98
CLASSIC BOAT JUNE 2019
I
n yachting, it’s rarely one thing that leads to disaster. Typically
there’s a sequence of events, a coming together of small
problems, that sets up the situation where one more straw will
indeed cause the camel to collapse. Afl oat, the skipper is the one
most likely to be aware of red lines being crossed, and many astute
captains have anticipated what they really don’t want to happen
next and directed extra effort into making sure it doesn’t.
I’m confi dent that many readers will be able to furnish examples
of deteriorating circumstances at sea with varying outcomes –
pleasures gained in success against adversity, or perhaps despair
that, in spite of doing all that seemed right at the time, events
overwhelmed them. Always, of course, there are lessons to be
learned and experiences fi led away for drawing upon in future.
For me, these thoughts of “chains of events”
occurred after a nasty experience leaving
Liverpool via the Queen’s Channel in August
- I was in my Harrison Butler-designed,
36ft (11m), 17-ton yacht Tramontana, built in
- The advantage of a heavy old wooden
boat is that she’s reasonably good at pushing
her way through oncoming waves, and not
easily knocked off course by a wave or gust of
wind. A yacht capable of doing around six knots has to leave
Liverpool with the east-going ebb, and because the prevailing wind
is from the west, heading down the Queen’s Channel with wind
against tide is not unusual. I knew it had a reputation for being
rough, but with a Force 3 blowing, I fi gured Tramontana would be
fi ne. I’d had a new engine installed four months earlier, and had the
sails ready to hoist and an anchor ready to drop. With a crew of
two to assist, blue skies overhead, and a departure at high water
exactly, all was going to plan. What could possibly go wrong?
Although fl at to begin with, the modest Force 3 did a surprisingly
effective job of setting up a heavy swell that rolled down the Channel.
There was no choice but to go parallel with the underwater walls
either side of the channel, which was head on into the swell. With
a four-knot tide pushing us on and wave and wind pushing us
back, it was the engine that tipped the balance in favour of making
headway. The engine was working hard as we crept down the long
passageway to the Irish Sea. Should I have got the sails up and
started tacking to and fro, still under engine power to try to lessen
the load? Perhaps, but I would be exposing more hull surface area
to the wind and waves – more force pushing us backwards – so I
decided to tough it out head on.
An engine overheat alarm settled the matter. With the engine off,
attention fl ipped to a frantic but orderly hoisting of the sails as we
drifted towards the wreck of the Pegu. She ran aground on the
training wall in 1939 with a hold full of whisky, long since removed
- no conciliatory drink for becoming shipwrecked there. Her black,
wooden, ribbed carcass was worryingly close, and I was on the
verge of giving the order to drop the anchor, when the sails began
drawing. With a large cargo vessel coming the opposite way to
dodge, I started thinking about synchronicity, the coming together
of events in time and space. I’d shredded my
large genoa on the way into Liverpool when a
turnbuckle failed and the forestay lost all tension.
The load transferred to the sail, vastly exceeding
what the material could cope with. The jib now
employed could not pull Tramontana to
windward nearly as effectively as the genoa but it
gave us enough manoeuvrability to dodge the
cargo ship and attend to the overheated engine.
I’d had an overheat three weeks before when it had somehow
‘boiled dry’. Right there is an earlier “link in the events chain”.
Back then, tipping a 4L bottle of drinking water into the cooling
system had sorted it, and the same solution now worked again,
enabling our mechanical friend to restart and save the situation.
I had avoided the humiliation of calling the Coastguard. Even so,
it took us fi ve hours to travel the 12 miles of the Queen’s Channel.
What I didn’t know then but discovered a year later, was that
my new engine had a faulty cooling water fi ller cap. Instead of a
cooling system operating at twice the pressure at sea level it was
operating at sea-level pressure. The result was that the cooling water
and antifreeze mix turned to steam at 105
0
C instead of the intended
130, a temperature far less likely to be reached. I suspect the cap got
knocked in transit or when the engine was being fi tted. To fi x it
cost nothing, just careful hammering back into the correct shape.
And yet that unnoticed knock, however it came about, was the fi rst
link in a chain that came within one link of costing me my ship.
Martin Hansen on a chain of events that nearly cost him his yacht
For the want of a hammer
“An engine
overheat alarm
settled the
matter”
Sternpost