from twenty feet below the ground. I was so deep.

And, of course, when it came time for my shift, the wind was nowhere near as “fun” as it had been for Yannick. She was all fidgety and dissatisfied—sometimes cranking up to 17 knots, other times dropping to 11 and threatening to spill the sails. I had to keep shifting our course a bit here and there to keep the canvas full and appease her. It was one of those irritating shifts and then, right when I heard Phillip rustle below and I started congratulating myself on making it to the end, the sea gods really decided to test me. I was clicking the auto-pilot over a few degrees to keep the wind off the stern and apparently I got a little too “click happy” and overwhelmed the B&G. This happened rarely, but on occasion, like a computer when too many tasks are initiated at once, the B&G would shut-down and re-boot. It is a quick process, maybe 45 seconds to a minute, but what happens when the B&G shuts down? So does the auto-pilot and if you don’t have your wits about you, you can easily get yourself all turned around and the sails all goobered up (a technical term in sailing).

Thankfully, because I had been so feverishly clicking, I knew the exact course we needed to be on (a heading of 82) and I was able to grab the wheel and hold her there while B&G came back. I was secretly hoping it would all be booted back up and running fine by the time Phillip got up there so he wouldn’t see I had crashed the system. Don’t tell Yannick either (until he reads this). Shhhhhh! But, I got lucky. The minute Phillip made his way into the saloon and started putting on his headlamp. The B&G came back up. I turned on the auto-pilot and set it for 82 and BOOM. Hands off the wheel.

“Everything going okay up here?” Phillip asked.

“Yep, just some finicky winds. But everything’s going fine. Great actually. Good night,” says Guilty Annie.

I have to say that was sometimes my favorite moment. The end of a successful night shift. It meant I had remained diligent, watched the instruments and my surroundings, nothing went wrong during my shift, and it was no longer my shift. I could shut down (mentally) and hand over the reins. Don’t get me wrong. Solo night shifts are often some of my most memorable, fulfilling moments of an offshore passage, but they are also often the scariest and the most stressful. It’s kind of like a tightrope walk. It’s beautiful, mesmerizing and stunning when you’re up there, but you’re also glad when you’ve made it safely to the other side. Whew.

After my shift, I crashed again. Falling quickly back into that 20-meter deep hole where everything was still and quiet and warm. The sound of footsteps at first became muffled noises in my dream. Branches beating a car window or something. They started to wake me but I lulled back again. Then more branches, they broke the glass of the windshield and suddenly I realized I’m not driving. I’m in my berth, the sounds of the water on the hull are now crisp and I hear them again. Footsteps, jogging from the bow to the stern, followed by Phillip’s voice. Something, something, then “I can’t!”

I kick the covers off, moving slower than I would prefer, and try to shake the sleep off as I stand up through the hatch over my berth. I don’t understand what I’m seeing at first. It’s Phillip, kneeling on the starboard transom, holding onto something that’s over the side of the boat. It is colorful in his hands. I blink a couple of times, trying to make sense of it, then the images form an answer. Phillip is holding the head of the spinnaker. I know it is the head because it is an acute triangle and it’s that unmistakeable crinkly green of Yannick’s furling spinnaker. I can then see the spinnaker halyard making it’s way down from the mast between Phillip’s arms. If that is the head … My mind questions the possibility of it until I emerge from my hatch and see the truth of it.

The spinnaker billows out ethereal and green behind the stern of Andanza, floating, flailing, sinking the water. She is so big and trails so far behind the boat. I try to start pulling in the sail alongside Phillip, but she is swamped, weighing ten times what she would with a sea of water in her belly. Yannick pops his head up from under the starboard hull, spits out salt water and says: “It’s ripping on the prop.” There isn’t time for questions, although they fill my mind anyway. Why? How? I feel Johnny’s hands near mine pulling as well but whatever inches we pull out seem to be sucked back into the water the moment we let go to re-grip. Just bobbing, the current is still strong enough to give the ocean more pull on the wet body of the sail than our weak hands can muster from the transom.

Yannick tells Phillip to crank the port engine and put the boat in reverse so we can get the sail on board. I can see he is fighting and yanking, trying to keep the sail off the starboard rudder. While I’m sure his first concern in going overboard was to rescue the sail, now that the sail is threatening our much more important prop and rudder, the tables have turned. With the port engine slowing us down, Johnny and I are finally able to make some visible headway with the sail, pulling several soggy feet up and over the toe rail at a time, but it is still a massive chore. The sail begins to bob in the water and creep toward the port hull and we all shout: “Watch the prop on port!”

