Heavy weather sailing on the Ventura coast

Awhile back, we described our interesting sail between Ventura and Channel Islands Marina in Oxnard …. the one with 30+ knot winds, a broken helm, confused and breaking seas and not a little bit of fear.

If you’ll recall, we described our technique as keeping her close to the wind and at a 30º-50º angle on the breaking waves. Plan A was to go home to Channnel Islands; Plan B was just hold what we had (Oh, God, I CANNOT write stay the course, even though that’s what I mean) until the seas allowed us to turn toward home. That might have meant exploring Santa Monica Bay or points even further south.

We were loath to lie-ahull or to heave-to as we were on a lee shore. Even if we had sea room, the Hunter 33 did not seem as if she would tolerate being beam-to the seas or would do well in the random oscillations of lying ahull (i.e. no sails), at least not without a sea anchor or drogue equipped with oil dispenser.

So we pressed on. And now we feel justified – actually, pretty damned smart, as Sailing Magazine http://www.sailingmagazine.net/index.html has (not explicitly) endorsed our procedure. It even has a name: Forereaching.

We’ve been teaching this at our local sailing school. Now we have a name for it … and an authority to back us up.

For a brief, but excellent article on the subject, go to US Sailing heavy weather page.

BTW, the Sailing article appears in the December 2007 issue.

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