After Losing a Propeller, Finding the Spirit to Sail On

Bad things come in threes, so it should have been no surprise when the propeller fell off Wanaka in the wide, blue Atlantic.

Already in the six weeks since French sailing icon Bruno Trouble had made it to the Chesapeake from a summer in Maine, he'd watched one crewman (me) topple off a dock and break two ribs while bringing in his 57-footer. Then he'd had to orchestrate major repairs from Paris, 3,000 miles away, when a flagpole broke off in 50-knot winds and smashed a meter-square hole in the deck window 24 hours before departure.

"I didn't think we'd ever get out of here," said Trouble (pronounced True-blay) as we cleared the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel at Norfolk two days later. But the ribs healed after a few painful weeks, the folks at Sarles Marina in Annapolis engineered an all-day work party to cover the hole in the deck and we were off, bound nearly 1,000 miles south to the Bahamas where Wanaka winters over.

"It should only take us four days from Norfolk," said Trouble, a former French Olympian and three-time America's Cup skipper. "Sailing or motoring, we average 220 miles a day."

That, of course, was before strike three -- the fateful clunk 80 miles off Cape Hatteras, N.C., the East Coast's most feared headland, where wild storms spin up without warning. Wanaka had shot across the cobalt Gulf Stream at nine knots in big winds, but when the breeze died we started motoring and something didn't sound right below.

"It must be weed on the prop," said Herve d'Hauthuille, Trouble's longtime sailing pal from Marseille. Four times he brought the boat to a standstill, backed down to clear the prop and watched a plume of Sargasso weed bubble up. On the fifth try things went up in smoke: No plume, no weed, and, worst of all, no reverse !

The skipper came bounding up from the galley where he'd been preparing another gourmet feast. He scrambled back below to check the engine, found nothing amiss, then sent young Baptiste Roynette overboard in mask and fins to check the hull.

"No propeller!" said Roynette, shaking seawater from his mop of black hair when he surfaced. Somehow the Danish-made, three-blade, folding Gori prop had come off, a theoretical impossibility, leaving us powerless with 600 miles to go.

It's axiomatic that in times of stress, the captain must be strong. Trouble scratched his chin, adjusted his spectacles and declared without a hint of concern, "We'll do it the old way."

So began four quiet, blissful days of open-ocean sailing through flat calms and brisk winds. Back home winter was in full fury, the long, cold nights and gray days heralding the approach of winter solstice. Out on the high seas, where prevailing westerly winds are tempered by the Gulf Stream's warmth, it was T-shirts and shorts, bare feet, falling stars in a glimmering sky and a sliver of silver moon to steer by.

Lacking an engine, it pays to have a sweet sailing boat and Wanaka proved to be one. Trouble had her custom-built in Auckland, New Zealand, during the 2003 America's Cup. Her wedge-shaped hull hovers beneath a towering mast of carbon fiber, with water ballast chambers along the gunwales to flatten her in strong winds, twin rudders for control, sails of stiff Kevlar and a deep keel that can be lifted up when the water is shallow.

But even the slipperiest sloop won't move in a dead calm. "We've been 12 miles in the last 12 hours," Trouble announced from the chart table after a particularly exasperating night. On deck, the mainsail and big genoa jib slapped noisily against the rigging; you could feel a thump as the sails filled, then collapsed.