Yannick is fighting the sail in the water, trying to keep her both off of the rudder on starboard and away from the prop on port, an almost impossible feat while submerged as Johnny and I slowly make progress. The more sail we recover, though, the less the grip the waters have on her and we can finally see an end in sight. Johnny and I heave a final two, three times and finally she is recovered, a wet, green mess covering us on the deck. Johnny and I just sit, soaked, our chests heaving, and rest as Yannick makes his way up the starboard ladder. He is breathing just as hard and his chest and stomach are covered in red whelps, lashes and bleeding cuts.

“I want to see it. Help me bring it to the trampoline,” he says. While none of us want to—Johnny and I both saw and felt many rips in her as we pulled her onboard, our wet hands sometimes gripping at the edge of a gaping hole and ripping it further—we follow Yannick’s orders and haul the sail into the stark sunlight on the tramp. Yannick spreads the remains of his spinnaker out, spreading the jagged chasms open, confirming what he already knew to be true. Phillip and I try to console him: “It can be repaired. We’ve ripped our kites many times and had them stitched back up.” “You saved the prop and rudder. That’s way more important,” but our murmurs seem too limp and weak to reach him. Although Johnny and I had no clue how the spinnaker went overboard (we were both asleep at the time) no one asked what happened right then. We were curious, sure. But, it didn’t matter. The sail was gone.

While I’m glad I snapped these pictures now that the incident is over, behind us and we’ve learned the lesson from it. In the moment, right when I did it, I felt a horrendous guilt as Yannick leaned over, knees to his chest, his wet hair dripping onto the remains of the tattered sail, mourning its loss. Yannick has said the same about many of the moments I captured from our trip that were not the fun highlights that you want to re-live but, rather, the more frustrating, trying times. That is, while he didn’t particularly enjoy the fact that the camera was rolling in the moment, he is grateful, now, for what I captured and have enabled him to share with others. But, I will say it is hard in the moment to decide what to record and what to simply let slip away as a mere memory.

After talking with Phillip later, I learned Phillip had woke early and was making coffee while Yannick held the helm around 6 a.m. The winds that had been easing off during my 12-2 a.m. shift the night before had settled into a steady 8-9 knots and Yannick and Phillip thought, rightfully, that it would be a good time to raise the spinnaker. They hoisted the spinnaker and Phillip said she raised and filled just fine. He remained at the bow while Yannick went back to the cockpit to sheet in the spinnaker sheet and that’s when the sail started to billow. Phillip didn’t know why at the time but she fluttered and sank overboard and was swept quickly between the two hulls of the boat.

Afraid the weight of the sail full of water would damage the bow sprit (if not rip it off entirely), he and Yannick released the tack of the spinnaker from the bow sprit and that is how I found them, with Phillip holding the head of the spinnaker over the starboard transom and Yannick having jumped overboard to try, initially, to prevent the sail from shredding on the prop or rudder and then, subsequently, to prevent the monstrous sail from damaging the prop or rudder on the starboard side.

Discussion after the incident told us the spinnaker halyard had been cinched into the winch at the mast but not clutched down above the winch. A very simple mistake that, with just the right gravitational forces, wind, water or bouncing of the boat, caused the halyard to come out of the self-tailing jaws of the winch and allow the sail to billow and sink overboard. While sailing itself really is simple—there are a handful of lines that must be pulled and cleated in a certain way—it is sadly almost too easy to suffer a grave loss by making a very simple mistake. Say, wrapping the line around the winch counter-clockwise, instead of clockwise, leaving a sea cock closed, forgetting to shut a clutch, etc. All of these things can cause a sometimes dangerous, costly loss. It’s hard to say whether the fact that the mistake can be so simple is a good thing or a bad thing. You’re glad when you find the mistake and realize how easily it can be prevented next time, but then you kick yourself at how easily it could have been prevented this time. But what’s done is done. C’est la vie. You just have to build muscle memory to where you do all the simple things in the right order as a matter of habit.

Yannick sat alone with his tattered spinnaker for a few minutes before unzipping her bag which lay on the tramp and started gently packing her back inside. I can’t really tell you why, but we left the spinnaker like that (“in a body bag” we called it, half in jest, half in truth) on the tramp for several days.

Even though none of us really enjoyed the sight of her up there, it felt like stuffing her back down into the forward locker on port would feel a bit like a betrayal. Like a final burial. So, she rode with us under the sun and through the waves on the buoyant tramp of the Freydis for a few days before we finally stowed her away.

