I sat on the foredeck and waited for the mast to go.
26
Drifting in the Gulf Stream
Incredibly, the mast did not break. The wind was down to about Force three, the main was double-reefed, and the inner forestay held everything together long enough for me to charge aft and release the main sheet and start getting halyards forward. Fortunately, Harp was equipped with two genoa halyards and two spinnaker halyards, and I got three of this lot forward to the toe rail and winched them tight. The mast would not fall now, but there was the immediate problem of recovering the flailing forestay and sail before the fitting at the top of the mast broke under the strain and sent everything overboard.
After twenty minutes of fruitless effort, trying to haul everything down onto the deck by hand, I discovered the easy way: I put the windward sheet onto one of the big Barlow self-tailing winches and cranked away until the stay was back on deck and under control. Perhaps “under control” is an overstatement, for the aluminum-rod forestay was writhing all over the place like a giant serpent. Finally, I got it shackled to the toe rail and lashed it so that it could not thrash about and chafe things. Next, I got the sail off, with some difficulty, and stowed. This gave me another genoa halyard to play with, and now the wisdom of having the little storm jib made came home to me. I set this flying on the halyard, tacked to the pad eye, which had been fitted about two feet abaft the forestay tack, and once again we had a headsail and could go to windward. We couldn’t point very high, but we could go to windward, and that’s where Newport was.
Trouble was, now that the wind had dropped and we had been reduced to a double-reefed main and a storm jib, we could move at only about two knots. I was afraid to hoist the whole main for fear of putting too much strain on the halyards and toe rail forward. Making two knots, there was no chance of reaching Newport by the weekend, and this was very depressing. Still, things could have been a great deal worse; we could have lost the mast and really have been in trouble. Our reduced speed called for a reassessment of the food and water situation, too. Food was getting short and water even shorter, so I had to be very careful to see that nothing else happened to delay us, or I would have to go on a very serious diet. I had already started brushing my teeth in salt water, and now I watched every drop. I tried collecting more water in the thundershowers by hanging a bucket from the end of the boom; this worked for a while, then the bucket blew away. But at least we had a main and a headsail and, above all, a mast.
Twenty-four hours later, however, we didn’t have a headsail anymore. The halyard on which it was flying parted at the mast sheave, probably because, in an effort to get the luff of the sail tight, I had winched it up too much and it was carrying too much of the weight of the mast. I was afraid to set the sail on another halyard — I was running out of them — and we made little progress during the night under the reefed main only.
I decided to have a go at getting my VHF transmitter working with spare batteries from my signaling lamp. They were six volts each; six plus six equaled twelve, I reasoned, and the VHF worked on a twelve-volt current. I wired the two batteries together, hooked them to the radio, and it worked! At least, I was getting crackling noises. I didn’t want to try transmitting until I could see a ship, since the batteries were small and surely wouldn’t last long.
By morning it was clear that under the present sail plan we could sail either to Newfoundland or to Bermuda but not to Newport, unless we got a radical wind shift, and I wasn’t going to count on that. The only alternative seemed to be to repair the forestay in some way so that we could set a headsail, a job which seemed clearly impossible. It was bad enough that when the stay was unshackled from the toe rail it would start thrashing about again; but the main problem would be getting the stay to stretch enough to reach the forestay tack. I had found the cause of the failure: a deck eye which fitted into the bottom of the forestay had come unscrewed. First, I removed the deck eye from the forestay tack and tried to screw it back into the bottom of the stay. The threads were stripped. It would go part of the way in, then freewheel when turned. I spent two hours, lying on my side on the foredeck, draped over a spinnaker pole, trying to get the thing screwed back in. Finally, using a large screwdriver for leverage, I managed by putting pressure on it and turning at the same time, to get it most of the way in. But I had no way of knowing if the threads would hold and keep the same thing from happening again.
Now I had to try to stretch the forestay far enough to reach its deck fitting. The logical thing to do, of course, was to ease off the backstay, then crank down on the halyards forward, bending the mast until it reached. But I knew that would not get it close enough. O.H. and I, when Harp had been relaunched at the beginning of the season, had had one hell of a time getting the backstay to reach under similar circumstances, and that was with two of us pulling on it and no sea tossing us about. I would have to find another way.
My eye fell on the reefing line, which had broken when the stay went. This was a length of flexible wire rope with a rope tail spliced to one end for ease of handling. I took the block normally used for the spinnaker foreguy and shackled it to the forestay tack fitting, then ran the reefing line up through it and tied it around the wire drum at the bottom of the forestay. I took the rope tail back to a winch and cranked it as tight as I could, then went back to inspect the angle at which the line was drawing the forestay toward its fitting. It looked right, but there was still a twelve-inch gap between the end of the stay and the deck fitting. I went back to the cockpit and cranked each halyard down as tight as I could, then cranked on the reefing line again. It was working. I loosened the backstay even more and cranked down on all the winches again. The gap was now only about two inches. Was it possible this was going to work?
I cranked still further and the reefing line parted. It wasn’t going to work. I was going to have to sail to Newfoundland and try to keep from starving to death while I was doing it. I ran the line through the block again and retied it, then went back and started easing off the backstay even more, frightened stiff that I would turn the wheel one thread too many and the backstay would go. I eased it about two inches beyond where I thought it would be safe, then, one by one, cranked down on the halyards again, then the reefing line. I went forward to inspect the gap. The deck eye was one-fourth inch from the position where the clevis pin would slip in to secure it. Summoning up all the strength I had, I squeezed the eye into the gap. The clevis pin went in. With trembling hands I secured it with a split pin, and we had a forestay again.
I couldn’t believe it. I had done something that two men shouldn’t have been able to do in a seaway. Could Robin Knox-Johnston have done this? (Of course he could, and in half the time.) The job had taken me from ten that morning until early evening, and I was too exhausted to hoist a foresail, so we slogged on overnight under main only. The next day was the sixth, the day I had planned to arrive in Newport, and we had drifted thirty-five miles to the northeast, pushed by the Gulf Stream. When the forestay broke we had been about four hundred miles from Newport, on about the latitude of Cape May. Now we were farther north, and I was worried about being headed again, as we would not be able to point high to windward with the present state of the rigging.