OF BOATING FRIENDS AND DINGHIES, by TIM MANN
Date happened: 1972
Two rousing sea stories from the early aquabatic days of modern multihulls.

Summary
OF BOATING FRIENDS & DINGHIES

Tim Mann was my youngest client. (Second youngest, Chris White). He built his Searunner 25 at age sixteen and cruised the California coast extensively in it. He sometimes visited with us in the late sixties when passing through our home harbor, Santa Cruz. Having no visible means of support, I once asked him how he sustained himself from his boat, and he said, “I forage a lot.”

He “foraged” enough to buy a part-built Searunner 37, which would become the SPICE of these stories and in which he eventually doubled the Pacific. Settling in the Marshall Islands, where he built boats for the local government, he then proceeded to Hawaii where he built a 57’ commercial fishing, sailing trimaran, and where he now operates a hydroponics business.

These stories illustrate the gung-ho bravado seen in many early multihull owner-builders, who sometimes learned their seamanship the hard way but persisted in making voyages and surviving incidents that may well have resulted in very different stories if sailed in very different boats. It was Tim and many sailors like him who demonstrated undeniably, to a doubting public, that “multihulls can do it.”

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OF BOATING FRIENDS & DINGHIES
By Tim Mann

I had just finished putting the new aluminum mast on SPICE, my Searunner 37 trimaran, working at the dock in Ventura, Southern California. I tuned the rigging by feel to as close as it was with the old wooden mast, and figured I would get the tuning closer when I got out of the harbor and got a little wind. My friend Paul hitchhiked up from Santa Barbara to sail the 25 miles back to Santa Barbara with me. He’d never been on a sailboat before and was really excited about the idea. I was living on SPICE off the wharf at Santa Barbara at the time, getting ready to sail up to Northern California where I had a job offer working for a sailmaker. Putting the new mast on in Ventura was the last major step in getting ready for that trip. I just had to go back to Santa Barbara, provision the boat, pick up some of my stuff and say my goodbyes.

So we cast off and made our way out of the harbor. SPICE didn’t have an engine yet and was just a pure sailing vessel, I always had two anchors ready to toss, one from each end of the boat, by just cutting a piece of 1/8″ cord or slipping a slipknot. Once at sea, I secured the anchors a lot more solidly, but anywhere near a harbor or jetties I kept my emergency brakes ready. We got a little wind outside the harbor entrance, maybe eight knots, and I had Paul steer while I got the wrench and screwdriver out and tuned the rigging under load. I noticed there was a fairly big groundswell running, maybe 10-12 feet.

The wind picked up a little to 15 knots, so I sighted the mast again, then went around fine tuning the rig and was pretty happy with the result. This was good, because then the wind picked up a little more. It was blowing 18-20 knots now. We were 7 or 8 miles out from Ventura harbor headed for Santa Barbara.

We were enjoying the day. It was beautiful and sunny, with a little overcast and some grey stuff off to the south. About halfway to Santa Barbara, the wind picked up again. This time it jumped straight to 30 to 35 knots in half an hour, then up to 40+ a little later. It got more overcast, and we started to get some windblown rain. I put a double reef in the mainsail, and dropped the yankee jib, tying it down really well, When I finished it was blowing 40 to 45+ solid, and I was really glad I had been conservative and put a double reef in instead of one. The wind didn’t pick up any more, which was really fortunate. I only had two sets of reef points in that main, and no storm staysail yet.

As we got closer to the Santa Barbara wharf, I checked it out. It didn’t look quite right. I got out the binocs for a closer look and all of a sudden I understood. The reason it hadn’t looked quite right was that the waves were breaking over the end of the Santa Barbara pier, which was 15 feet off the water, and the entire harbor entrance was closed out. The harbor dredge had been pulled back inside the harbor for safety. As I scanned the anchorage where I had been living, I recognized four of my friend’s boats, on the beach. They had dragged anchor in the fast-building wind and swell and no one had been able to get out to them in time to get them to safety.

I looked at this and realized it wasn’t going to change anytime soon. It was time to swallow that lump in my throat and start thinking about alternatives. Can’t anchor in an open roadstead in that kind of wind and swell; can’t surf through fifteen-foot breaking waves into a crowded harbor in 40 knots of wind without probably trashing the boat. I opted to turn out towards the Channel Islands and look for a safe anchorage there. We crossed back towards the other side of the channel from Santa Barbara. When we were about halfway to the islands it became obvious that the wind, which was clobbering the south side of the islands, was also wrapping around the islands into the channel and clobbering the anchorages on the north side of the islands. These were the anchorages where I’d thought I’d find some shelter. That lump in my throat came back, bigtime.

When you have no choice but one, you still have that one. I was thinking really hard. I asked Paul if he didn’t mind going to San Francisco. This was the first time he’d ever been sailing, you know, and he had no idea what I was asking him or what he was in for. Not that we had a lot of options. We could have beaten out of the channel then hove to in the offshore shipping lanes in 45 knots, which would have been a lot of fun. Oh, I forgot to mention, the boat didn’t have an electrical system yet, or any radio except the little Radio Shack weather radio that got the Coast Guard weather stations. I had a flashlight, and Aladdin lamps in the cabins, but no juice yet. I actually started to get a little excited, thinking about it. I had been planning to beat up the coast against the usual northwesterly headwinds in a week or so to get to my new job. Surfing north in a southerly instead of beating north in northwesterlies really started to appeal to me.

