Radio Crossing

If friends can’t actually change the weather, at least they can tell you how to avoid it.

By Terence Loose

I

t was April eighth and my wife Gayl and I were sweating through another blistering Puerto Vallarta day while working on our Westsail 32, Tamarac II, something we had done every day for the past two months. But today was different: April ninth we would be at sea, putting in the first miles toward our five-year dream to cruise the South Pacific. Actually, it’s not entirely true that the next day spelled our first hop toward our South Seas dream; we had tried for the South Pacific a year earlier. We had left Long Beach with high hopes, but, after 13 days of battling inexperience, engine problems and more inexperience, we had landed in Mexico’s Cabo San Lucas, defeated and more than a little shaken up (Sail, June, 2002).

Our chances looked a lot better this time, however. We had a year of cruising experience, knew our boat intimately, were in the company of 30-some other boats as part of the annual Puddle Jump pack, and, most important, we were accomplished radio operators.

In that first attempt for the swaying palms of the South Pacific, we were alone in our quest and, after almost a week of unreadable weather faxes and only each other for inspiration, Gayl and I discovered the power of HAM radio. Tuning in Mexico’s Chubasco Net proved the pivotal point in our cruising life. Suddenly we had a world of support, not to mention accurate weather information, and were talked into safe harbor.

With that in mind, we had two radio nets scheduled for each day of our crossing. The Pacific Seafarer’s Net on 14.313 MHz, a HAM net for General License or higher operators, is run mostly by former seaman now based in the U.S.’s Northwest, with one powerful operator in Hawaii. This is a truly benevolent group who run their net with a professional care. Every night at 0330 GMT a roll call is taken, with listed boats’ captains giving their position and conditions, along with any vital information. This is logged and, for benefit of friends and family back home, uploaded to the Seafarer’s website (pacsea.net or www.bitwrangler.com). If a captain fails to check in for more than a few days, the authorities are notified, as well as all of the boats listening to the net.

Our second scheduled net was less formal, but just as vital to our comfort and success. Christened the Odyssey 2001 Net, it was on SSB and organized by our bunch of Puddle Jumpers. This one aired in the morning and I had volunteered as net manager for Tuesdays. It would keep us in touch with friends, give us something to look forward to—sail changes and worrying about the pressures on the rudder gets old—and provide a weather forecast specifically tailored to our route.

This last feature was invaluable. It was provided by longtime cruiser and weather expert Don Anderson, a Newport Beach resident who can be seen in Mexican waters frequently aboard Summer Passage. Anderson would study the most up-to-date satellite coverage, along with gathering various forecasts, and put together his own weather forecast covering our fleet, complete with a best route and optimum equator crossing waypoint. Each morning he would email the report to a dozen Puddle Jumpers, one of whom would read it on the net. This was followed by another weather report pulled down by one of the many HAM operators through HAM-based email. Since Gayl and I did not have onboard email (big mistake) and I had given up on getting weather faxes long ago (it was always snowing in my part of the ocean), this information would become a crucial part of our decision-making.

So it was with calmer nerves that we eased Tamarac II out of her end tie at Paradise Village Marina on a sunny spring morning and aimed her bow west toward the trades.

A mere 25 hours later those nerves were tested. After a day of beating into 15-18 knot northwest winds, I fired up the engine for a quick charge on the morning of day two. Twenty minutes later I shut her down in a panic following the sounding of the low oil pressure alarm. Gayl and I looked at each other in disbelief: it was on day two that our engine had quit in our first bluewater expedition. And it had not started again until day 13.

This time, however, it was not the fault of Big Blue (our name for Tamarac II’s power source). The leeward-side preventer line had been washed overboard and wrapped around our prop. I was both relieved and cowed at the discovery—I liked the fact that the problem was no more than a minor bone-head move, but I didn’t like the obvious solution, which was to go for a swim. It deserved some thought, and soon I found myself on the radio with Odyssey 2001 friends, a few hundred miles ahead.

