I was nearing the end of my watch at 11 p.m., 150 nautical miles off the northwest Australian coast, when I peered around the dodger on our 35-foot sloop to catch a better look at our sails. It was, as a friend described it, “champagne conditions”—15 knots aft of the beam, a low swell from behind with a skinny moon and streams of phosphorescence piercing the offshore dark. The genoa was filling beautifully, as was the main, although it looked a little full and the boom a little too high.
I was just weighing whether it was worth tensioning the vang as my eyes traced the boom to the gooseneck and stopped in horror where the vang attached; the boom was angled about 35 degrees at this point, bent upwards and, as my eyes adjusted, shaking somewhat.
My stomach dropped as the magnitude of the problem sunk in. We were three days into an 11-day passage, had been without reception or radio contact for almost the entire time, and had no satphone to check the forecast or get external advice. I calmly but quickly woke the crew, my partner, Sara, and friend, Klaus. It had not been a catastrophic failure, and we were still sailing along fairly quickly. We had a few minutes to think and needed to make the most of those.
As luck would have it, I’d recently been listening to a podcast about something called the OODA Loop. Although it may sound like the reef knot’s wacky Swedish cousin (mention the OODA Loop
