Crew Log 233 – All Tied Up

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May 3, 2010 – At Sea, 30º 43’N, 116º 19’W
By Herb McCormick

Modern life is busy. We hustle here, we hustle there, we try our best to strike the proper balance between family and work, we make a hash of that, we formulate plans, we cancel them, we get ourselves wound up in a right tizzy. We get a call from a cherished pal we haven’t seen in a while, inviting us for a cup of coffee or a beer, and the best possible thing we could do for ourselves – for our soul and sanity – is to just drop everything and reconnect. But, so often, we don’t.

We even have a saying for it: We’re “all tied up.”

A modern voyage Around the Americas is also busy. We sail here, we sail there, we tell everyone we’ll be in, say, San Diego, at a certain time, but then the northerlies fill in, the seas become stupid, the weather fails to cooperate, we get ourselves wound up in a right tizzy. Then, at the worst possible moment – how about last night, just before darkness fell? – we somehow wrap about a spool’s worth of discarded polypropylene line around our propeller and everything seemingly goes to custard, particularly our well-meaning “schedule.”

We even have a description for it. Not only were we “all tied up,” we were, like, all tied up.

Many hours later, well after the sun had set and rose again, our onboard scientist and resident philosopher, Michael Reynolds, etched the silver border around what could have been a very, very dark cloud. “Well, at least you’ll have something to write about today,” he said. And so I do. Here goes.

The situation is easily explained; rectifying it was the issue. Sometime late yesterday afternoon, we snagged the line. We’re not sure exactly when, just that there was suddenly a strange vibration and our progress was somewhat thwarted, i.e., instead of doing 7-8 knots, we were doing 5-6. Hmmm. It was, as they say, a conundrum.

Answers, however, were forthcoming. Around 1900 hours (7 p.m. local), we stopped the boat to make our second daily “cast” of Michael’s new probe – which records sea temperature, salinity and pH factors – into the sea. We’ve done this every day since Michael rejoined the boat several weeks ago. This was the first time we’d seen a long, yellow, snaking line drifting from astern of Ocean Watch.

Skipper Mark Schrader said, “Oh-oh,” and punctuated that with, “We’ve got a problem.”

The water was 65º, which sounds cold, but which I’m very comfortable in, having grown up in New England, where I’ve swam all my life. I was wearing baggies. I should’ve jumped in immediately. I’d have all night to rue the decision not to. Also: readers of this blog will know we’ve had similar difficulties before. Before those difficulties, and after, it was my job to get the dive gear aboard, which would’ve made all the drama considerably less dramatic. Actually, there is a word for this, and that word is “inexcusable.” Instead, let me sing to the heavens the motto of Idiots Anonymous: “Dude! My bad!”

We gathered as much of the flotsam as we could, hacked it off and shoved it in a bag, where it could do no future idiots, er, sailors, any harm. We eased the boat into reverse (not a good sound, or sensation) and then into forward (well, um, okay). The skipper and mate Dave Logan eyed one another and agreed to press forward. We’d obviously been carrying it for a while. We’d press on through the evening and reassess things in the morning.

It was a long night.

Conditions to power on couldn’t have been better – the seas were glassy, the moon above radiant – but Ocean Watch struggled to make six knots, even at 1600 RPM (our Lugger diesel usually provides all the propulsion we require at around 1400 RPM). “We should be doing eight,” said Logan, spitting out the words (not for the first, or last, time). While he obsessed about the speed, I did the same about not diving in. Happy campers we weren’t. The one diversion was the VHF-radio traffic amongst all the cruisers we’d seen that morning in Turtle Bay. Having already transited these waters a couple of years ago, at one point Logan chirped in with some advice about a reef just ahead. Little did we know, we’d be chatting with those lads a few hours later.

Did I mention it was a long night?

At 0600, when I came back on watch after a snooze, everyone else was on deck. Logan said, “We’ve been discussing your future. I’m making coffee.” As the holder of a bachelor’s degree from a fine liberal-arts institution, I knew what this meant. I punched the button that displays seawater temperature. It wasn’t the 59º I’d seen a couple hours earlier, but it wasn’t 65º, either. Still, I considered 61º to have crossed the threshold. I had one thought for Logan: “Wetsuit.”

Once in the water, I couldn’t believe the mess. “A big knot” doesn’t quite begin to describe the mass of rope tangled around the rudder and shaft. How we’d managed to record even six knots was a mystery.

For those of you who’ve never donned a 7-millimeter wetsuit – I was snuggled into Mark’s brand-new one – you need to understand that such a garment provides floatation. A lot of it. In many instances this is a very desirable quality, though repeatedly diving under a rolling 64-foot yacht is not one of them. I knew I was going to have some issues when I took a line under the boat from the port side to the starboard side so I’d have something to grab onto while I was working. For the length of the trip I was jammed up against the bottom of the hull like a cork.

