You want to know what it's like?
I posted this once before on a bulletin board in response to a question about what it’s like to be in a storm and this morning I just copied it from that posting. Somehow it seemed appropriate to this discussion given Capn Bill’s post. Be careful what you wish for, you might just get what you think you want. In October of 1976 I was in Hurricane Gloria on a 30 foot boat 550 miles east of Puerto Rico with 90 Knots wind speed and 45 foot (or larger, its hard to tell after the wave is higher then the mast) waves. To the north of me was the 590 foot 15,028 ton Sylvia L Ossa with a crew of 37. She sank with a loss of all hands sometime between the 13 to the 15 of October. During the height of the storm the truck fitting failed by cracking between the hole for the headstay clevis pin and the corner of the casting adjacent to the mast. When the headstay went the sound and the recoil were intense. Early in the storm I had a small storm jib just turn to dust. As it went the rig seamed to just grab the boat and shake it, the whole boat vibrated. The loss of the headstay was to say the least very awkward at the time. In trying to turn the boat downwind after the headstay went the rudder failed at the bolt for tiller when the bolt sheared off. When the rain would pass by, it would flatten the waves out and pound on the boat like thousands of hammers all trying to get through the deck and destroy everything. When the standing rigging started to vibrate you thought that the rig would come down or the mast would drill a hole right through the keel. Within the next hour the motion of the boat was so violent that the hull failed with a crack forming between the aft most keel bolts. You could see the sides of the crack moving up and down as the boat rolled. She started to make water at that point. After getting beat up for that hour I had the boat back under control. Before the storm was fully over the steering was repaired and a new head stay was up. The leak was getting bad so I started for the nearest dry land as fast as I could go. At this point Hurricane Holly was predicted to be coming my way and I had enough of bad weather so I sent out a Mayday by SSB and that was received by a Dutch tugboat and they relayed it to the German ship Hagen of the Hapag-Lloyd line. She had passed me in the night some 100 miles to the west but she turned around and came back to get me. When she got to me the wind was climbing and had reached 60 knots. When my boat came alongside the Hagen the crack at the aft two keel bolts propagated along the entire length of the keel. The bottom of the boat flexed downward and opened up at the bolts and she started to sink. In the hour so before we meet we spoke by VHF and they asked for the dimensions and weight of the boat. There plan was to weld a cradle to the deck and if they could they wanted to pick up the boat with two wire slings and swing her inboard to the steel cradle. When we did get together the captain kept his ship away from my boat a few feet and had two of his crew come onboard with wire cutters, they helped me off and then cut the standing rigging while some crew on deck got the mast. They brought the rig on deck and on the next roll she was out of the water. I don’t think she hit the ship but once during the entire time. That one strike crushed about ten feet of hull-deck joint. I had been beat up so much from going up the mast to rig a headstay that I couldn’t walk and that’s why I needed help to get off my boat. The entire rescue was over in under ten minuets and they never came to a full stop. When the boat was on deck I found that the fairing forward of the rudder had also failed and the keel had dropped over 1/2 inch by digging out the fiberglass under the washers for the keel bolts. You want to know what its like to see a storm wave from a vantage point only 3 or 4 feet above the sea. One of the few things in life that I can guarantee you is that it’s a vantage point you never want to have yourself. As I tell you this keep in mind that I really can’t make any intelligent comments on the wind speed or the height of the waves. If I remember it right my gauge for wind speed only went up to 75 statute miles per hour and I never had any way to measure the wave height. After the waves get to be higher then my mast all bets were off about guessing the height. There is the expected increase in wave height as the wind speed increases. During the period of increase you see a marked change in shape and height. The wave will start to climb in height and increase in steepness until they get their tops blown off. After that the wave are noticeably asymmetrical with a very steep face. The next thing is the top of the wave looks like it just falls over and the entire surface of the sea is covered by foam and spray from the wave tops disintegrating into foam. During the increase but before the wave starts to become chaotic in shape the lee side will have large patches of foam free water. There is a repeatable pattern to the height. You can count the average height waves as they go by and then the showstopper would come along right on schedule. You don’t have to watch to windward, you can feel the big one coming. Actually you can’t look to windward at the height of the storm; it hurts to put your face above the cockpit coming. You can hunker down in the cockpit and look past the lee side of the cockpit or stay in the cabin and look out the weather ports. Even then it’s tough to see anything because the weather ports had a great view of the sky most of the time and the lee ports were under water or pointing straight down. The background to all of this is the sound of two 747 jets dueling to see who can be the loudest. A gust in Hurricane Gloria would be better then 90 Knots (wind speed reported from Hurricane Hunter Aircraft that flew overhead) and would take the top of the wave right off. The wave top didn’t just fall over and create foam and spray, it was entirely removed and the air was filled with what I could only describe as a new type of water. A layer of water with enough air in it so you could get a breath now and then. This layer of water/air mix is not very high and when you look down wind (if you are in the cockpit you can only look downwind and your height of eye is only 3 feet above the water) you can’t see it at all. It looks just like a layer of spray. You would almost swear that the wave shape changed as the gust came through from a trochoid wave to a wave form with a flat top, The peak was gone and all that remained was a steeper leading edge of solid water with less spray hugging the surface near the top and a backside that had a surface layer of spray and foam that was several inches thick. As the boat makes it to the peak of the wave the boat will have lost a large amount of stability and just falls over. I know the rule about a wave being limited to a height of 1/7 of its own wavelength. But I would swear on a stack of bibles that the relationship doesn’t hold up in a gust condition and the wavelength will close up much faster then you would expect. It’s as if the wave changes in speed faster then it can change in height. The angle that you read about as the greatest angle that the face of a wave can support, I think its 130 degrees. Forget about that, I saw a wave go by that had a face that was close to vertical and it was as stable as a rock. Within seconds of the gust passing, the wave pattern will return to what it was immediately before the gust and the wavelength increases again. All in all, it was an experience that I would not want to repeat. But if you want to try it, be my guest and have fun. Good sailing and enjoy the weather, Robert Gainer
