…(with a SeaRunner 37 Trimaran as the bowling ball)

by Tim Mann

One weekend (I don’t even remember why I did this, because it was 40 years ago) I sailed my SeaRunner 37 “Spice”, designed by Jim Brown, from her usual mooring at Pillar Point Harbor in Half Moon Bay, California, up the coast to San Francisco Bay. I’d been to the Bay before; it was only 25 miles away or so, and that should have been an easy day’s sail in a boat capable of 10 knots to windward and up to 20 off the wind.

Sounds simple, right? Especially in this day of everyone having GPS’s on their phones, and knowing where they were within 50 feet at any time? Well, back then things were simpler but not as easy; you depended on your own navigational skills to keep your boat off the rocks, and you from being dead. At that time, there were no radars made for small boats of her size, and no GPS’s at all, so we were all on our own, me and Spice.

If you think of it that way, you have a lot of motivation to learn your navigation really well. Well, I had; even without a radar, without GPS, without anything but my eyes and ears and a cheapo $125 depth sounder, I could feel my way up the Northern California coast in a pea-soup fog and light winds by using the depth sounder (to see when I’d gotten in too shallow, or too close to the coast) and my ears.

I made a series of tacks up the coast, beating upwind in the light headwinds that day gave me; tacking out away from the coast for three or four miles, then tacking back in towards the coastline. As I would get closer to the coast on my coastwards tacks, I would hear the increasingly louder sound of surf on rocks, which meant I was getting closer (it’s easy to hear in the fog, which accentuates and carries sound well).

I’d also see the bottom starting to show up on the depth sounder, first at about 50 fathoms, then switch to feet, then tack when the depth got around 70 to 80 feet (around a quarter mile off the coast in most places). Then, I’d just take a tack out away from the coast, which put me in safer territory.

The winds were light that day, which turned a proposed 6-hour trip into a 12-hour trip. Even though I’d left at first light from Pillar Point, I had spent so long drifting around in 3 to 4 knot winds in the fog that I hadn’t made much headway towards the “Gate”, which is what the local sailors call the Golden Gate.

Just after before dark, I arrived just outside the “Potato Patch”, a particularly nasty bit of water outside the Gate where the waves feel the relatively shallow bottom, then break just like they break on a beach. At this point, I was about twelve miles outside the Gate, and saw a large container ship just clearing the Patch as the last daylight faded; and could just make out the name on her stern in the low light: “Nordlines Voyager”.

I should also mention that during the last hour, the wind had picked up from the 3-4 knots I’d had all day, and was now blowing 25 to 30 knots, with higher gusts. Spice and I were headed straight into the Gate over the Potato Patch, surfing along in 15 to 18-foot swells with our speedometer pegged at 15 knots (the highest it would read). I had no idea how fast we were really going: 20? 25 in bursts?

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the Potato Patch: “Potato Patch Shoal is part of the larger Four Fathom Bank outside of the San Francisco Bay. The formidable shipping hazard is within the course of swimmers who attempt solo swims and relays between the Golden Gate Bridge, California coastline and the Farallon Islands. It is an expanse of relatively shallow reef covering several square miles, with water depths ranging from 23 to 36 feet.”

Here’s a photo of a US Coast Guard 44-foot self-righting motor lifeboat during a training exercise in the Potato Patch:

As the ship passed and (except for its running lights) faded into the growing darkness over the ocean, I turned on my little weather radio to listen to the Coast Guard “Notices To Mariners”. This is a marine channel which gives weather and tide information, also warnings of any changes in navigational lights that mariners should know of. The first thing out of the announcer’s mouth was: “Container ship Nordlines Voyager just lost 20 or more deck containers in the Potato Patch; caution is advised to all ships navigating in that area”. Oh fish poop!

PART 2

In the full dark now, my internal dialogue went something like this: I’m alone and exhausted after 14 hours of singlehanded sailing; the wind is blowing 25 knots at least, with 15 to 18 foot seas; there’s a cold driving sideways rain on top of that; I’m 10 miles outside the Gate and Potato Patch, and have to go through them both to get into the Bay and anyplace safe I can sleep; I just saw the ship that lost the containers in the Potato Patch; they don’t know how many containers went overboard; are they all full, all empty, or a mix; do empty, full, or leaky containers float; are they dark-colored or light-colored; how many floated and how many sank; how far above the water does a floating container float: 6 inches or 6 feet; and finally, what the heck does a container in the Potato Patch look like?

