Leaving on any passage leaves me with a dry taste in the mouth, a pile of butterflies in the stomach and a lot of ticking off of checklists. The boat is stuffed from stem to stern with enough food for four ocean passages. We have enough spares to fix just about anything on board, though Sod’s Law dictates that the one spare we do need will be the one we omitted. It’s kind of endearing that, however many times we get ready for a passage, it is still a daunting experience setting off into the open sea on a small boat. The nerves get to you every time and the bravado on the dock is notably muted.
The one item on a check-list that all of us keep looking at is the weather and, importantly, whether there is bad weather in the offing. Even in these days of grib forecasts, using half a dozen different models, the weather gods can wreak havoc. I’m pretty thorough in my research of historical weather records for an area or a passage, and we also monitor several weather websites to get a sense of what is happening. And yet it can all turn to custard, and we need to be prepared for heavy weather.
Probably my go-to tactic for heavy weather was gleaned from Moitessier’s The Long Way when he described how running before a storm that he stopped trailing warps and let Joshua go at its own pace over the waves. Even in a heavy old boat like Joshua he could run under bare poles and safely surf over the waves keeping a sort of rhythm with the sea.
Case 1. Tropical Storm Peter
In early December 2003 we left Las Palmas was a 36ft (11m) Pedrick Cheoy Lee with three of us on board. We were five days out when the weather began to deteriorate, and we reduced sail to run with 45-50kts of wind. Our weather was once a day from checking in on the SSB net when an American boat ahead of us that had satellite coms would relay the forecast. As we surfed down the waves Lu got the forecast and would draw up a sort of synoptic chart and come out to tell me the bad news: “This is tropical storm Peter and this is us”, she said showing me the chart. We were effectively tracking the storm at about the same speed and we were squarely inside the southeast quadrant.