They were just passing Socorro Island, about to make their dovetail turn to the southwest, and updated me with conditions and anchorage specifics. One of the options was to make for the islands, drop anchor, cut the line free, get a night’s rest, and head out fresh. It was a good plan except for one thing: the wind. My friend was reporting 22- to 25-knot winds from the west along with a strong southerly current. Without Big Blue—hell, with the beast firing—we had little hope to hold a course high enough for Socorro, which lay to the WSW.

We went into the night unsure of what to do. Gayl didn’t like the idea of my going for a swim 125 miles offshore and I knew we would never make Socorro. The next morning on the net we had a dozen soothing voices and before long Gayl was as convinced as I that heaving-to and getting wet was the only solution.

After breakfast, with the sun up and a moderate wind and sea, we stopped Tamarac II. As she bobbed and weaved on the three-foot sea, I tied a line around my waste, donned a mask and grabbed a knife.

I looked at Gayl. “Here’s your chance to get rid of me,” I said.

She didn’t laugh.

Less than 20 minutes later the line was free. And the job turned out to be more fun than fear. Floating in the ripping current behind Tamarac II, gazing down into an eternity of deep blue broken only by spiraling rays of light, it was as free as a man could feel. In fact, the hardest part of the job was climbing back aboard using the emergency fold-out steps on Tamarac II’s transom. (I’m now convinced they were designed to punish barefoot sailors who fall overboard.)

The next 10 days were as uneventful as life at sea can be. Except for the tanker we almost hit on day seven, in broad daylight, in a shipping lane, our dream cruise was just that, a dream. Our mornings and evenings were filled with checking our friends’ progress on the Seafarer’s and Odyssey radio nets, after which we’d usually change frequencies for a less formal discussion of fish caught, wildlife spotted and meals spilled.

Unfortunately, small talk was only to last for 10 days. It all came to a thunderous halt on day 13, when Gayl and I entered the notorious ITCZ. I say entered, but a more accurate description of the event would be it overtook us. Something you learn very quickly on an ocean alone is just how wrong 95% of the advice given on land is. Case in point: that claptrap about running west above the ITCZ until you get over a nice thin spot, where you’re told to dart south across it into the southeast trades. This is about as helpful as instructing you to buy a stock at it’s low point and sell at its zenith—looks good on paper, ain’t gonna happen in this world. Lets do some math. You are traveling at six knots, max. The ITCZ is jumping, bulging and twisting like a five-trillion-ton boa constrictor in a pen full of sheep. I could show you high seas reports that track it moving over a hundred miles north or south on a longitude within six hours.

On the evening of April 21, at seven-and-a-half degrees north, 123 degrees west the beast curled around us, and squeezed. We took in one of the most ominous sights a sailor can: an absolutely black sky astern broken only by great flashes of lightening. The flashes were directly upwind, so I knew the clouds that made them were traveling approximately 10 knots faster then we were. Nowhere to run, no place to hide.

We worked all night battling one after another of the line squalls. It was frightening, frustrating work. The lightening brought out the fear, and the darkness made it hard to predict when to furl in the Yankee, which we needed full out between bombings to make headway since our main was double-reefed. But no words can describe the feeling of isolation a couple feels steering a 45-foot-tall lightening rod through electrified squalls 1,000 miles from the nearest land. The term bull’s-eye came up a lot.

The one mitigating factor was our time on the airways each night and morning. Checking in with the Seafarer’s Net was a much-needed routine, as well as a break from the action above—the show of lights usually started right around the time the net did. It also reminded us that someone was monitoring our situation and provided weather information from boats up- and downwind of us.

The less-formal Odyssey net in the mornings did that and more. Anderson’s weather report was helpful to a point, but in the ITCZ a look off the quarter predicts more than the best computer model. It was the contacts with the sailors around us that gave us solace as well as a forecast. We had three boats within three hundred miles of us, each going through, or just escaping, what we were. And, unknown to us at the time, it would be through these discussions that our landfall would come at least a day sooner than it would have had we followed our original float plan.

After that first sleepless night of being pasted while doing our best petrified wet mice routine, we had a lot of questions for our Odyssey friends. A few friends about three days in front of us, told us they had turned south when they hit the nasty conditions we were experiencing. Their rationale was since the squall lines were guided by the northeast trades, to continue southwest toward the ideal equator crossing waypoint only spelled further trouble. That made since.

