After a break from doing the trip, I decided to do the Grace delivery this year from Newport to Miami. We started on Saturday, November 2nd, and arrived in Coconut Grove late on November 8th.
While I’ve had one voyage that wasn’t super eventful until the VERY end, most of my voyages have had at least some sort of challenge and adventure. You never know what you will hit off the coast of the eastern seaboard.
As usual, Cape Hatteras was the turning point for this voyage. The first couple of days were relatively uneventful. One of the boat’s captains was a great cook, so we had great food. The seas were calm so that we could sleep.
When we pulled up to Hatteras, the wind shifted to dead on, so we kept our main sail up for stability. However, the pin holding the roller in the boom broke free, and the roller started coming out. We ended up lashing the boom roller to the boom, but this meant we were very stuck about the sail’s position, as we would need to move a lot of lines if we wanted to switch our position.
While I must have understood that there was probably a roller in the boom, I never appreciated it until I saw it sticking out the tail end of the boom by the foot of the sail. Thankfully, our roller is made of carbon fiber, so it arched a bit but didn’t bend (apparently, some boats have aluminum, and that bends).
Still, there was a lot of stress on the foot of the sale with the wind. In good times, there are three attachment points from the foot of the sale to the roller. As the days passed, we noticed that one of the points had broken, and we had two. We became terrified that if the next one broke, the third would fail shortly after, and then we would have a giant unruly sail flopping around from the mast. While the wind was still 20 knots, we decided to douse the main instead of risking letting the wind get higher. This was a challenging task as the wind was running pretty fast. We tacked the boat gently past the wind to direct the position of the fall of the sail before releasing the main halyard. The sail was expected to drop quickly, but it didn’t. Instead, Tommy had to go up the mast and pull it down.
We felt safer once the sail was on deck, but our speed diminished. When we finally arrived at the bottom of Florida, it was just past dark. This was problematic because the channel we tried to navigate was very shallow, and the markers needed to be illuminated. In the middle of some of the shallowest parts, we found our transmission had also gone, so we lost propulsion from the main engine, and Tommy had to hop in the dinghy to direct the boat.
With thrusters and Tommy’s nudging, we made it slowly and safely to the dock. It was an adventure and a half.
Although some details of this trip have yet to be included, this post maintains the spirit of the challenge.
If you want to check out Tommy, watch his YouTube videos and adventures.