Yannick impressed us all that morning. While he does have a temper and he does have a tendency to focus on a problem until it becomes a festered infectious thorn, he also has an uncanny ability to sweep aside a crappy situation and turn back into his jovial self rather easily. He himself calls it: “Highs and lows. When it’s good times, I’m on the highest of highs, but when things start to suck, I fall to the lowest of lows. I’m either really happy or really pissed off.” Right after the really crappy spinnaker incident, Yannick decided to get really happy and he told me to make sure we still had Johnny’s birthday celebration lined up. Phillip had decided to make Johnny a “birthday breakfast” that day of egg and cheese burritos (although Johnny ended up getting a birthday lunch, a birthday snack and a birthday dinner too). By the end of it, we were telling him: “You get a day, not a week.” But, we did have fun putting together a little Hallmark-worthy (or so I thought) celebration for Johnny that morning, not hours after losing the spinnaker. June 11th, 2016, Johnny Walker turned 72:

A few short days later also marked a tipping point in the trip as the crew watched the number of nautical miles put behind us pass 2,300 leaving a little less than 2,400 nm to go before we crossed the Atlantic ocean on a small sailboat. That was a pretty cool feeling. I put together a video commemorating it, “Trans-Atlantic: the Halfway Point” for my Patrons while we were underway that I was able to share with them once we made it to the Azores. Enjoy!

I hope you all are enjoying the tall (although very true) sea tales from our Atlantic-crossing. If offshore voyaging is something you would like to experience or scratch off your bucket list, be sure to check out my “Voyages” tab and see all of the awesome blue water trips the s/v Libra will be making this winter across the Gulf of Mexico. Patrons get a $250 discount on any voyage and there are still a few bunks left on the trip to Isla Mujeres with me over Thanksgiving as well as the New Years Eve trip to Cuba to celebrate the new year with Phillip and I in Havana. Book today!

Also, if you haven’t yet seen the Atlantic-crossing movie and would like to, she is now available FOR RENT on YouTube. Check it out!

And, (yes AND! we’ve got a lot of cool stuff going on here at HaveWindWillTravel), we are just a few weeks out from drawing our 3rd Gift of Cruising “Go Offshore with Andy Schell” winner. If you would like your name to be put in the pot, become a Patron, read through Andy’s FAQs on his website and EMAIL ME to opt-in for a chance to win!

Ch. 10: The Shuddering Shroud

September 28, 2016September 28, 2016anniedike

“If we snap one of those battens, I don’t have a spare,” Yannick tells the crew after we put in the third reef.

Thankfully the storm off the tip of Florida was intense but very brief, lasting a grand total of about twenty minutes with peak winds of 32 mph. We may not have needed to go all the way down to third reef, but after our (very first ever) drop to reef one did not go so well and the winds were still building at the time, Yannick instructed the crew to drop to reef two—for safety as much as for practice. While reef three was primarily practice, it was necessary all the same as the crew had never done it before and we needed to learn exactly how to secure the sail down to that mark. The third reef in Yannick’s main does not have a line at the tack (the mast) running back to the cockpit; rather, it is cinched down to the boom at the tack with just a strap. So, it was good practice to put the third reef in simply to learn the set-up. With the third reef in and winds holding at 28 mph, it was then just a fun romp in the rain, a nice shower for the salty boat and crew.

Video Annie was clearly having a good time:

However, just like washing your car to make sure it doesn’t rain, Johnny put the kibosh on our rinse by breaking out some soap to take a shower. I’d say I felt bad for him, all lathered up and sudsy the minute the rain stopped, but he looked so funny. Like an unhappy cat in the tub!

Yannick, ever the problem-solver, remained focused on the crew’s poor reefing performance. “I’m going to write up instructions,” he said as he headed down below right after the storm. It wasn’t like we had botched the whole thing but reefing can be difficult when you are on a 46 foot boat, cannot hear one another over the wind and waves and you’re not confident, without communication, which lines to release or pull and when. It needs to be coordinated, rehearsed and performed like a tire change at a pit stop—quickly, efficiently and safely. In order to do that, you need to know—before sails start popping and snaring and lines are whipping about—in which order to do things. I was all for instructions. Type away Yannick.

And type he did. And printed them too! Later that afternoon we each had a typed-up instruction sheet taped at each of our designated posts setting out each step of our specific reefing procedure and we started doing reefing drills.

