Despite rig failure and a tropical cyclone, Francis Hawkings remains composed on an eventful Pacific crossing. Tom Cunliffe introduces this extract from Roving CommissionsNot for the first time, the Royal Cruising Club\u2019s wonderful annual journal Roving Commissions has turned up a jewel of seamanship. Delving into the 2021 edition I found an account by Francis Hawkings entitled \u2018Three lucky escapes to Japan\u2019. The article comes in two sections. The first describes a passage from California to Hawaii, two-handed on his Tradewind 35 Plainsong with his son-in-law.
\nAs is so often the case these days, the trades largely fail to oblige and the passage is not without incident. Hawkings goes on to make the run from Hawaii to Japan single-handed. He finds himself confronted by challenges aplenty but deals with them in a relaxed and seamanlike manner, describing the events with unusual clarity yet never losing the human touch.
\nHe manages a potentially catastrophic cap shroud failure with what seems almost a shrug of the shoulders, then makes an assessment of how to cope with a truly ugly weather situation. The single-handed passage is recounted here in its entirety, including a final twist courtesy of Japanese bureaucracy.<\/p>\n
Extract from Roving\u00a0Commissions
\nLeft Hawaii on 27 March and for the first two and a half weeks enjoyed the beautiful trade wind sailing that I\u2019d not found before Hawaii. The dawns were stunning and the sunsets exquisite; the wind blew, gently, and the waves were very well behaved.
\nI took care of the boat in the morning and read a book in the afternoon. I got used to the solitude, though with a satellite phone, and therefore unlimited texts, \u2018solitude\u2019 in the 2020s takes on a rather attenuated meaning, and came to terms with the beautiful enormity and emptiness of the Pacific.
\nI slept in 60- to 90-minute increments at night and felt remarkably untired. The going was not my fastest but I was making around 800 miles a week in the right direction and feeling pretty content. My biggest concern was that I was about to finish Barak Obama\u2019s excellent memoir A Promised Land. Until, that is, lolling on my bunk on 13 April, about 10\u00b0 deep into the Eastern Hemisphere and well over the International Date Line, I heard a loud crack on deck.
\nFrancis Hawkings aboard Plainsong at dawn off Honolulu. Photo: Michael Milton
\nI didn\u2019t hurry unduly to get up but would have done if I\u2019d realised what the problem was: I had lost my windward cap shroud. It turned out that water had seeped under the port chainplate, which is in effect a D-ring bolted through the deck, and corroded the nuts holding the bolts on the underside of the deck; eventually the nuts disintegrated and the bolts pulled up through the deck. Bleak thoughts of being dismasted thousands of miles from anywhere.
\nAt this point a series of lucky breaks set in. First and foremost, the wind was pretty light and I hadn\u2019t lost my mast. In addition, because of the bounty of the cutter rig, I was able to cannibalise the nuts off the inner forestay, which I figured wasn\u2019t so critical to the rig\u2019s structural integrity.
\nBy a miracle, both sets of nuts were accessible and the same size; the threads on the cap shroud bolts were more or less undamaged; the fitting had come up cleanly and not enlarged the holes through the deck; and the through-bolts were welded to the D-ring above the deck, so I didn\u2019t need a second pair of hands to hold anything on deck while I tightened the nuts below. Within three hours we were cautiously under way again.
\nFair breezes and rain showers on passage from California to Hawaii. Photo: Michael Milton
\nThe following day I jury rigged the inner forestay using the stemhead fitting. So we were back to full sail plan again and this arrangement saw us through another 2,500 miles and two gales. Having escaped from lockdown, this was escape number two.
\nKirk Patterson, my ever-present satphone consultant, put a damper on my rigging celebrations the following day by telling me about a typhoon forming in the vicinity of the Philippines, beyond the range of the GRIB files I was looking at. In the next few days this strengthened into what I subsequently learned was super typhoon Surigae, one of the most intense tropical cyclones on record.
\nFor me, happily ignorant of that, the question was how to avoid it if, as is typical, the typhoon swung north-east away from the Philippines and out towards my course.
\nNot the sort of forecast anyone wants to see. Photo: PredictWind
\nThe question was made more tricky by the fact that Surigae hung around the Philippines and strengthened for about a week or so, which made it very hard for the forecasters to agree on where it might go once it got moving.
\nSeveral predicted a relatively easterly course, in which case Surigae would pass south of me. But there were always one or two outlier forecasts suggesting a more north-easterly course, in which case the typhoon would be ahead of me. To thread the needle between these two scenarios I needed to be sufficiently far north to avoid the easterly path but not too far west.
\nBoxed in
\nThe obvious solution was to sail north-west. But there was a problem: to the north there was a fairly vigorous low which was producing gale force northerlies, north-westerlies and westerlies around its western and southern circumference. I couldn\u2019t sail far north or north-west because doing so would have taken me straight into these gales. I was boxed in.
\nMy solution was to head in a north-westerly direction up to 28\u00b0N from 24\u00b0N and then sail due west. This was designed to keep me sufficiently far north to avoid the most likely path of the typhoon and yet not so far north that I was exposed to a full gale from the low. And indeed it did: I didn\u2019t experience sustained winds from the low of more than 35 knots, with only occasional full gale gusts. But I did have to heave-to for the best part of a day, costing me valuable escape time from Surigae, which was now, it was confirmed, tracking along the relatively easterly path and headed to pass south of me.
\nAfter almost two weeks of typhoon anxiety the denouement was forecast to come on 26 April. But at the last minute \u2013 by now weakening and an extratropical cyclone of less than typhoon strength \u2013 Surigae jinked to the north-east.
