By Nick Halkowski

Each crash was not terrible, but the accumulation of thousands weighed heavily on my mind.  Accidents at sea often happen in an instant, without warning, and each jolt threatened to break the small boat in two.  But the alternative was heading out to sea, where the waves would be larger, the wind would be stronger, and the likelihood of making it back to land in one piece much more remote.  That is to say, there was no alternative.  We were committed and just had to hold on.

This leg of the trip started in southern Mexico, in a tiny port town of Puerto Chiapas, and would end, eventually, at the northern end of Costa Rica.   The boat, a 1960s sailboat known as a Cal 36, had seen better days but had stoically carried us from L.A. over the past few months, in my mind passing some sort of test.  But her sails were worn and her engine was less than perfect.  Most of the time in Chiapas was spent hand sewing thick sail fabric or draped over the rusty metal hunk of an engine in overwhelming heat and humidity, sweating, bleeding, and cursing together solutions with help from the local mom and pop hardware store, Home Depot.  As much fun as this was, departure from here was not overly emotional.

My crew since L.A. was a semi-nomadic traveler from Canada, Sammy.  She was working on historic tall-ships, big sailboats of the “Master and Commander” kind, when she decided to head south on my decidedly smaller and probably less seaworthy vessel.  I am not sure what she thought she was getting herself into, but I bet this was not it.  She had handled the trip up to that point with aplomb, but the leaky decks, worn sails, and ever petulant engine were taking their toll.  She had intimated that this next leg would be her last as she had met an older gentleman living on his slightly larger and much nicer sailboat (a Westsail 42) in Chiapas and had hatched a plan with him to start an English school in town for local children.  I would imagine she could have met nearly anyone doing anything at that point and still excused herself from the remainder of the trip, and not without good reason.  However, in the middle of the ocean, Sammy could not leave the boat, and this inevitably became quite the point of frustration about halfway into this leg to Costa Rica.  

The Pacific coast of Nicaragua and northern Costa Rica often has incredibly strong winds blowing away from land, or offshore, for weeks at a time with strengths approaching hurricane force.  These are locally known as the Papagayos.  The prediction of these winds is challenging, as the timing may be known, but often the exact strength will not.  Before leaving Chiapas, I had checked the forecast.  A weak Papagayos was predicted many days out, but since this looked like the best window so far, I decided to go while things looked at least ok.

Things were not ok.  Three days out of Chiapas, the winds began rising from the east and continued building until they were steady 30 knots with gale force gusts.  Luckily we were only 5-10 miles offshore so the winds, despite their strength, did not have the time to kick up larger waves, but the short chop was enough to launch the boat into the air, resulting in the continual crashes as she landed heavily on the back of the wave.  At first every crash made my heart jump and flutter as if I was on the edge of a cliff.  Checking after each bodily thud that nothing had broken, I uneasily sat down again, only to be roused by another deafening bang.  Eventually, the smaller ones were nearly ignored, and only the truly impressive crashes, when it seemed half the boat was suspended in a second in midair before slamming back into the sea, were acknowledged.

Sammy was enjoying herself even less than me, if that was possible.  While I had at least some experience in similar conditions off the coast of northern California, up to this point the trip had been an easy run down the coast of Baja California, and then light air sailing and motoring through southern Mexico.  This abrupt change in conditions was met with contempt and worry.  But luckily nothing had broken.

That is until the morning after the first full day of strong winds.  I walked, or more accurately, crawled on all fours, holding on for dear life lest I test the security of my harness connecting me to the boat, all the way forward to the mast.  I needed to check the metal wires keeping the mast, and the sails attached to the mast, from falling over.  The constant pounding into the short, steep chop put immense strain on the entire system, with each crash putting far more stress on it than it had likely ever seen before.  If the wires broke, or the connection between the wires and the boat failed, the mast would break, and we would be at the mercy of the wind pushing us out hundreds of miles to sea.  The idea of ending up there with a questionable engine and no sails sounded bad, so I had no intention of letting that happen.

I finally made it to the mast and began checking the wires and fittings.  To my horror, one of the connections from a wire to the boat was clearly failing.  The stress from every crash had slowly started pulling the fiberglass reinforced plywood deck up—literally pulling my boat apart.  There was no telling how many more crashes it would last before ripping out a manhole-sized piece of deck, bringing down the mast and leaving the ocean with an easy pathway directly into the boat.  While this would unlikely be enough to sink the boat with the smaller chop we were experiencing close to shore, I knew as we got pushed further offshore (as we inevitably would without a mast and sails), the waves would grow, and such a large hole would quickly become a real problem.  Something had to be done, fast.  

I looked around as water kept coming over the boat as it continued to crash into the waves.  That was the obvious first step—stop the crashing and take the stress off the mast.  I crawled back to the cockpit and turned the boat about 90 degrees to the left so now the wind was coming over the other side, the side that, at least for now, had all the wires intact.  Not only did this relieve the strain on the side with the damaged connection point, but it also put the boat in a position known as “hove-to,” essentially parking the boat and vastly reducing its forward motion.  It is an essential technique for sailors because of how quickly an unmanageable situation becomes completely doable after heaving-to.

In this case, as always, as soon as I hove-to it seemed like we entered a different world.  While the wind was still blowing strong, the boat’s motion seemed to nearly stop.  Sammy poked her head out from below.  “Did we run aground?”  I wish I thought, then we could go ashore and find a bar.  “Nope, just hove-to, going to check on something real quick.”  (As much as it is important to keep crew abreast of what is happening with the boat, sometimes the true extent of the danger in certain situations is best discussed later, if at all.)

With the boat’s motion much calmer, I was able to move easily forward to the mast and reassess the situation.  On the port side, the damage still looked bad.  The deck was hocking out and the backing plate was threatening to pull a large chunk of the deck free.  Without many other options, I took two ropes that ran up the mast and tied them tightly to the toerail, a solid metal rail extending around the entire circumference of the deck.  As this was held into the deck with hundreds of large bolts, I figured at the least this would hold up better than the backing plate.  Of course, the ropes themselves were far less strong than the wire they were replacing.  But I had no other choice—it had to work, otherwise it was a one-way ticket out to sea. 

After attaching the ropes to the toerail and cinching them down as tightly as possible, I went back to the cockpit and brought the boat back to its previous course, hard on the wind, bashing into the waves.  “Wait, why are we doing this again?  I liked what was happening before,” Sammy protested.  “Unfortunately,” I explained, “if we stayed the way we were, we would be pushed out to sea, where the waves are bigger and the winds even stronger.”  “I don’t want that.”  “Great, onwards!”  

Now that we were back on a port tack, it was time to see how my ginned up solution was doing.  I crawled forward, being tossed and sprayed as before.  I made it back up the mast.  I took a deep breath and loosened the wire to see if my makeshift rig would hold—it did.  The ropes seemed to take the strain well.  I left the wire connected, even though I knew if the ropes broke, nothing was going to save the mast from breaking.

Luckily, it didn’t.  We continued bashing into the waves the rest of that day and overnight the winds began to subside.  By the next morning we needed to raise a bit of mainsail, and had a very comfortable run into Playa del Coco, Costa Rica, a small beach town in the northwest province of Guanacaste.  We anchored off the beach and immediately crashed into our bunks.  We had made it.  Over the next few days, we recovered, and I fixed the deck, although knowing now this was a weak spot in the rig design and that I would have to reinforce this backing plate when I had more time.  Sammy eventually left for Mexico, and I continued on solo to Panama to transit the canal, with the memories of the last leg already fading into my wake.