Now the normal thing to do would be to send one of the crew up to the bow of the boat with my million-candlepower 12 volt searchlight, have them on the lookout for any containers, and shouting steering instructions back to me. There were a few problems with that idea, though; the first one was that I’d singlehanded Spice up the coast, and there was no crew. I hadn’t bothered to round up any friends for crew because I’d thought a day of peaceful singlehanded sailing sounded like just the thing to start my weekend off with.

Even if I had crew, and they were on the job, their vision would be compromised by the pelting sideways rain that was now falling, driven by 25 knots of wind. Even if I had crew, at 25 knots we would be on top of a container in no time, and they might not see the container and get the news to me in time, or clearly enough, for me to avoid hitting it. At the speed we were going(20 knots +/-) I would be through the danger zone in half an hour, or would have demolished the boat against one of the containers by then.

So, manually steering from the from the normal helm position in the boat’s central cockpit, I got out my mondo searchlight and turned it on; I was going to see what was up ahead of me using its actinic glare! However, as the sails were forward of me, I was immediately blinded by the reflected light that it sent back from the sails to me. This eliminated my night vision; I couldn’t see up ahead at all! Panic!

Luckily Spice was equipped with a thing Jim Brown called the “wiggler”, which would engage or disengage the rudder from the steering wheel so that the self-steering windvane, which powered the trimtab (also of Jim’s design), could steer the boat without having to work against and overcome the friction in the manual steering system. The result was that when the wiggler was disconnected, the rudder hung loose on the transom, sensitive to the slightest push in either direction from the dimunitive trimtab, and the boat would self-steer effortlessly on the lightest wind, guided by the windvane.

The neat thing about the joystick was that when the rudder was disconnected from the manual steering, and the windvane was not connected to the trimtab, you could use the joystick to make 4 tons of boat go roaring all over the place with just a touch of your fingertips! The joystick lines only reached to my helm position in the cockpit, so I got out some more line and lengthened them hurriedly until they would reach the bow pulpit. I took the joystick and the searchlight up to the bow pulpit, and then, holding my breath, disconnected the rudder.

This was scary, because we were going 20 knots and surfing up the backs of the waves in front of us from time to time; but as soon as I got the lines adjusted properly, the joystick performed as advertised, and I had complete and instant control over the boat’s direction. I then turned my attention forward. I was still in good shape, for all this internal dialogue and fooling around with joysticks and searchlights had taken place in only about eight minutes since I saw the Nordline Voyager. I wasn’t really into the Potato Patch yet, where the containers had fallen off.

I wedged myself solidly into the bow pulpit, sweeping the searchlight forward from side to side, and wiggling the joystick in response to what the waves and wind were doing. I could see clearly at least 400 feet in front of the boat, and felt I could easily dodge anything that was floating high enough for me to see. I mentally settled into this routine, and we cruised happily along through the night; if you can call doing 20 knots and overtaking 18 foot waves while trying to dodge huge floating metal boxes “cruising”.

I was cold and wet in my foul weather gear, because I’d had to pee down my leg into my boots at some point in this process (I needed to go and couldn’t risk the boat’s safety on a trip below to the head). Up at the bow pulpit, the spray from the waves I was surfing was driving itself right up my sleeves and the legs of my foulie pants.

I was cold, exhausted, scared, and exhilarated all at the same time. I might be in real trouble soon, but for now I was really alive! I had a chance, and that’s all I’ve ever asked for. We surfed and surfed, and I stared ahead into the mysterious darkness, wishing it to reveal its secrets, or lack thereof. If you’ve ever been on a plywood multihull surfing in 18-foot waves at 20 knots, you’ll know that the sounds of the ocean were deafening; thrumming of wind in the rig, the crash and smash of wavetops against the hulls, and the noise the boat itself made rushing through the ocean, which was like a hundred little mountain streams rushing by your sleeping bag at night in a canyon.

After an eternal while, the wind slowed, and we slowed down a bit. And a bit more, and then were only a mile outside the Bridge and the Gate in about ten knots of wind and ten foot seas. I made some mental calculations about which way the tide was flowing, the time the ship lost the containers, what time it was now, and I relaxed. I knew that any containers that were still floating were at least five miles behind me outside the Gate, and that it was safe.

Resisting an urge to “do something”, I hung out where I was for quite awhile, staying up at the bow for another half hour or so, because it simply felt so cool to be steering my boat from the nose. I steered into the beautiful nighttime world of San Francisco Bay, with its glowing skylines and flashing neon signs, and headed for the nice, dark, peaceful anchorage I knew was there.

The above story comes from Tim Mann, who let us publish it for you, our dear reader 🙂
You can find out more about Tim at:
Friendly Aquaponics, Inc
Honoka’a, Hawaii
www.friendlyaquaponics.com