By the second drill we were all far more comfortable with our respective roles and the communication that needed to occur while reefing. While our reefing was improving, we were still struggling with the boom. Yes, the boom. Or I was at least—having the luxury on our Niagara of a boom vang—having to deal with the added problem of a boom, if not held up by the main sail or topping lift would come crashing down on the bimini. Whose boom hits their bimini? This irked me! Like an entirely new, complicated task stacked on top of all our tasks was just what we needed. Imagine you’re making coffee in the galley (think of all the things you have to do—fill the pot with water, light the stove, measure the grounds, etc.) and if you let go of the stove, it will fall out of the counter and crash onto the floor. That’s a little what this crashing boom felt like. If the main sail is not holding it up, the topping lift must. Once the main sail is raised, however, the topping lift must be slacked or it will chafe the main halyard. So, it’s kind of like swapping hands, but keeping a constant hold on the stove while you’re working in the galley. It was just one more thing.

Luckily, the additional tasks relating to the boom were added to Yannick’s reefing procedure at the mast. His list was definitely longer than any one else’s. In case you are curious, here is a rough reconstruction of our reefing procedure on Andanza:

Phillip turns slightly into the wind
Annie furls the genny in to third reef – with either Johnny on port or Phillip at the helm easing the sheet out [We did this so it wouldn’t beat Yannick up at the mast while reefing the main.]
Phillip turns back off the wind while the crew prepares to reef the main
Annie checks clutches for tack on deck and for clew on boom are all closed
Yannick at mast tightens topping lift (so the boom won’t crash on the bimini when we release the tension of the main)
Phillip turns slightly into the wind
Yannick at mast begins to lower the main
Annie on starboard pulls line for reef one at the tack down to the mark
Johnny on port winches the line for reef one at the clew down to the mark [while my line could be pulled by hand, meaning if we were on a port tack the genny sheet could remain on the winch, Johnny’s task of pulling down the reef point at the clew was much harder and had to be done at the winch. If we were on a starboard tack, he had a separate clutch on port that could hold the genny while he used the genny winch to pull down the reef at the clew. Winching the sail down at the clew was definitely the hardest job as it held the most wind]
Yannick raises the main back up to tension the sail back up (so it can raise the boom)
Yannick then releases the topping lift (and we all hope the boom doesn’t crash on the bimini)
Phillip falls off and puts wind back in the sail and we all inspect sail shape, line tension and check for chafe points

Yannick also liked to use a long Velcro strap at the clew to help ease the tension of the reef line that held the clew down. As I mentioned, that was by far where the most tension was held. Listening to that line squeal and stretch to its limit as Johnny winched down the clew point was not enjoyable for anyone. And, because it held so much tension, it also squealed and squeaked with each slight movement of the boom as the boat knocked around over waves. Yannick hated this. He’s not a fan of anything that squeaks. So, he would always go up on the bimini after we put in a reef point and run a long piece of Velcro through the reef point at the clew to hold some of the tension at the clew and instruct Johnny to then let out some of the line that held the clew down. Yannick was happy when the Velcro and the line “shared” the load.

In all, it’s a good thing we got our sail tactics rehearsed and operating like a well-oiled machine because the winds were screaming, holding steady around 23 knots for three days! After our lackluster, glassy days in the Gulf, it felt like Andanza shot like a slingshot around the tip of Florida and up the east coast. It was fun to see folks who had been clearly watching us on the Delorme (albeit in silence) finally chiming in with comments like: “Now you guys are moving!” “There’s the wind!” and “No more motoring!” And they were right!

Yannick got some great panorama (i.e., GoPro on a stick) shots during those days:

We had a Mahi grab onto the line the day after our Key West stop and I had to wonder if the line actually grabbed onto him, because we were hauling at 13 knots.

I had never caught a Mahi before and I was mesmerized by the colors. Brilliant yellows and shiny greens, followed by a kaleidoscope ripple across her scales as she gulped her last breaths.

While I said previously that I didn’t feel bad for the tuna we had caught in the Gulf, that it felt like a gift, that did not ring true here. The Mahi was so beautiful. I really hated to pierce its stunning skin with my knife. Then Johnny says, “Throw the hook back out quick. You can often catch the mate.”

Ack!

Apparently, these amazing fish mate for life and, once the connection is made, they swim together for the remainder of their piscine years. Now, not only had I stripped this sad fish in the water of his lifelong, by his side, every-day mate but then he had to watch me slaughter her before his very eyes. I know he was just sharing some probably very helpful, valuable marine-life knowledge but Jesus Johnny! I did not need to know that. The Mahi was succulent, light, fluffy and white and I hated every bite of it. Poor fishy.

