Offered to help the owner (a friend of a friend of a friend) of an older racing sailboat move his boat from Florida to Maryland. It was planned to be us and 4-5 other crew, but (red flag the first) ended up being only me, my wife, and the owner.
There were lots of red flags before finding ourselves in squarely over our heads -- an overheating motor was explained away as having had an undersized thermostat installed. Plausible enough. The lack of a bimini in August in Florida was just forgotten, but led to pretty significant overheating to me. The autopilot not working we didn't realize until about 15 miles offshore. That the autopilot was draining all the other batteries we didn't realize until we lost navigation lights. Etc. Etc.
This was embarrassingly recent, but suffice to say a LOT of lessons were learned. The boat was foreign enough that I accepted too many "explanations" as comfort when they should have been a reason to abort. Failures compounded and voila, we're now 15 hours away from civilization flying a spinnaker through thunderstorms at night and positively hauling ass.
Eventually we got the owner to appreciate our discomfort enough and how over our heads we were to head to safety in Charleston (he'd still just been heading east, which was baffling -- but apparently it is not everyone's first instinct to go to safety when life-threatening failures crop up) but that brought its own perils -- coming into a crowded channel at night without navigation lights isn't advised. We were shining a flashlight onto the sails, but the flashlight would change modes if it wasn't held steadily enough. One of the storms we'd sailed through had killed the owner's phone as well as his phone charger, so the little bits of navigation we had were precious, but necessary coming into shallower coastal waters. A cargo ship coming out of harbor kicked us out of the channel just enough that we ended up grounded and stuck pretty squarely about a half mile away from restaurants, but late enough on a Sunday that there wasn't any other traffic we could hail down. (A radio would have been lovely in that case)
I was sunburnt and heat-stroked enough that despite guzzling water constantly, I hadn't urinated in 24 hours, and though we were in relative calm, the totality of circumstances, I used the last of the dwindling battery on the last usable phone among us to call the coast guard for evacuation. The owner of the boat stayed behind.
To paraphrase Cheryl Strayed -- If you'd asked me at any point in the journey, I was absolutely miserable, but on the whole it was miraculous. Gained a ton of skills. Learned a ton of red flags to look out for. Experienced a lot of firsts, not the least of which included a crash course in celestial navigation. And being 200 miles offshore and awake the whole night during the Perseid meteor shower was absolutely brilliant.
"If you'd asked me at any point in the journey, I was absolutely miserable, but on the whole it was miraculous. Gained a ton of skills."
Sounds a lot like ocean racing sailboats under normal circumstances.
I quit ocean racing (after about 5 seasons) when I had a sudden realisation that the only part that was any fun in the last 3 days was sitting in the bar after it was over and talking about it. And there were ten times as many non-crew people there enjoying that with us as there were crew on the boat I raced on.
lmao -- we checked on him the next morning. He didn't answer my call, but that made sense as his phone had died, so we drove by where it had been stranded and it wasn't there so he'd moved. Felt guilty that we couldn't get in touch with him to offer him a ride back in our rental car, but caught up with him a few weeks later and he managed to get the boat into a slip somewhere down there.
There were lots of red flags before finding ourselves in squarely over our heads -- an overheating motor was explained away as having had an undersized thermostat installed. Plausible enough. The lack of a bimini in August in Florida was just forgotten, but led to pretty significant overheating to me. The autopilot not working we didn't realize until about 15 miles offshore. That the autopilot was draining all the other batteries we didn't realize until we lost navigation lights. Etc. Etc.
This was embarrassingly recent, but suffice to say a LOT of lessons were learned. The boat was foreign enough that I accepted too many "explanations" as comfort when they should have been a reason to abort. Failures compounded and voila, we're now 15 hours away from civilization flying a spinnaker through thunderstorms at night and positively hauling ass.
Eventually we got the owner to appreciate our discomfort enough and how over our heads we were to head to safety in Charleston (he'd still just been heading east, which was baffling -- but apparently it is not everyone's first instinct to go to safety when life-threatening failures crop up) but that brought its own perils -- coming into a crowded channel at night without navigation lights isn't advised. We were shining a flashlight onto the sails, but the flashlight would change modes if it wasn't held steadily enough. One of the storms we'd sailed through had killed the owner's phone as well as his phone charger, so the little bits of navigation we had were precious, but necessary coming into shallower coastal waters. A cargo ship coming out of harbor kicked us out of the channel just enough that we ended up grounded and stuck pretty squarely about a half mile away from restaurants, but late enough on a Sunday that there wasn't any other traffic we could hail down. (A radio would have been lovely in that case)
I was sunburnt and heat-stroked enough that despite guzzling water constantly, I hadn't urinated in 24 hours, and though we were in relative calm, the totality of circumstances, I used the last of the dwindling battery on the last usable phone among us to call the coast guard for evacuation. The owner of the boat stayed behind.
To paraphrase Cheryl Strayed -- If you'd asked me at any point in the journey, I was absolutely miserable, but on the whole it was miraculous. Gained a ton of skills. Learned a ton of red flags to look out for. Experienced a lot of firsts, not the least of which included a crash course in celestial navigation. And being 200 miles offshore and awake the whole night during the Perseid meteor shower was absolutely brilliant.