Call for Help/ This American Life (Merged)

[colemj]

Originally Posted by SVNeko

Better read up on DAN. They recently made clear that they are not in the business of flying cruisers with illnesses back to the USA.

Sent from my SCH-I545 using Cruisers Sailing Forum mobile app

DAN has never had a policy of flying anyone to the USA or their home country. Their policy is to evacuate one to the nearest medical facility capable of handling the medical problem. They have also clarified their policy stance regarding cruisers and they still cover that.

And again, DAN does not have the reach to get someone mid-ocean. That will always fall to the normal SAR means.

Mark

[TeddyDiver]

Note that there's DAN America, DAN Europe and maybe more. Everyone totally separate and independent from each other and having their own insurance policies..

[rebel heart]

Originally Posted by Scottuk

Did you actively sail towards the rescue boat after picking up the 4 guys? Did they bring anything for communication?
If you didn't sail then why?

We stayed hove-to as much as possible, but primarily at that point were avoiding squalls.

Sailing towards them would have been being on a beat. The difference in distance might have been 100 or 200 nautical miles depending on your math, but considering that the Vandegrift was making 30 knots towards us we (myself, the PJ's, and the Vandegrift) decided to focus on staying put and avoiding storms.

The Vandegrift was going to be on station by nightfall anyway and we'd be doing the offloading in morning, so ultimately it didn't change schedules at all and made it easier for the Vandegrift to find us.

The PJ airbone rescuemen brought two satellite phones and a military radio, the latter of which seemed to work within a couple of hundred miles.

[Scottuk]

Cheers for the response.

[IdoraKeeper]

Greetings RH. Spotted a boat yet? I hope everyone is well and things are out of disaster mode.

[who_cares]

Originally Posted by IdoraKeeper

Greetings RH. Spotted a boat yet? I hope everyone is well and things are out of disaster mode.

They're looking for a spaceship now .

RH, do you have any regrets about the trip? Preparations, time of departure, boat, anything you would've done differently?

[Scottuk]

I think your response also better contextualises the photograph included in the SD mag.

[savoir]

Originally Posted by who_cares

And what's wrong with that? Sounds fast and fun, easy singlehanding conditions as long as the boat could handle it.

The voyage to Hawaii is likely to have been quite enjoyable.

Shorten sail a little more than necessary to stabilize the boat and off you go. It seems like the starting point was around 15N meaning the likely course would be roughly 280. Hawaii is at 19N. By April the trades are remarkably stable giving you 15 - 20 all day every day.

Nice.

[who_cares]

Originally Posted by savoir

The voyage to Hawaii is likely to have been quite enjoyable.

Shorten sail a little more than necessary to stabilize the boat and off you go. It seems like the starting point was around 15N meaning the likely course would be roughly 280. Hawaii is at 19N. By April the trades are remarkably stable giving you 15 - 20 all day every day.

Nice.

Yup, that would've been awesome. And honestly sailing the boat by himself wouldn't have been any more difficult than sailing it with a wife who always stayed below and sick kids, in fact I'd call that a vacation!

[rebel heart]

Originally Posted by who_cares

And what's wrong with that? Sounds fast and fun, easy singlehanding conditions as long as the boat could handle it.

I'm not sure if you've ever been in the eastern trades, specifically around >120 degrees longitude, but if you would consider close reaching in that environment to be "fast, fun, and easy" then you are a much better sailor than myself and hats off you to.

[rebel heart]

Originally Posted by IdoraKeeper

Greetings RH. Spotted a boat yet? I hope everyone is well and things are out of disaster mode.

There are some possibilities, but really most of our world right now has been focusing on the basics. Bills, health, and just catching our breath a little bit. Reconnecting with friends and family.

[rebel heart]

Originally Posted by who_cares

They're looking for a spaceship now .

RH, do you have any regrets about the trip? Preparations, time of departure, boat, anything you would've done differently?

It's really hard to answer that. One of the logical fallacies is a "Historian's fallacy", in that:

when one assumes that decision makers of the past viewed events from the same perspective and having the same information as those subsequently analyzing the decision.

There were boats with kids living from the same port as us headed to the same destination. Some of those crews had more sea time, some had less. Some had younger kids, some had older. Some boats were faster and some were slower.

If I had hindsight I'd obviously go back and chain the boat to the dock so we couldn't leave at all.

But if you're asking for some general rule, piece of equipment, or standard that I think every boat leaving across an ocean must have that we didn't have, I really can't come up with that one.

To some I think that might reek of arrogance or pig-headedness, but that's as best as I can answer the question.

