Harvest Moon 2002--The Return

The next morning when I went back on watch, we raised the sails again and switched on the autopilot and had a nice relaxing sail not quite the direction we wanted to go. In the course of the afternoon, with the wind building and still from the wrong direction, we first switched on the engine again, then dropped the sails. Unfortunately, the main halyard got away from someone and became intimate with the upper reaches of the rigging.

So there we were, motoring along, pounding into the waves (somewhere in the 6-8 foot range at this point), about an hour before sunset, with an oil rig to leeward, and all of a sudden the inboard decided to call it a day. This was interesting. With the boat wallowing, the crew somehow managed to get the staysail and then the reefed main up. Then it was engine repair time. With a little help from the former owner, reached via cell phone, the skipper and mate got the cabin smelling like diesel fuel, while us less experienced folks tacked the boat back and forth, making little headway but at least not hitting anything. We listened to the radio conversation between the Coast Guard and another boat nearby, one of the winners from the regatta, which had lost her forestay along with the sail as well as losing her engine. The crew were eventually taken off by helicopter. The engine stubbornly refused to be fixed. Sometime after I'd gone off watch, the wind did shift around to where we were making progress toward Freeport, the nearest port and now our destination.

Then the wind died. At this point, we were about twelve miles from the Freeport jetties, in twenty or so feet of water, beach visible along quite a good stretch of the horizon. We anchored and dropped the sails. There was a thunderstorm headed our way. The skipper decided he'd had enough, and we radioed the Coast Guard (who had been monitoring our progress throughout the night) and asked if they could find us a tow. They couldn't, but they came and got us themselves (arriving about fifteen minutes after the thunderstorm). Cell phone calls were made and a marina berth and land transportation arranged. It was a two-hour tow in the pouring rain, but by the time we got in, it had quit raining. We'd been at sea for about fifty hours and boy, those shore facilities looked good.