I took stock of what we had for provisions: a 20-lb case of oranges, a 2-lb box of dates, some dry lentils, half a loaf of bread, and two five-gallon plastic jugs of drinking water. By now it was about an hour from dark and we were just off Point Conception. I checked in with the weather on the little battery radio, and the nice Coast Guard man said it was blowing 45 knots south-south-east, and gusting, with seas 15 to 18 feet and building. The Sumlog had been pegged at 15 knots since we gave the pier at Santa Barbara a pass. I looked around, and thought, with an hour to sunset, I ought to give the self-steering a try. I had used it for short runs in light winds and it had worked fine. I had built it just like Jim Brown said to in his Searunner Construction Manual. It ought to work, right?

Before I did that, I let Paul try steering. I wanted to see if there was any possibility of sleep, or if I just had to stay up. Paul immediately put us into a monster sliding broach down the face of a wave; he freaked out and froze, I freaked out and grabbed the wheel back. OK, that wasn’t going to work. Let’s try the self-steering. We had turned the corner at Point Conception a while back and were heading up the coast now, and the waves were coming up from the stern quarter. As a wave would come charging up behind us, the stern would get kicked sideways, I would frantically counter by spinning the wheel, the boat would catch the wave, put on an additional eight or ten knots for eight or ten seconds, and go charging up the back of the wave in front of us. Then we would slow down a little, (but not enough to unpeg the Sumlog), the next wave would come up behind us, and the whole thing repeated itself. Doing the best I could, I had been steering thirty degrees to either side of my desired course.

Finally I cut in the self-steering. I didn’t disengage the rudder with the wiggler yet, as I was sure I would need to override the self-steering the way I had needed to override Paul. The wheel spun, driven by the ghost vane and trimtab on the stern of the boat, and the yaw reduced to fifteen degrees of either side of the course. My hands hovered just above the wheel, lightly letting the rim spin under my fingers, and I felt the wheel turning when I wouldn’t have turned it. It did things I wouldn’t have done if I was manually steering the boat. After about fifteen flawless minutes of this, I relaxed big time. I got Paul up from below and gave him the lecture about watching for lights, watching the compass, etc. Paul was just stoked. He wasn’t seasick, and this was the most exciting new thing that ever happened to him. Paul was doing great, I couldn’t have asked for a more pliable or positive crew member.

Then, about thirty miles off the coast and maybe sixty north of Point Conception, I sacked out. I had checked Paul out for the last couple hours on the red light/green light thing, we had seen ships, and we had seen a tugboat, so he knew there was something dangerous (and often invisible) behind them. I felt pretty good about things. By now, we were in the middle of a dark, dark night, ripping along at twenty knots plus, roaring down the faces of these waves that had gotten quite a bit larger than what the Coast Guard proposed earlier in the day. We were stoned out of our minds. No drugs involved, it was just that the entire surface of the sea was a giant blue phosphorescent light show. There were the three huge tracks the boat left running up and down the surface of the waves, then the monster blue glow when six feet fell off the top of an 18-foot wave in the dark. Every once in a while, in a fleeting quiet moment between waves, a great whirl would occur twenty or thirty feet below the surface when something down there did something down there. This made me hope our 3/8″ thick plywood boat didn’t look or sound like food.

I got a couple of hours of much-needed sleep inside a boat that sounded like it was parked under a 100-foot waterfall, then got up for a half hour and checked out the scene. Pretty much like when I went to bed: fast, wet, phosphorescent, and unearthly. I went back to bed for another four hours with no alarms from Paul, checked again, and noticed the wind had dropped to a measly 35 knots or so. I went back to bed; we blasted on through the night. At sunrise, we were in the middle of a trackless mess of big confused waves, surfing north with the Sumlog still pegged at fifteen knots.

I had no idea where we were. Although I was a navigator and had even taught courses in navigation, without a horizon I couldn’t do anything. We hadn’t seen that since Santa Barbara. I mean, I had my dead reckoning, for what that was worth. We had been going for how long (I knew that), at what speed (I had no idea, since my speed measuring device had pegged eighteen hours ago, stayed that way since then, and was making whining noises), and in what direction (I had a general idea of this, with the side-to-side yaw reduced to a total of only thirty degrees by the self-steering, instead of the 60 degrees we were doing when I was hand steering). I put a dot just a little north of the Big Sur coast, somewhere between twenty and ninety miles offshore, then tried to figure out a course to set, since the wind and waves seemed to be abating. We headed in towards the coast a little more and ran like that until nightfall.

As sunset approached the wind dropped and dropped and dropped, until we were flopping like mad in the leftover confused swell from the southerly with about three knots of wind. I unlashed the yankee again and hauled it up, shook the reefs out of the main, and kept on. The sea got quieter and quieter, until about three in the morning, we were sitting in a flat calm, fogbound, with the sails slatting back and forth. We had made it to somewhere; we weren’t sure where. We had seen no lights all night, neither ship nor lighthouses.

