Fear and Loathing on the Bay: Foxxfyre’s Farallones 2000 Adventure

My escape plan worked to perfection. In the confusion generated by the prearranged fight between the electrical engineers and the model shop machinists, I was able to sneak out the side door and boogie up 880 to Richmond, arriving at the boat around 2:30 pm on Friday. The weather was warm and sunny, with only a trace of wind. Anticipating a pleasant evening schmoozing with the usual suspects at the Golden Gate Yacht club, I hurriedly prepared the boat for the 9 mile delivery across the Bay to the start of the 2000 SSS SingleHanded Farallones race.

Since the wind was light, and coming from directly where I wanted to go, I opted to motor, and left the mainsail furled, and put no sails on deck. All went well for the first several miles, out the Potrero Reach into the Bay proper. As I neared Angel Island, a breeze started to fill in, and soon I was seeing 15 knots from directly ahead. I figured that sails would be more trouble than they were worth, but put on some foulies, "just in case".

As I passed Pt. Blunt, the wind had increased to 27 knots true, and was still heading me, although beginning to go to the west. At this point a mainsail would have been helpful. The sea conditions were some of the worst I have seen in the Bay, and Foxxfyre was soon laboring in the short chop.

After a bit of thrashing, we came into the lee of Alcatraz, and conditions abated. I was still reluctant to put up any sails, as I had only a mile or so to go to the Golden Gate Yacht Club. About 200 yards past Alcatraz, and back in the 30 knot blasts coming from the Slot, the trusty old Yanmar engine, which until now had been running like a watch, suddenly began emitting noises reminiscent of a truckload of live pigs locking up the brakes at 90 miles per hour. I engaged the autopilot and ran below to assess the problem. Throwing open the engine compartment, I was horrified to be greeted with blasts of black smoke and the sight of the exhaust manifold lying in the bilge! The engine compartment was covered in black soot, and it was clear that the day was about to get a lot more interesting.

Running back on deck, I shut down the engine and took a look about. The wind was still howling in the upper twenties, and the boat was drifting sideways down the Bay. "Humpph," I thought, "I am a famous singlehanded sailor. I know what to do. I will simply put up the sails and sail back into the slip." Ha ha ha…

Since I had no jibs on deck, I decided to raise the main. Throwing off the sail ties, I heaved away on the halyard with vigor. As the boat was scudding downwind sideways, the mainsail blew through the shrouds and the halyard entwined itself around the spreaders. I eased the halyard and went forward to untangle the mess. Back in the cockpit, I heaved away again, with the same result. Muttering some favorite French quotations, I cleared the jams and tried again. This time I got the head of the main to the spreader before the battens fouled the shrouds. The boat was obviously not understanding my increasingly loud instructions regarding it’s behavior and ancestry, so I ran off downwind with the partially raised mainsail and then stuffed the bow into the wind when I had gotten a bit of speed. As the bow came up, I winched away on the halyard, and after three run-and-stuff episodes, got the main up.

I immediately set course back to Richmond. The tide, which had been opposing me on the way to the Cityfront, had, by now turned and was ebbing with a vengeance. In order to get more power, I set a 65% jib on a wire removable forestay. As I sat back and prepared for the trip back to the slip, I noticed that the boom was a little high. About 8 feet high! The solid boom vang, which I had so proudly installed the weekend before, had ripped out of the boom. Obviously the work of a master craftsman. With no topping lift, and no vang, the boom was doing it’s best to rip off the gooseneck in the howling wind. After a bit of a fight, I got a temporary vang set up and reset course to Richmond. As we got in the lee of Angel Island, the wind started to drop. By the time we reached the Richmond Ship Channel, the wind was only 5 knots, and from astern. The tide was winning, so I decided more sail was in order. We made the turn into the Potrero Reach, and I went below to get a big jib. As I hefted it, I briefly considered dragging it out the main hatch into the cockpit and then forward. But since the winds were now quite light, and since the Reach was a glassy millpond, with no swells in sight, I decided to take it out the front hatch. I threw back the hatch, heaved the sail onto the foredeck, and started to climb onto the deck through the hatch. As I began to emerge, to my horror, I was staring straight at a 4 foot high wake thrown up by the Richmond Ferry, which in the 30 seconds I had been below had rounded the curve in the channel and was steaming along at Warp Factor 11. I howled as the bow rose on the first wave and then stuffed into the following trough, scooping a foot of green water onto the deck, down the front of my bib foulies and all over my bunk.

Screaming vile imprecations, I danced around the boat, shaking my fist at the uncaring back of the indifferent ferry. The ferry wake had brought the boat speed to zero, and the big ebb tide was making noises about taking me on a tour of the neighboring mudflats. I hurriedly raised the 150% jib and prayed for wind. A small breeze filled in, and I had again resumed sailing towards Marina Bay when I heard myself being called on the VHF. It turned out that a friend whom I had called on the cell phone to whine about my plight, had driven to Marina Bay and was enlisting the dock regulars to help get me into my slip. This sounded like a good idea, until I rounded the last turn into the fairway and saw a huge crowd of well wishers surrounding my slip. It was like the end of a bad Airplane movie- the firetrucks spraying foam on the runway while women weep helplessly and the damaged aircraft careens towards the tarmac. I gritted my teeth and aimed the bow at the cheering wall of flesh. The wind had begun to blow vigorously again, and I was flying down the fairway. I blew the jib and main and jammed the tiller over. Faces loomed in my peripheral vision, like grinning Jack-O’Lanterns, and then the mooring lines were secured. I thanked all my friends for their support and took down the sails. As the perfect ending to a perfect day, I discovered experimentally that one can insert a finger into the small hole at the end of a Lewmar XA sheet stopper while closing the stopper and the cams will flatten the finger into a form which I am sure will prove useful for picking locks and flipping pancakes.

Anyway, Foxxfyre will recover. The damage is all repairable. I spent a tedious weekend cleaning the engine compartment and removing broken items from the boat instead of rounding the Farallones. I guess the moral is that no boat, however well maintained, is proof against the forces of the wind and sea, and that the mental and physical skills we learn racing shorthanded are the best form of life insurance for boating that we can get.