It was a Catch 22 situation. The wetsuit kept me warm, but I used up most of my breath getting down to the problem, leaving little time to hack away at the line with my serrated knife. I came up once and put on a 10-pound weight belt, and a second time to add the rest of the weight we had onboard, another four pounds. By the way, free diving, like any sport, is something you master through practice and repetition. I’ve done neither. My cousin, Paul Faerber, a fireman in Newport, Rhode Island, is great at it. This would’ve been a quick job for him. For me: Not so much.

By the fifth or sixth excursion down, I knew I had two options; I needed to get out and lose the wetsuit, or find an air supply. There is another word that describes certain aspects of my character, and that word is, “wimp.” From the water, I looked up at the skipper, who was spotting me from on deck, and said, “You think any of those other boats have dive tanks?”

David Thoreson picked up the radio and made the call. A northbound boat named Indigo did not have scuba gear, but it had something even better: a hookah, which is basically a long tube attached to a small air compressor through which one can breathe indefinitely. Could we borrow it? Yes we could. They were four miles astern, and altered course for Ocean Watch.

Once we had the device, the denouement lasted three minutes (David T timed it): With a hacksaw lashed to my wrist and hookah-driven, I dove down; sawed away the big knot aft of the prop; found the other end of the line so I had both in my mitts; uncoiled the beast; hauled it back to the surface; handed it up to Michael; and said the only thing worth saying. “Let’s go to San Diego.”

On Monday afternoon, that’s where we were headed.

At this juncture, we need to offer a few thanks. In an unrelated aside, a few days ago I mentioned a book we had onboard, but didn’t know who wrote it. So thanks to blog reader and offshore sailor Carl Sarnoff for passing along the name of the author of the excellent cruising guide, The Baja Bash, as we can now properly credit Capt. John Elfers, currently the manager of a marina called Los Cabos, some twenty miles north of Cabo San Lucas, for his fine, well-read book.

Tomorrow, we’ll return to the United States after a hiatus of some six months as we sailed around South America. There, along with family and friends, we’ll be greeted by David Rockefeller, Jr. and Dan Pingaro of Sailors for the Sea and teachers Zeta Strickland and Roxanne Nanninga of Pacific Science Center. Without the support of these partner institutions, the Around the Americas expedition wouldn’t have happened. Thank you.

Following my toils and thrashings underwater this morning, the skipper addressed my skinned knuckles – thanks, barnacles! – with supplies from our vast medical supply kit, which was supplied by Mike Lafferty of Lafferty’s Pharmacy: The Ship’s Medicine Chest, of Seattle, Washington (email: ems@laffertyrx.com). For anyone contemplating any sort of passage aboard a boat, we couldn’t recommend his services any more highly. Thanks a lot, Mike.

Finally, we need to thank the crews of the ketch, Crescendo, which stood by a couple of miles away to offer assistance if we needed it, and especially to the skipper of the PDQ 44 catamaran, Indigo, who selflessly went well out of his way and trusted us with an expensive, brand-new piece of equipment. “We’ll get it in San Diego,” he said. Hopefully we can repay the generous favor with a few libations: On us.

Afterwards, David T and Mark hailed the respective boats to express our gratitude, and the captain of Crescendo, said, “Well, you would’ve done the same for me.” Yes, that’s no doubt true; helping fellow mariners in need is the great, unwritten law of the sea. But the fact of the matter is, this time we were the ones who needed to be assisted. In that great karmic ledger of the oceans, today we are in the red, and Crescendo and Indigo are firmly in the black. Gentlemen, we offer you our sincere thanks.

During all the hubbub, Mark dropped a quick email to our shore team in San Diego updating them on the situation and explaining that our ETA might be affected. David Rockefeller, our Ocean Watch mate around Cape Horn, responded almost immediately. I’m paraphrasing here, but what DR said was this: We’re humans, we can figure out a way to extricate ourselves from a man-made mess. Fish and other sea creatures aren’t so fortunate.

Of course, he was right.

For much of this afternoon, some denizens of the sea, a series of whales, including one spectacular blue whale that might’ve been almost a hundred feet long, shadowed us. At one point it surfaced and Logan did a double take. “I thought it was land,” he said later. The whales were stunning and they were humbling, free to roam at will. Happily, once again, so was Ocean Watch.

By late afternoon, San Diego was under a hundred miles away. Getting snagged had been unraveling, but all the same, we were untied.

-Herb McCormick with photographs by David Thoreson

*This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos

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