The boat
So what was the deal ? Well, the boat was a charter boat for the
It was a 1½
year old Moody ’46 with three cabins, center-cockpit bathtub-formed and a
cutter rig. It had two electrical jib sheet winches, a dodger and a bimini. It
had the full nine yards in electronics : radar, GPS with chart plotter, auto
pilot, wind vane and speed, knotmeter, sounder (depth), all very nicely
integrated together with a NMEA communications bus.
“So, this a new
boat. It got ‘new boat’ problems. Especially being a chartered boat” I told
Bill after he tried to convince me it was a new boat, so nothing could go
wrong. I poked around for all sorts for stuff : Was there a manual bilge pump?
Emergency steering? Search light? EPIRB? Boltcutter, knifes, seaplugs ? Voltmeter?
... but the boat seem well equipped even with tools. A radar reflector was
missing for the
The boat had plenty of seaplugs, but also had maybe 20 seacocks,
a sailor’s nightmare. It had two bathrooms, in each there was three separate
seaplugs one for the sink, one for the shower floor, one for god-knows-what...
The crew
Well, we had Bill Happel,
the captain. Bill is an avid smallboat racer, and sometimes works as “deckmeat”
on bigger boats. He didn’t really feel qualified, but his friend Ned figured
Bill was good for the job.
We had Brice, who cruised everywhere, our
designated navigateur, our oldest crewmember.
I was a bit worried to learn before departure, that Brice has diabetes 2, deaf
on 1 ear, blind on one eye and can’t feel anything in his legs. But he is a
hell of a yachtsman, that stops for nothing. However, he hasn’t sailed for years, as he owned a trawler.
Brice during packing.
Then, Paula, our model/actress/documentary
reporter to-turn-cruiser girl. Paula’s boyfriend bought a boat, and they are
supposed to cruise for 1-3 years when they get ready. Paula never really sailed
much before, and we worried she might get very seasick. She and Brice did the
provisioning and (pre-)cooked the food. Paula is another “downsized” person
(join the club, Paula).
Finally, me , Klaus. My only two comparable
experiences were sailing from Göteborg to Copenhagen, Denmark, and to Bimini (50 miles from Miami). I
remembered being very tired from the Göteborg trip , and was somewhat nervous
about a weeklong trip with 24 hour watches. I am an electrical engineer;
reluctantly I admit I even have a Ph.D.. Since February 2002 I have not worked
thanks to the post-bubble economy.
Saturday Day 1
So, low and
behold, Saturday appeared, we all packed our warmest clothes. About 10am we
met, and started “packing” the boat. Chris, Paula’s boyfriend, came around, and
seemed nervous about it and came with comments like “Oh there is another day in
packing this boat, unless you do it underway, and then Paula can’t make it for
work reasons.” But we got it all loaded in a rush, got to the fuel dock and got
our 152 gallons of diesel.
So we went out
the Palm Beach inlet, and were immediately met by thunder and a hailstorm. Bill
could not get the autopilot to work and a bunch of other instruments. “Wait a
minute,” I thought for myself, “he didn’t even check the boat out before
leaving?” I thought about the diesel engine, I once sailed, that overheated
after a couple of hours, and of people in Denmark, who spend up to a year using
their boat to be sure of malfunctions et cetera before going anywhere far.
We hit the gulf stream about 25 miles offshore. Brice started to
talk up and down about the autopilot and we couldn’t live without and
blah-blah-blah. What a leisure cruiser, I remember thinking. We can sail the
boat. Well, on the GPS chartplotter,
indeed we did sail a bit in an S-form (map at no.2 on page 1), but hey, we’ll
get better.
I saw a
barracuda jump in the air for a fish it missed. Bill decided to go for 3 hours
watches. So Brice would go from 10-1am, me from 1am-4am, Bill from 4am-7am.
Paula would go whenever she felt like it. The weather was Mickey-Mouse weather.
Sure there was some showers and thunderstorm mostly in the distance. But even
when we got hit by them, it was like there was no wind in them. Although Bill
did appear to work a lot during the night. He said he tried to avoid a storm.
“Don’t lose the miles,” I warned, “you fool around for a ½ hour every 2hours, you
lose 6-10 miles a watch or 36-60 miles a day”.
The boat with Paula on the side.
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