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March 23, 2010 · 11:10 pm

The Matey’s Log: Of Wind & Fog

On Wednesday July 23, 1896, The New York Times reported…

Nearly 114 years later, on the other end of the continent, another sailboat race fell victim to fluky winds, fog and calm…

As the crew of Sprit Decision gathered on H Dock in Ventura Harbor to prepare our boat for the third race of the Pierpont Bay Yacht Club’s Spring Series, there was only the slightest suggestion of a breeze. As we rigged our sails and made ready to get underway, we all knew what that anemic zephyr meant.

Light air.

Sprit Decision, a 32’ 9” Beneteau First 10R, is a relatively heavy boat among the contenders in the Spinnaker A class — and she’s not her best in light air. Her advantages of size and design come into play with about 10 knots of wind, and she truly enjoys filling her sails with 15-20 knots, so unless there was going to be a dramatic and unforeseen shift in the weather, Sprit Decision and her crew would be hard pressed to succeed.

As the boats met at Mandalay buoy for the start of the race, the sea was flat and the wind barely a breath. You know there’s very little wind when, from across the water, you can hear people talking in conversational tones on the other boats. If anyone had been listening to the conversation aboard Sprit Decision as we moved sluggishly through the glassy water, they would’ve heard Captain George suggest that it might be a “Brophy’s Day” – by which he meant that if there wasn’t going to be any wind for this race, we might as well motor back to the harbor and enjoy a drink or two at Brophy Bros seafood restaurant. None of us took him too seriously. Captain George is always the last man to quit a race.

The start of the race was postponed as race officials chose a new, shorter course for the race. On this day, there would be no grand sail out across the Santa Barbara Channel and around one of the oil platforms. Instead, we’d race a less ambitious course, from buoy to buoy, closer to the coast.

As we jockeyed for position in the light wind, waiting for the five-minutes-to-start warning to sound, our veteran bowman, Claude, looked to the south and saw a line of fog approaching some distance from the south. “That’s not good,” he told me, but he didn’t explain why. That I would learn later in the race.

Bowman Claude sees the fog to the south.

After being surprised with only a one-minute warning prior to the start, we managed to get across the line slightly behind the leaders, and proceeded to the first mark, a buoy to the north of us called “Fish Sticks”. We were making 4.5 knots of boat speed with just 5 knots of wind in our sails. That’s pretty efficient sailing for Sprit Decision.

We rounded Fish Sticks in the back half of the pack – our smaller, less-heavy foes having the advantage in lighter air, but after deploying our spinnaker in a most seamanlike manner, we were soon running back to Mandalay buoy, plowing through the gently rolling seas at 6 knots in 6 knots of wind. We chased down one of the smaller Olson 30’s that had gotten ahead of us, and were hoping to overtake a couple more boats as the wind picked up and our boat speed increased.

As we got to within 200 yards of Mandalay bouy, we could see the fog rolling up toward the buoy from the south. By the time we got to within 50 yards of the mark, it was already getting hard to see the leading boats rounding the buoy in the fog. Soon, we were inside the fog ourselves, and as the fog moving north met the weak air current moving south – they cancelled each other out, the wind stalled, and Sprit Decision rounded Mandalay Buoy at a crawl.

For more info on the how and why of wind & fog, click here.

At that moment in struck me how drastically conditions can change in the Santa Barbara Channel. One moment, you sailing along on a sunny day in light wind on a gentle following current – and the next, you’re becalmed in dense fog on a flat ocean. And you’re watching the sudden, dangerous circus as boats try not to collide with each other while approaching, rounding, and leaving the mark – with little wind to give them power or control.

If you’re a sailor, you may find it interesting to know that we jibed the spinnaker as we rounded the mark and were still flying our kite as we ran northeast back to Ventura Harbor. (I’m still a bit confused as to how these things happen.) What I do know is that within ten minutes, the fog cleared, the wind picked up, and we got across the finish line in Ventura Harbor just as the wind was dying again.

Captain George called me that evening to say we’d finished 5^th out of 10 boats in the race. And while we weren’t going to take home any trophies for our effort that day, it had been the best day of light air sailing we’d ever enjoyed racing Sprit Decision.

Our next sailing adventure is the Newport to Ensenada race on April 23rd. I’m hoping that the words “light wind” and “fog” will have no place in the account of that race.

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Tagged as Beneteau, Brophy Bros, calm, Captain George, Fish Sticks, fog, Mandalay buoy, Newport to Ensenada, Olson 30, PBYC, Pierpont Bay Yacht Club, sail race, sailboat, sailing, Santa Barbara Channel, spring series, Sprit Decision, Ventura Harbor

February 14, 2010 · 12:52 pm

The Matey’s Log: Sailing Season Begins

Captain George Moll wanted his crew on the H dock in Ventura Harbor at 8:00 am on Saturday morning, February 13. It was a good thing that the race was being run the day before Valentine’s Day. Like golfing, sailing is a sport that takes men out of the house for long stretches of time on the weekend. But sailboat racing is worse than golf because it’s never certain when you’ll be done. 18 holes of golf always take about the same amount of time to complete. The duration of a sailboat race depends upon the vagaries of the wind and conditions on the water. The race was set to start at 11:00 am, and if the gods Aeolus and Poseidon were with us, we could easily be back on the dock by 4:00, as I’d promised my wife, Victoria. Or we could be home much, much later.

