A Southern Ocean Mystery

Areefed main and full poled-out Yankee pulled our 56ft, aluminum-hulled cutter, Seal, toward Antarctica. My husband, Hamish, and I were halfway across the Drake Passage, with four charter guests and our two young children onboard. We had 17 knots of apparent wind and 10ft seas coming up from astern, some of the best weather we’ve ever had on our many voyages south. At 0200, barely dark, we jibed all standing. The jibe was silent, thanks to the nylon preventer that took the shock out of the system (the children never even woke), but the nylon still stretched enough to leave the main pinned against the runners, and we didn’t have enough steerage to simply come back around again.

The fastest solution was to start up the engine and steer back onto the correct jibe. That done, Hamish shut the engine down again, and we carried on. Although we had heeled over fairly sharply with the jibe, it