[who_cares]

Originally Posted by rebel heart

It's really hard to answer that. One of the logical fallacies is a "Historian's fallacy", in that:



There were boats with kids living from the same port as us headed to the same destination. Some of those crews had more sea time, some had less. Some had younger kids, some had older. Some boats were faster and some were slower.

If I had hindsight I'd obviously go back and chain the boat to the dock so we couldn't leave at all.

But if you're asking for some general rule, piece of equipment, or standard that I think every boat leaving across an ocean must have that we didn't have, I really can't come up with that one.

To some I think that might reek of arrogance or pig-headedness, but that's as best as I can answer the question.

Nope, not asking for a general rule, piece of equipment, or standard or anything like that. Just wondering if you thought to yourself at any point "darn i wish I had checked THIS before we left", or "darn, that would've been handy to have", or "gee, I wish I had done this a few times before we left".

I do that just about every time we come back to the dock. Just a general debrief to see if we had done something better. When we were in the middle of an offshore race and had to peel from the 1 to a 3 I sure wished we had practiced that before we left the dock.

[downunder]

Quote from someone who has travelled extensively with babies on a cat.

Default Re: Building Maverick 440,
Fantastic - congrats are due. We also purchased (from another manufacturer, though) our cat a number of years ago in Cape Town; our twins were born whilst in the Indian Ocean and two more followed later in other parts of the world. Are you going to share your plans for the next year or so?

[rebel heart]

Eric mentioned that the boom went over in a broach. Were preventers rigged, and if so, were they rigged forward? Or did they fail or otherwise give way?

I had preventers rigged, from the end of the 19' boom through a pad-eye on the deck about even with the mast, that came back and attached to a cleat at the starboard quarter. I have a hard time believing that enough load was transmitted through that to cause the leaking that we had, but I really don't have any data either way.

I had ocassionaly also rigged a preventer all the way forward to the sampson posts which actually worked fine in more gentle weather, but when things got gross it just wasn't manageable. I'm not sure if we ever did that on the Pacific crossing.

I would and did have the staysail prevented out to the sampson posts, running through a freeport on the gunwale.

How did the boom damage the hull/deck joint (that was the impression I got, but it seemed a touch unlikely)?

I really don't know, and possibly it didn't. I know we broached pretty violently, I know we started to have leaking at the joint after that, and I know it got worse as time kept ticking. Especially when shipping green water.

Was Eric hand-steering when the broach happened, or was an AP or windvane in use?

Windvane. I was in the companionway I believe.

Did you havestern drogues/para off the bow of any sort, and were they used to slow or otherwise help to keep the boat in a "broach minimizing" direction?


No. We went through a few different mindsets:
1) Try to keep the speed up so we can get through the area and make time. We had reduced canvas but in general the ITCZ strategy is to try to cut through it as quick as possible, or certainly not linger.

2) Stay hove-to to get some rest, cook dinner, do things that it helps to not have the boat banging around (showering, etc).

3) Actively steer when the wind/waves changed direction and strength when squalls came through.

4) Try to actively steer around the squalls to make your life much easier.

Could RH have heaved to effectively and was that considered or attempted?. From what I could see from the lines, it looked pretty heave-to friendly.

Yeah we did and it was fine, except when we got into mixed swells. The prevailing wind would have us hove-to, but there was another swell that would break that would catch us beam-on. I'm pretty sure that's actually what broached us.

Were the batteries and SSB in an unusual position? You mentioned water ingress damaging both, and I wonder if positioning came into this? Was your SSB antenna the backstay or an antenna carried aloft on a halyard? The SIM card fiasco just out and out sucks...

Backstay antenna, nothing special, insulators installed maybe three years previous. The batteries were in the standard under-the-quarter berth location and the SSB was mounted with the back of it hitting the bulkhead.

To give you an idea of the amount of water that entered the boat on that big broach, an auto-inflating life jacket inflated in the cabin. It was just pure green water, and that hit the radio as well (I can't imagine it not). To imagine the location of the radio, if you were to walk down the companionway facing forward and stick your arm out to starboard, it was right about there along the bulkhead aiming amidships (towards the port bulkhead).

I gather you had both manual and electric bilge pumps. Would you consider that a PTO on the diesel to run a engine-powered pump would have been a decent option, or just a further complication?

I think it would have complicated it further. The manual we had was something I bought because I read about it in a book and the author said it was the only pump he could really rely on. In truth, it actually cleared a decent sized toy one of my kids managed to jam in there without us noticing probably months before.

The integrated systems, even just needing electrical power or the engine, were definitely the most vulnerable. When the electronics started to fail it was circuit by circuit it seemed, and somethings would come back online and then fail twelve hours later.

We were a pretty "old school" boat in our equipment choices, with a lot of manual or otherwise simple electronics. Even at that, losing even just a couple of pieces of critical gear causes a lot of problems.