The sailing those days was some of the easiest I’ve done in my life. It was Brandon, back home, who had told us this many times in the days before we left. “You’ll get on a tack and stay there for six days,” he said. “Chafe will be your biggest problem.” That Brandon, he knows his stuff.

He was so right. Once we had steady wind in the sails, with the auto-pilot holding like a dream, there was really nothing to do as far as the sailing went. While Yannick continued (continued! continued!) daily to work on boat projects, the crew kind of fell into an easy routine. Books were devoured. I recall specifically Johnny starting one, finishing one and starting another in one day.

Phillip and I found ourselves doubled over one day watching Johnny napping one days in the cockpit.

Sleep was absolutely indulged. Can you spot Johnny in this pic? That was his favorite sleep spot!

I distinctly remember Johnny had Phillip and I doubled over in laughter one day when he woke up from a particularly-deep nap. Sure, he’d had his mouth wide open, jaw dropped, overcome with sleep. We’ve all been there. You wake up on occasion, acutely aware your mouth is ajar, subjecting anyone around you to whatever funk is coming out, yet you find the weight of your jaw is simply too heavy to lift. So you just leave yourself wide open and let yourself drift happily back away. That wasn’t the funny part. What was funny was this. So he’s out. Mouth open. Heavy breaths of his chest up and down. Phillip and I were sitting on the other cockpit benches reading and we both watched as Johnny stirred. Pulled his heavy jaw up, smacked a few times, blinked around the table and let his gaze fall on a little bowl in front of him. It had been Phillip’s and it had been once filled with cookies. Now, only little cookie bits remained.

Johnny eyed the bowl, reached a lumbering hand toward it, dumped it into his mouth, closed his eyes while he chewed and swallowed (as if the act of consuming crumbs was so tiring he had to rest his eyes while he did it). Then he eased on back, laid his head against the boat and was soon back in his blissful, slackjaw slumbering state. Having both watched the entire scene in silence, Phillip and I busted up, snickering and giggling and joking about how now, at least, Johnny’s breath would smell like cookies. Johnny was funny. I made him post the group Delorme message that night where he said the trip was affording him “Days of undeserved rest.” Some moments like that, as well as Yannick spitting his words at us in the rain from the mast, talking about the third reef and battens snapping, will stick with me. Some moments from the trip are crystallized in my memory where other periods of time, days on end even, feel like a blue water blur.

Comraderie among the crew grew like vines. First it’s just a seed in the sand. Two things put together but not really connected. Then over time, as the two are exposed simultaneously to elements and experiences, little shoots start to emerge. A joke is shared, a frightening moment, a hand lent out with just the tool you needed, a story from one another’s past and before you know it, you’ve connected with the person. Roots have reached out and the dirt has welcomed their hold. You start to understand the person in a way you didn’t before. You’ll start to sense when they’re content to be left alone, when they may need your help but haven’t yet asked for it, when they’re in the mood to hear a funny story, but more importantly, when they’re not. Case in point:

When Yannick’s sitting in a pile of tools, frowning at the broken end of the windex: NOT a good time to tell him a funny story about your high school prom (he cares not).

When Phillip’s searing steaks on the grill on the transom, smiling and salivating: PERFECT time to strike up a rousing rendition of Son of a Son of a Sailor.

When Annie’s staring at her computer screen, tapping her lip trying to write something brilliant: NOT a good time to strum up a political conversation about Obamacare. (She cares not.)

When Yannick’s splayed out in his berth, asleep, drooling with Breaking Bad play on his laptop: BAD time to tell him there’s a screw loose on the bimini cover.

When Johnny’s looking for the tonic water to go with his swig of gin: GREAT time to ask him to write the crew message for our bottle. The message Johnny came up with:

Andanza was here, with its ruthless crew. (Give the date.)

You were lucky, you weren’t here too.

It is fun the moments you share out there. Phillip spent those days cooking up a storm every day with often a fun, creative bite for lunch (egg salad sandwiches, sushi, seafood pasta, BBQ) and, often, a rather gourmet dish for dinner (pork curry, beef stroganoff, shrimp alfredo). Thankfully, we were sailing then, no longer motoring, so Johnny finally got his days of deserved rest, reading and relaxing. I read and wrote and filmed and created and ate Phillip’s wonderful dishes. That man can sure cook! We make a good team ’cause I can sure eat!