We flapped all the next day. This is where you guys with engines would have fired them up and gone somewhere purposefully to figure out where you were. With no engine, I, the navigator, had a fogbound day with no horizon, no ships to clue us we were near a shipping lane, and no shoreline. No nothing. We ate oranges and dates and farted a lot: they’re not a good food combination.

We flapped on into the night. At about ten that night, we got a nice steady three-knot breeze, which seemed huge after the day and night we had just spent flapping. It was really pleasant sailing. And then, about two, we started seeing lights off the land. Just an occasional flash here and there, nothing that could possibly be a lighthouse.

Then, I started seeing a regular flash. I timed it, by counting Mississippi-one, etc (I had no stopwatch or timepiece). fifteen seconds, then eighteen, then fifteen, or was it sixteen, then twenty-eight. Was that double fifteen, or sixteen, cause I missed seeing a flash? Then twenty-one seconds; not double anything. What the heck? I combed the charts and racked my brains, and tried every combination of things I could think of to make this lighthouse make sense with no luck. Then the light dawned (literally). I had driven this coast before, and what I was seeing was a coastal access road that opened onto the coast highway by coming up a slight rise before the turn onto the highway. I had been seeing the flash of the headlights when the cars turned onto the highway, every fifteen (or twenty-one) seconds. I knew exactly where we were.

We had a beautiful sunrise. The fog lifted, we were twelve miles from the harbor at Pillar Point, Half Moon Bay. It took us until noon to make those twelve miles, Then I slept for days and days, Paul hitchhiked home to Santa Barbara, and I never saw him again. Seems like there’s a lot of that with boating friends and dinghies, sad to say.

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Another incident on SPICE serves to illustrate the point. My friend Joseph, another inexperienced sailor, joined me for the trip from Half Moon Bay, past San Francisco to Tomales Bay for a haul –out. We had just arrived off the entrance to Tomales Bay about a half hour before the time my calculations said should be slack tide. See, I even knew about that thing where you’re not supposed to cross a bar on an outgoing tide because it undercuts the waves and makes them break on you. But we had a nice 15 knot breeze coming off the land and plenty of way on, so we headed towards the bar.

As we got a little closer, we could see sets consisting of 4 to 5 large waves breaking all the way across the entrance to the bay, about 1,500 feet across. I felt pretty confident of having control of the boat since we were making 8 to 9 knots through the water, closehauled into the land breeze, and so I timed the sets, sheeted in and drove for the bar on the back of the last wave in a set. And then the wind died completely.

We just sat there, dead in the water, watching the next set coming up behind us. As they got closer and closer I craned my neck up forward to locate the 12′ tall steel channel buoy that was somewhere in front of us. Couldn’t see it. Then I gave up and watched the waves behind us until the last possible second to get lined up for whatever was next. The last thing I saw before I turned forward to concentrate on my steering was a wave that was breaking. Its top was a couple of feet higher than the top of the wind vane, (which was 12′ off the water). The next thing I saw looking forward was Joseph’s eyes, which had gone hugely wide. Joseph’s job was holding the haul-down line for the centerboard, which we had uncleated because I had some crazy idea that the bar was really shallow and that the board, which had a 6′ draft fully down, might hit the bottom and kick up. I told Joseph to feel for it, let the board kick up, then pull it down again when we got to deeper water. Joseph had obviously forgotten completely about the centerboard and was in some deeper, more primitive place. And then everything was underwater.

I remember holding my breath for what seemed like forever, then the water draining down past the top of my head, past my shoulders, down the side decks of the boat, then we were bouncing forward like a 37-foot surfboard the surfer lost, at maybe 20 knots or so on the fifteen-foot wall of foam that the breaking wave had turned into. I cranked and cranked on the wheel with no discernible result, then SPICE leveled off, straightened out, and took off in front of the wall of foam. In solid water now, she steered like a race car, with the slightest touch on the wheel sending her veering from side to side.

We coasted a little further on that wave, then were beyond the bar and moving into the Bay on a barely perceptible breeze.

I looked around and noticed first it was a beautiful sunny day, with little fluffy clouds in the deep blue sky. Then I noticed my wind vane was gone, its 1″ stainless steel shaft snapped off. My foam-core dinghy, which had been double-lashed to the cabintop, was also gone. Upon further checking, we found two feet of water in the bilge. Although all the hatches had been closed and dogged, it had made its way in somehow. Inside the boat it looked like someone with a firehose had cut loose. Everything was soaked and thrown upside down. Needless to say, we were wet and cold.

We sailed in to Marconi Cove, a little marina further in along the Bay, and were welcomed and treated to the story of the 38′ ketch which just last month had rolled and drowned four people at the bar in conditions not quite as bad as those we just experienced.

I never saw my “indestructible,” unsinkable, bright yellow dinghy again. Had to build another one. My friend Joseph got off at the dock, and didn’t come by much after that. He never mentioned going sailing to Paradise again, but at least this time I didn’t lose the dinghy.

Author’s contact: kaimana AT hawaiiantel DOT net