This advice was bolstered by the reports coming in from boats further south, closing in on the Marquesas. For days the fleet below three degrees south had been reporting 25- to 30-knot southeast trades accompanied by 10- to 12-foot seas. And Anderson’s reports called for more of the same well into the future. On our current route, that would mean taking the seas directly on the beam—not a pleasant thought.

The choice was clear: head dead south as long as possible. Of course, this would lengthen our route to Hiva Oa—the rum line course was 1,425 miles on a bearing of 222 degrees true—but then, distance to a sailor is as relative as time is to Einstein. With luck, heading south would get us out of the ITCZ sooner and give us a better angle on the predicted towering seas and reinforced trades.

But in addition to sound advice, our morning net discussions offered something almost more comforting: the knowledge that other boats had been where we were and lived to tell about it. Not that we were continually picturing an exploding mast and a sinking ship, but the fact was that Gayl and I had never sailed in squally weather, had never experienced the terrifying thrill of the entire sky lighting up above your mast. And, in fact, the last time we were stuck sailing defensively we had no company and no radio contacts. Now, we were discovering just how much impact something as intangible as a human voice can be.

The next few days took on a frustrating pattern. The days had heavy, overcast skies, but were not violent—10-knot northeast trades were spotted with many rain squalls boasting winds from 25 to 45 knots but lightening-free. But with afternoon came stacking cumulonimbus monsters gearing up for their nightly feeding. The light trades meant we needed a full Yankee to drive the boat, but squalls were so prevalent—and big—that steering around them was futile. This forced a lot of sail handling, which in turn forced exhaustion.

Going into the second night I made a decision to run with a double-reefed main and the “Iron Genny”; Gayl and I had not slept for 24 hours and burning diesel seemed much wiser than burning energy on the Yankee. To this day I think that’s one of the best moves I made as captain; on my off-watches sleep came much easier against the rumblings of Big Blue than it did against the fear of my 105-pound wife caught a little late in furling in the headsail.

I’ll never know if heading south got us through the squalls any sooner; we left our last electrical squall astern around three degrees north on April 25, our 17^th day of the crossing. We had endured four nights of what Anderson had termed “big, bad, ugly stuff” in his daily ITCZ reports. But heading south definitely paid off in another way.

After only four hours of true doldrums on day 17, we picked up the southeast trades at just above three degrees north. Hiva Oa was 1,100 miles away with a bearing of 225 degrees true. But Anderson’s reports were still calling for reinforced southeast trades with big seas further south, so we sailed well below the rum line. The next three days were some of my favorite of the trip. We enjoyed 10- to 15-knot ESE winds, flat seas and no swell. It was in these conditions that we crossed the equator at 128 degrees west longitude, claiming our shellback status with a bottle of cheap champagne.

We kept driving SSE, eagerly watching the GPS as our rum line to Hiva Oa to 234 degrees true as we held a course anywhere from 200 to 215 degrees true. Idle pleasures took center stage again—watching the wave-dodging flying fish, greeting dolphin as they danced with our bow, and of course chatting on the radio with friends.

As we passed four degrees south and still hadn’t experienced any trades above 20 knots, we began to toy with the idea of changing our course back to the rum line. When Anderson called off his high winds warnings, we were both relieved and perturbed. We liked the sound of 10 to 15 but hated that we had wasted so much time pushing south.

It turned out that the effort was not in vain, however. In our final push to the Marquesas, we racked up our best day’s run numbers of the trip thanks to a fast west-setting current. With our better angle, we sailed our boat at what seemed like a four-knot bay-cruise clip but sped at six to six-and-a-half knots over ground, posting 148 and 147 mile last days, respectively.

We pulled into Taahuku Bay, Hiva Oa just before three o’clock to what seemed like a hero’s welcome. For me, a dinghy full of friends after 25 days at sea meant more than that first sight of land. Sure, it was good to drop the hook and stop our boat after pushing her for 605 hours, but it was even better to see the faces behind all those warm voices with whom we had shared our journey, and who had helped us fulfill a five-year dream. þ

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