Cruising_World_2016-06-07

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We were flying by the seat of our foul-weather pants — cold, wet, slightly seasick, tired and

beaten down, dealing with conditions that were mostly new to us.

BY ANTHONY IRVING

Waypoints

june/july 2016

cruisingworld.com

A

ccording to my journal, Nottoway was seven days out

from Horta, Azores, heading due east toward Cascais,

Portugal. So far it had been a relatively uneventful

sail, with weather doing a little bit of this and that. Nottoway

is a Ted Hood-designed Bristol 40 built in the early 1970s (see

“Commuter Cruising 101,” March 2016). With a full keel and

centerboard, she is comfortable in troubling seas, but the loss of

the centerboard on the crossing from Maine to the Azores had

brought her age and overall condition into question.

With a new centerboard fashioned in Horta, Nottoway was

behaving beautifully as the wind and seas began to rise. It was

late June, and we were less than 180 miles from the coast. That

evening our crew of three, skipper Spencer Smith, David Yezzi

and I, took bets on when we would make landfall. The challenge

to the calculation was how much the head wind would push us

south of our mark, but we all fi gured on arrival within 36 hours.

When I came on watch at midnight, the wind was blowing

20-plus knots, and we opted to reef to make the night a bit more

comfortable. By the midday watch, however, winds had grown

to between 30 and 40 knots, and remained there for nearly three

days. So much for the bet.

This is not the telling of a disaster at sea, but rather of three

guys and a boat pulling together in trying conditions. Here was

our challenge: Wind speeds were up to 40 knots, and the waves

had built to between 15 and 20 feet. We were under bare poles

except for a little bit of the roller-furling jib showing. With the

hanky-size sail set, and having lashed the wheel to windward,

we maintained an upwind zigzag course of about 1 knot, just

enough to keep steerage way on. Where we wanted to go was

east, directly upwind. Yet we were nearing the Gibraltar shipping

lanes and weren’t exactly the most visible thing out there,

especially in the wave troughs. So we decided the only way to get

where we wanted to go was to cross the shipping lanes at a right

angle, as quickly as possible.

North-south ship traffi c coming in and out of Gibraltar can

be heavy, and we worried that our dark green, low-profi le sail-

boat under bare poles would be easily missed. Even if we could

increase our way by 3 to 4 knots, we would be sitting ducks

JAILBREAK from

Poseidon’s PRISON

COURTESY OF ANTHONY IRVING, DAVID YEZZI AND SPENCER SMITH

The crew re-provisioned and had Nottoway’s centerboard

replaced in the Azores before setting off for Portugal (top

right). The windvane, seen intact behind David and Spencer

(above), didn’t survive the rough weather (top left).