Winds That Made a Journey Anything but a Breeze

By Angus Phillips
Sunday, June 22, 2008

Speed is for the young -- young men and young boats. So it was with no small measure of concern that we set out last weekend to race across the Gulf Stream from Annapolis to Bermuda on Air Mail, aging men in an aging boat.

The forecast was for strong winds up to 30 knots but before it was over we'd see 50. If you've never seen 50 knots of wind from a small boat, lucky you. Most boaters haven't. The squall line roars in from nowhere and engulfs you before you can even get the sails down.

"We need help!" yelled the skipper, Tom Carrico. He's soft-spoken by nature; if he raises his voice, it's a worry. Down below we'd felt the boat judder at the first gusts and the feet of the sleeping, four-man off-watch already were hitting the cabin floor.

It's pitch dark. You scramble up the ladder into mayhem. Boom and mainsail slash across the deck as gusts hit in machine-gun bursts. The headsail has broken loose from its holdings and furiously cracks and tugs, shaking the mast. The sea comes in windswept bucket-loads, the hull tips crazily, foam-flecked water rushes over the deck to fill the cockpit knee-deep.

I'm 63 years old, barefoot in a T-shirt, 200 miles out to sea, hanging onto nothing, trying to tug down a towering sheet of wind-whipped, straining Kevlar that will not budge.

"Ease the main halyard!"

"It is eased!"

Last week's Bermuda Ocean Race sent two dozen boats 750 miles from the Severn River to St. George's in conditions favorable enough that the first to finish, David Ross's 48-foot Raider, set a course record in just under 3 days 14 hours.

It was steady headwinds for 120 miles down the Chesapeake, then the fleet turned left out of the bay and cracked off for 600-plus miles of open ocean. When Air Mail found the Gulf Stream 100 miles out, the water temperature jumped from 72 to 82 degrees and the sea went from institutional green to cobalt blue. Banks of cumulus cloud built towers aloft in the damp, warm air.

"It's beautiful out here," said Judah dal Cais of Arlington, seeing the Stream for the first time at age 42. But beauty can be difficult.

We were whooping it up and hanging on when the southwest breeze built to 25 knots. Air Mail, a 24-year-old 39-footer built for speed, not comfort, shot down the face of waves at 11 and 12 knots. In the first 24 hours at sea, she covered 232 miles, averaging almost 10 knots, flying.

But staying atop the whitecapped waves required timely, sharp tugs on the tiller, and the persistent shock-loads from all that tugging exacted a toll. Carrico was on the helm near dusk on Sunday when something gave out. The boat lurched sharply to windward. "I don't have control," he said.

Kip Louttit, a Coast Guard captain in real life and Air Mail crewman by volition, donned his safety tether and dangled over the transom to see what was up. "You've lost the bottom two feet of the rudder," he said, "and ripped the [fiberglass] skin off a good part of what's left."

As anyone who has lived in the United States the last eight years knows, a rudderless ship is not so good. What to do? Carrico pointed Air Mail downwind to ease the stress on what was left of the rudder and called a cockpit powwow. With big winds in the forecast and 350 miles to go, all agreed that finishing the race seemed unwise, even though Air Mail was leading her class.

Nearest port of call was the Chesapeake, 250 miles away but dead against wind and currents. Easiest point of sail was downwind, which at the moment was north. Any port in a storm, sailors say. "It looks like we're going to Montauk," 320 miles off at the eastern tip of Long Island, said the skipper, turning the bow to due north.

During the night the breeze shifted. With shortened mainsail and a little hanky of a headsail up, Air Mail was sailing along easily. Louttit took another peek and concluded the stub of a rudder was holding up. Maybe we could make it back to Norfolk after all.

"Let's tack," said Carrico. The lads hopped to, brought the boat around and struck a course for home. All went well until late that night. Then all hell broke loose.

The beauty of boats and boating is that if you keep eyes and ears open, you learn something every time you go. Whether for old salts like Carrico and Louttit and me, with a century of sailing between us, or for novices dal Cais and Greg Jenkins of Northwest Washington, both racing offshore for the first time, a 50-knot Gulf Stream line squall is a great learning experience.

"I wasn't scared," said dal Cais, a lifelong adventurer who once spent three months living in a tent in Alaska. "Well, I was, but then I looked around and saw that other, more experienced people were calm, and I thought, 'Okay, this is normal, this is going to be all right.' "

"I had your shirt in my hand when you were hanging off the boom trying to get the sail down," Jenkins told me afterward. "I just said, 'I don't care what happens. I'm not letting go of this guy.' "

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Postcript: On Wednesday morning, as a full moon faded over the Virginia Beach skyline and dawn lit an empty eastern sky, Air Mail sailed back into protected home waters. Carrico said it may be the last ocean race for the old warhorse, which won its class in the Bermuda Ocean Race two years ago and has taken home trinkets and platters for podium finishes in a host of other events.

As for the crew, at an average age of over 50 the horizon may be shrinking as well, at least for the senior members. Adventure is good for you. "Scare yourself every day" is not a bad bit of advice when you're young. But to all things there's a season.