\nArticle continues below\u2026<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\tGreat Seamanship: Where the Trade Winds Blow<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\tLou Boudreau shipped out of Nova Scotia in the 1950s at five months old in the 98ft schooner Doubloon. His\u2026<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\tGreat seamanship: Taken by the wind<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\tMike Jacker is a retired orthopaedic surgeon living in Illinois. Among many other activities he still sails his boat, now\u2026<\/p>\n
I stopped congratulating myself on having evaded its path. The wind steadily increased during the morning of 26 April and backed from south-east to north-east. The barometer was plunging. The rain became intense. By early afternoon I realised that storm jib alone was too much sail; eventually the Monitor, which is a remarkable self-steerer, couldn\u2019t cope, we gybed, and were lying uncomfortably crosswise to the waves, which were pretty big and angry (and, I will admit, a bit frightening).
\nGood storms are all alike; every bad storm is bad in its own way. The trouble with bad storms is that your normal defences (heaving to, running under storm jib, etc) don\u2019t work and you are experimenting to find the right solution.
\nI hand steered for a couple of hours while trying out different rigs. Storm jib was too much but Plainsong wouldn\u2019t run under bare poles and Monitor alone; she wasn\u2019t going fast enough and kept getting pushed crosswise again as the waves came up under her counter. The key was to move fast enough but keep the stern as straight on to the following sea as possible. I thought that a drogue would slow her down too much and didn\u2019t want to have the recovery challenge from a failed experiment.
\nPlainsong at Naoshima, Japan. Photo: Michael Milton
\nIn the middle of all this the rain stopped and a hole of blue sky opened above us. I wondered whether we were in what was left of the eye and feared a sudden shift of wind direction and an even more confused sea. But it kept blowing steadily in the low 40s and gusting, at its maximum, into the 50s while continuing to back through north.
\nEventually the right combination was a tiny triangle of yankee, barely more than the reinforced corner of the sail unfurled from the furler, plus a warp and chain streamed astern. By late afternoon the wind had reached north-west, the barometer was rising and the edge was coming off both the gusts and the waves.
\nSo, on what turned into a bright sunny evening, albeit still windy, I was celebrating the fact that nothing had broken or gone wrong. In retrospect, I estimate that I was perhaps some 120 miles west of the eye at its closest point of approach.
\nIt was my third lucky escape, both because I stayed in the better sector of a now-weakened cyclone and because later that day Surigae began to undergo \u2018explosive cyclogenesis\u2019 once it had passed me, with 10\u00ad minute maximum sustained winds of 70 knots.
\nI had about 100 miles left to run and 24 hours after my Surigae moment I could resume my course to the west. I told myself that now, with the typhoon threat passed, I didn\u2019t care what the weather did and revelled in some light air and diminishing seas in the following days.
\nAbout 400 miles from Japan the Japanese authorities, through Kirk, started pressing more insistently for an ETA. It was made clear that once I\u2019d specified an ETA, I mustn\u2019t be late and it wouldn\u2019t do to be early. I was to behave, in other words, like a ship.
\nFenders ready, Plainsong approaches Tannowa. Photo: Michael Milton
\nThe problem was that the forecasts for the next few days were all over the place, mostly light and contrary, and I needed to negotiate the Kuroshio current which would run at three knots or so for a while but which, like the Gulf Stream, was meandery and hard to pin down until you were in it.
\nI had no real idea when I would arrive. But I was making progress. Once I\u2019d passed the line of offshore islands running roughly south from Tokyo I could tell that things were changing. I was visited by a swallow which did a lap of the boat and headed back to the mainland, a magic moment between two voyagers.
\n[As] my AIS screen changed from the beautiful blank of the open ocean to a chaos of up to 35 vessels or so at any one time, it was clear I was reaching the known world again. In the end, I decided to do a sustained stint of motoring to get across the shipping lane and because this would put me within striking distance of a predictable ETA. It was boring but it paid off: I was able to set sail again for my last night on the open sea. Sunrise on the morning of 8 May revealed, along with intense coastal shipping, the beautiful green and grey shades of hills on the southernmost tip of Honshu, Japan\u2019s largest island.
\nCoasting
\nDuring the day I sailed up the narrowing funnel of Kii Suido which separates Honshu from Shikoku, the next large island to the west. An ocean voyage turned into a coastal day sail as towns came into view, tiny white fishing boats surprised the life out of me in the haze and I swept between two islands on a fair tide, a smooth sea and a moderate breeze on the beam.
\nGiven the times of these tides, in order not to be late for my ETA I had to arrive way too early. But since I was way too early, I couldn\u2019t arrive (I wasn\u2019t allowed to anchor, since that would have been penetrating Japanese soil). So I spent the night hove-to off the entrance to Tannowa, drifting this way and that.
\nI was annoyed at the bureaucracy but by the time a beautiful dawn arrived, I couldn\u2019t care less; nothing could spoil my good mood. Finally, after 42 days at sea I moored alongside the Q dock in Tannowa Yacht Harbour at 1001 on 9 May. I was, to my shame, one minute late because, at the last moment, I changed my mind about which direction to lie and had to switch the fenders.<\/p>\n
If you enjoyed this\u2026.<\/p>\n
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The post Roving Commissions extract: Calm in the Storm appeared first on Yachting World.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Despite rig failure and a tropical cyclone, Francis Hawkings remains composed on an eventful Pacific crossing. Tom Cunliffe introduces this extract from Roving CommissionsNot for the first time, the Royal Cruising Club\u2019s wonderful annual journal Roving Commissions has turned up … <\/p>\n