And, Yannick continued to work. We all stayed out of his way primarily, with the long-standing premise that if he needed or wanted our help, all he needed to do was ask and we would jump to his call. Rarely did he. This system worked well, until two worlds collided. When Yannick started cutting into Phillip’s cutting board (literally) to construct a new base for his windex (which he had to mount on the port side of the mast) to account for the Freydis’ rotating mast.

Yannick and Phillip bartered and negotiated and it was decided Yannick could have a chunk, not the whole thing and Phillip was granted free reign of the cutting board that came with the Magma grill. It’s all about coming to understandings and respecting each other’s space. This is how you all get along on a boat.

But, let’s talk for a minute about how the boat gets along. Have any of you made an offshore passage on a catamaran? If you have, please chime in in a comment below. I would love to hear from you. The bashing on the catamaran shocked me. Stunned me. It was teeth-jarring at times. When water trapped between the two hulls rumbled, thundered and finally bashed its way out, I had to convince myself each time that we had not just hit a whale. While I had felt our 1985 Niagara 35 slam into a wall of water plenty of times and suspected a hull breach, this was different. It was a special breed of bashing, a violent, shrill collision that made me sure, not just suspicious, the boat had cracked in half. The bashing on the cat stopped sentences. It stung bare feet on the galley floor. It was like a nervous system message so strong it bypassed your brain. Muscles flinched without instruction. The crew grew accustomed but never comfortable with it. With the bashing, however, came a great deal of speed. With winds of 23+ holding steady, we were averaging 10 knots most day, even clicking off a record 243 nautical miles in one day. We were flying, bashing, sleeping while sailing into the heart of the ocean.

We were also shuddering. Once the wind found us and we started to do some actual very sporty sailing on the trip, the shuddering began. We heard it first on the port side because we were on a starboard tack. With each lurch and bash of the boat into eight-foot seas, the lazy shroud on the port side would let out a shrill metallic ringing. It vibrated like a plucked guitar string with each romp of the boat. The sound (as all sounds on a boat are) was amplified below and in mine and Phillip’s berth on the aft port side.

Annie trying to record some of the wicked sounds of the boat. Folks who have seen the movie, was I able to capture them? Did it sound like you were there? Do tell!

While I could try to find the words to describe it, the best way to truly convey our concerns would be to say it sounded like it was damaging the boat. Imagine a sail flapping, snapping and popping. Even a non-sailor would likely cringe and think to themselves: Make it stop. As a sailor, you know the sound means trouble for the boat and your immediate instinct is to fill the sail with wind or drop it, to rescue the flailing part somehow. With the shuddering of the shroud, the entire crew felt that way, but Johnny, Phillip and I, as strictly monohull sailors, had no experience sailing a catamaran offshore. We had no experience with a boat that only has three stays or, better yet, one whose mast rotates.

Once I found out we were dealing with a boat rigged up with lines to pull on the lazy shroud to lessen the vibration when on an opposite tack, I knew I had nothing to offer.

What is the proper tuning of that rig and what vibration is permitted or intolerable with a rig like that was an impossible question for the crew to answer.

While Yannick had the most offshore experience with the boat, it was limited to a sixteen day run bringing Andanza from Martinique up to Pensacola and he said he didn’t recall as much shuddering on that trip and didn’t know exactly how tight was the right amount of tight in light of the rotating mast. He sent out texts and emails to various professionals back in Pensacola via the Delorme (another benefit of having available satellite communication) but it was late in the evening when those were sent out and the crew knew we likely would not hear from anyone until the following morning. In the meantime, the shroud continued its murderous shudder with each romp of the boat.

Yannick worked tirelessly to tighten the slack line for the shroud and checking the chain plate on port. It looked solid at the time, but every time the boat went head to head with a wall of water, the wave would bash into the hull with a thunderous slap and immediately the metallic ring of the shuddering shroud would follow. Slap. Shudder. Slap. Shudder. Sleep came in fretful snatches that night. I woke around 2:00 a.m. to find Yannick checking the chain plate (for the fifth time) on the port side. He just looked at me sitting up in my berth and walked back up, his face telling me nothing had changed, but that meant nothing had improved either.

When Yannick is checking the chain plates because the shroud is clanging itself to death: NOT a good time ask him if everything is okay.

Fun story? I hope you all are digging the Atlantic-crossing saga because I’m sure having a helluva time telling it. The full-length movie from our voyage is up now for Patrons on Patreon and coming to rent on YouTube Oct. 7th. If anyone has already seen it, let folks know what you thought of it in a comment below!