Lessons Learned

Our experience with the gale was not our best moment seamanship-wise. Some of the mistakes committed were within the realm of things we knew about. There's a difference between knowing best practices and living the consequences of not following them. Therefore, I suspect we'll take the following list seriously. For each rule, I'll provide some background explaining what went wrong.

1. A few things onboard are critical. Problems with critical items must be solved or a backup plan accepted before departure.
   
   
2. The boat and contents must be properly secured before departure for a sea passage.
   
   
3. We must have a dead reckoning navigation plan to use as backup in case of electronics failure.
   
   
4. Pro-actively fix problems when they are first noticed.
   
   
5. Sea sickness remedies must be taken in advance of any queasiness.
   
   
6. All food and other critical equipment must be stored in waterproof containers.
   
   
7. Every kind of operational maneuver must be tested and rehearsed at the dock.
   
   
8. We need a crew plan for long passages. The plan must allow for one of us to be incapacitated.
   
   
9. At sea we need a supply of ready-made food to use when the going gets rough.
   
   

Here are some of the things that went wrong that made us come up with this list.

• On the spur of the moment, as we passed through Beaufort, we decided to go out to sea instead of staying in port one more day. This spur of the moment decision was the root of much of our trouble.
  
  
• Things were stored on deck and stored loose under the dinghy. That worked well for several months including the rough weather we had on Champlain. In the height of the gale these things started getting in the way. Things came out from under the dinghy. We needed to close the hatch in the cabin because water was coming in, but the tarp stored under the dinghy got in the way and prevented the hatch from closing.
  
  I did dog down the cockpit floor and did a few other things as we departed shore. However, we need a checklist. We'll have to develop such a departure checklist and add to it as we learn more.
  
  
• I made a hasty navigation plan using the GPS and without consulting the paper charts. The plan missed some shoal waters along the intended course. I didn't discover this error until I double checked with the printed charts three hours out. Good for me double checking, shame on me for poor planning in the first place.
  
  
• A secondary consequence of making a dead reckoning navigation plan is that hasty spontaneous decisions to put to sea are eliminated. It would be a good practice to make it a big deal to transition from not-at-sea to at-sea modes of discipline.
  
  Compare it to your home versus driving habits. At home and office we leave everything laying around and do little or nothing to prepare for emergencies (unless you expect a hurricane). In the car you develop good safety habits. You make sure doors are closed, you fasten seat belts (don't you?) You see to it that cargo and kids are adequately secured. Our boat is both our home and our car so to speak, so we need extra ritual to remind us to switch from one culture to the other.
  
  
• We noticed an excessive compass deviation of 3-10 degrees two days before leaving. We were still dinking around trying to diagnose it. When we left shore in Beaufort, it was still unresolved.
  
  When I discovered the navigation planning error, it made me realize that if we had a GPS failure right then, we would have been in serious trouble because we didn't trust the compass. A day later I realized that I have two other compasses onboard and we could have made a backup plan to use those.
  
  
• With the rail underwater for so much of the time, we wound up with a lot of water inside. I estimate 30 gallons. It ran down the walls, through the food storage lockers and into the bilge. A lot of food in the lockers got wet and had to be discarded.
  
  We'll try to find and fix the leak but the reality is that leaks are inevitable on boats. As we fix some, new ones will appear. For ocean crossings, we must protect the food in waterproof containers.
  
  
• When I tried to double reef the mainsail, it didn't work. The jiffy reefing line jammed somehow. It was dark and I couldn't see why. I let it go till dawn, sailing with the mainsail in a baggy shape, not flat. After dawn I see that I routed the line through boom bails and they jammed them. The real error was not testing the reefing while at the dock. I had never double reefed before. Still haven't triple reefed at sea. Yesterday at the dock we practiced single, double and triple reefing, and tried the manual emergency bilge pump (it didn't work). The lesson is to verify everything by rehearsals and drills.
  
  
• The water streaming over the decks managed to untie three knots that I'm sure were properly tied. I never suspected that water could do that. Two of those knots secured the jacklines. The jackline is the line attached to the boat that one tethers ones safety harness to in order to prevent falling overboard. Jacklines have life safety importance! I don't know how to test each knot on each kind of line on each kind of fastener for all weather. I'm not sure of a silver bullet for this problem.
  
  
• After dawn I saw that the lazy jacks and the running backstay were both fouling the double reefed mainsail, threatening to rip the sail. Then the light bulb in my head went off. Things were deteriorating and I was doing nothing about it. Each additional problem made it incrementally more difficult to deal with current conditions and with new problems; that's my definition of deteriorating.
  
  I was cold, tired, before dawn I was scared of doing things in the dark, I was short handed because Libby was sick, my muscles hurt especially my arms from bracing myself. Unless I eversed the trend, things could get very bad. That spurred me to action, and I started correcting every problem I saw until they were all corrected. I must have made two dozen trips to the foredeck.
  
  The point is, you have to be brave and pro-active, and not cower. It may be scary to climb out to the end of the boom to fix something in the dark in rough weather, but the risk of not doing it could be worse.
  
  A second point is that it is vital to recognize, as I did, when things are deteriorating, then act immediately to reverse that trend. That was part of my pilot training, and it served me well. Bad accidents usually result from a chain of mistakes, not single mistake.
  
  
• A lot of things fell on the cabin floor. That's normal for sailboats. However, we had a lot of books stored in milk crates in the V-berth. They were secured with lines fastened to the wall. The boat got knocked around so much that the fastenings tore the screws out of the wall. Properly, secured means fasteners appropriately strong.
  
  
• Libby felt fine until we changed course at 0300. Then she got seasick within seconds. She has a wristwatch like seasickness device but she wasn't wearing it and she didn't ask for it until five hours later. She was down for 12 hours before recovering enough to help me again. We must prevent seasickness if possible, not remedy it after the fact.
  
  
• Libby and I will have to think carefully about the crew problem. Always requiring a third person on board could seriously cut into our around the world plans. We need to improve our physical condition and stamina, our skills, and we sometimes need to add more crew members. Fatigue at the helm leads to poor performance and errors.
  
  
• Through all this, Tarwathie behaved well. No excessive heeling, no knockdowns, no broaches. The Westsail 32 is a seaworthy boat. I'm very glad we have her. If we were in a modern Hunter, or Catalina or Benetau boat I would have been more scared.
  
  

Anyhow, I expect that we'll refine this list and live by it as time goes on.