Kinetic Vic-Maui Report 07-07

Kinetic friends:

Ever wondered just how people get their nicknames on sailing teams? 

This evening, Wednesday, at about 5:30 pm, broad reaching in 20+ knots of wind about six hundred miles from the nearest land, we wrapped a spinnaker around the forestay. The flogging sail quickly wound itself tightly in two different sections at two different heights, and trapped the topping lift line as well.  We bore off and ran deep downwind under mainsail and fouled spinnaker.

How or why this happened doesn't really matter now; it just happened, like bad things sometimes do. And it had to be solved, in the middle of the ocean, on our own, without the benefit of outside assistance or shore-based pundits. 

As squalls rolled over the boat and darkness fell, Kinetic bowman Adam Thomson went up the rig in a climbing harness, twice, for a total of almost two hours.  On his first trip up the rig, hanging from a halyard, tethered to a standing line, and holding one-handed or two-legged to the wildly gyrating rig by sheer willpower, he succeeded in unwinding and zap-strapping about twelve feet of the top section of sail using one free hand.  But all efforts to unwind the majority of the sixty foot tall, sixteen hundred square foot sail proved futile.  We lowered Adam back to deck level, discussed a variety of ideas, and decided that the sail would have to be cut down. 

Up the mast Adam went, for the second time.  The sail cloth was wound very tightly on the forestay, in many layers, and had to be cut away with a knife held in one hand while hanging onto the forestay with the other hand or an ankle or the crook of a knee, in a variety of contortionist positions dictated by the boat and mast pitching and rolling in the seas and the sail remnants flogging relentlessly in the blustery wind.  At times, he was in a vertical, head up position, at other times he was horizontal like a hang-glider pilot.  He cut and sawed and sliced and gradually the sail came down in strips, entirely unsalvageable but carefully retained for warranty purposes (just kidding!). All this was accomplished without either cutting himself or the topping lift.  Finally, down to deck level came Adam, exhausted and bruised but otherwise alright. 

Kinetic's crew salutes Adam "The Ninja" Thomson.  We've given him the rest of the night off.

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