Captain George wanted us at the dock good and early because our boat, a 32-foot Beneteau First 10R named Sprit Decision hadn’t been in a race since early December. The crew was glad to be racing again. We were all veterans of earlier campaigns, though every one of my crewmates is a far more experienced sailorman than I am. Captain George and Captain Tom Weber own Sprit Decision. George and Tom are a pair of old salts who keep everyone entertained with their crusty maritime Oscar and Felix act. Affable, gentlemanly Michael Froelich skippers his own boat, and is a key member of our crew as a helmsman and sail trimmer. Claude Dubreuil, an expert diver and sailor, is our fearless leader on the foredeck. (I assist Claude on the foc’s’le.) And my longtime buddy, Darroch Greer, may be the new guy on the foredeck crew, but as a diver, sailor and surfer, he’s also much saltier than me.

And me? Well, they call me “The Matey”, but my virtues as a sailor extend little beyond blind loyalty to my captain, the strength to haul lines and pump halyards, a knack for cursing like a tar in Nelson’s navy — and a good bit of weight on the rail. All in all, the six of us were a fine crew with which to start the 2010 racing season.

The February 13^th race was the first of the Spring Series sponsored by the Pierpont Bay Yacht Club out of Ventura Harbor. Sprit Decision was among the twenty or so boats competing in the spinnaker class. The racecourse began at the Mandalay buoy, across the Santa Barbara Channel, around oil platform Gilda, then back into Ventura Harbor.

The Santa Barbara Channel is a glorious stretch of blue Pacific Ocean that separates mainland California from the northernmost Channel Islands. It runs between Point Conception and Oxnard on the coast and the islands of Anacapa and San Miguel. It’s as gorgeous a body of water as you’ll find on the planet, and whether you win or lose the race, it’s a pleasure to spend time on these waters.

As we sailed out of Ventura Harbor, we saw hard-working souls in two large out-rigger canoes paddling their way back inside the breakwater. It was a reminder that human beings have been navigating the Santa Barbara Channel for centuries – maybe even millennia. For many centuries before they first encountered Europeans in 1542, when Juan Cabrillo and his cohorts arrived from Mexico to “discover” the channel, the Native American Chumash tribe went back and forth across the channel in large, primitive dugout canoes, connecting the islands with their mainland villages and establishing trade between them.

We crossed the starting line just a few seconds after 11:00 am, and were sailing among the leaders, headed for the offshore oil platform called “Gail”. (All the oil platforms in the channel are named after women. It does get lonely on those platforms.) Platform Gail is about 10 miles from Ventura Harbor – and with a steady 10-15 knots of wind, we were showing 7-8 knots of boat speed. At that rate, we’d round Gail within a couple hours. Sprit Decision, her bottom newly-cleaned and treated, was knifing through the large, wide, rolling swells, as we made our way toward Gail.

Gail and her sister platforms are sitting in the Santa Barbara Channel because of the many oil fields below its sea floor. The channel has been mined for over 100 years – and was the site of the very first offshore oil well in 1896.

The channel was also fouled by one of the worst oil spills in history in 1969, when the black stuff came oozing out of fissures around a recently drilled offshore well a few miles south of Santa Barbara, blackening hundreds of square miles of water, killing aquatic wildlife, and mucking up the beaches from Goleta to Ventura. That disaster helped to galvanize the nascent environmental movement in the United States.

I must admit, I wasn’t thinking much about that history as we rounded platform Gail because there would soon be important work to do. Once we got around Gail and were headed back to Ventura Harbor, the wind would generally be on our stern – which meant a spinnaker run to the finish line. Flying the spinnaker is one of the main responsibilities of the foredeck crew, and it’s one of those critical shipboard evolutions that can either kick the boat into a higher gear – or trigger a disaster.

Before the race, we’d practiced deploying the spinnaker – with mixed results. (Among other snafus, I managed to nearly get myself knocked off the boat helping to jibe the spinnaker.) But, rounding Gail, we got our spinnaker flying with very little drama, and were soon making between 10 and 11 knots on our run back to Ventura Harbor.

Claude looks back to admire the swell.

Since the start of the race, the long, rolling swells pushing toward the shore had continued to build – and were now quite large: eight to ten feet from crest to trough. As it was a following sea, Sprit Decision was literally surfing the swells that came in under her stern. The sea, the ship, and the crew were in a great rhythm less than a mile to the finish – but it wouldn’t last.

Suddenly, as we neared the shore and shallower water, the perverse geometry of the sea came into play, and the swell began to fall off more precipitously. The wind was gusting as we were riding down one particularly large swell, and as Sprit Decision’s bow dipped dramatically – a gust of wind drove the spinnaker down toward the trough of the swell. The boat’s bow was pushed parallel to the rolling swell and the boat was listing heavily to starboard, its rail nearly in the water. In an instant, we were on the verge of getting knocked down and broached by the onrushing swell.

Michael, trimming the spinnaker, came close to a bath when we were nearly knocked down.

Quick work by all hands kept the ship from heeling over disastrously, but it was critical to de-power the spinnaker. (In other words, get the wind out of it, so it wouldn’t be driven into the water, taking us with it.) Alas, one of the spinnaker’s working sheets got hung up on deck cleat! You may not know what all that means – but the bottom line is that we were nearly knocked down a second time before we were able to free that spinnaker line, right the ship, and haul down the spinnaker. Of course, there are no photos of these wild and wooly moments. At times like that, it’s all hands on deck!

Twenty minutes later, we were across the finish line. It had been an exciting and satisfying first race of the season. I’m not sure where we finished – probably somewhere in the middle of the fleet – but it was a pure joy to survive the experience with Captains Moll and Weber and the gallant men of Sprit Decision.

And, best of all, with the wind as consistently stiff as it was – we finished at 2:00 pm. That’s two hours earlier than I told Victoria I’d be done! So, I got home earlier than expected.