I posted this once before on a bulletin board in response to a question about what it’s like to be in a storm and this morning I just copied it from that posting. Somehow it seemed appropriate to this discussion given Capn Bill’s post. Be careful what you wish for, you might just get what you think you want. In October of 1976 I was in Hurricane Gloria on a 30 foot boat 550 miles east of Puerto Rico with 90 Knots wind speed and 45 foot (or larger, its hard to tell after the wave is higher then the mast) waves. To the north of me was the 590 foot 15,028 ton Sylvia L Ossa with a crew of 37. She sank with a loss of all hands sometime between the 13 to the 15 of October. During the height of the storm the truck fitting failed by cracking between the hole for the headstay clevis pin and the corner of the casting adjacent to the mast. When the headstay went the sound and the recoil were intense. Early in the storm I had a small storm jib just turn to dust. As it went the rig seamed to just grab the boat and shake it, the whole boat vibrated. The loss of the headstay was to say the least very awkward at the time. In trying to turn the boat downwind after the headstay went the rudder failed at the bolt for tiller when the bolt sheared off. When the rain would pass by, it would flatten the waves out and pound on the boat like thousands of hammers all trying to get through the deck and destroy everything. When the standing rigging started to vibrate you thought that the rig would come down or the mast would drill a hole right through the keel. Within the next hour the motion of the boat was so violent that the hull failed with a crack forming between the aft most keel bolts. You could see the sides of the crack moving up and down as the boat rolled. She started to make water at that point. After getting beat up for that hour I had the boat back under control. Before the storm was fully over the steering was repaired and a new head stay was up. The leak was getting bad so I started for the nearest dry land as fast as I could go. At this point Hurricane Holly was predicted to be coming my way and I had enough of bad weather so I sent out a Mayday by SSB and that was received by a Dutch tugboat and they relayed it to the German ship Hagen of the Hapag-Lloyd line. She had passed me in the night some 100 miles to the west but she turned around and came back to get me. When she got to me the wind was climbing and had reached 60 knots. When my boat came alongside the Hagen the crack at the aft two keel bolts propagated along the entire length of the keel. The bottom of the boat flexed downward and opened up at the bolts and she started to sink. In the hour so before we meet we spoke by VHF and they asked for the dimensions and weight of the boat. There plan was to weld a cradle to the deck and if they could they wanted to pick up the boat with two wire slings and swing her inboard to the steel cradle. When we did get together the captain kept his ship away from my boat a few feet and had two of his crew come onboard with wire cutters, they helped me off and then cut the standing rigging while some crew on deck got the mast. They brought the rig on deck and on the next roll she was out of the water. I don’t think she hit the ship but once during the entire time. That one strike crushed about ten feet of hull-deck joint. I had been beat up so much from going up the mast to rig a headstay that I couldn’t walk and that’s why I needed help to get off my boat. The entire rescue was over in under ten minuets and they never came to a full stop. When the boat was on deck I found that the fairing forward of the rudder had also failed and the keel had dropped over 1/2 inch by digging out the fiberglass under the washers for the keel bolts. You want to know what its like to see a storm wave from a vantage point only 3 or 4 feet above the sea. One of the few things in life that I can guarantee you is that it’s a vantage point you never want to have yourself. As I tell you this keep in mind that I really can’t make any intelligent comments on the wind speed or the height of the waves. If I remember it right my gauge for wind speed only went up to 75 statute miles per hour and I never had any way to measure the wave height. After the waves get to be higher then my mast all bets were off about guessing the height. There is the expected increase in wave height as the wind speed increases. During the period of increase you see a marked change in shape and height. The wave will start to climb in height and increase in steepness until they get their tops blown off. After that the wave are noticeably asymmetrical with a very steep face. The next thing is the top of the wave looks like it just falls over and the entire surface of the sea is covered by foam and spray from the wave tops disintegrating into foam. During the increase but before the wave starts to become chaotic in shape the lee side will have large patches of foam free water. There is a repeatable pattern to the height. You can count the average height waves as they go by and then the showstopper would come along right on schedule. You don’t have to watch to windward, you can feel the big one coming. Actually you can’t look to windward at the height of the storm; it hurts to put your face above the cockpit coming. You can hunker down in the cockpit and look past the lee side of the cockpit or stay in the cabin and look out the weather ports. Even then it’s tough to see anything because the weather ports had a great view of the sky most of the time and the lee ports were under water or pointing straight down. The background to all of this is the sound of two 747 jets dueling to see who can be the loudest. A gust in Hurricane Gloria would be better then 90 Knots (wind speed reported from Hurricane Hunter Aircraft that flew overhead) and would take the top of the wave right off. The wave top didn’t just fall over and create foam and spray, it was entirely removed and the air was filled with what I could only describe as a new type of water. A layer of water with enough air in it so you could get a breath now and then. This layer of water/air mix is not very high and when you look down wind (if you are in the cockpit you can only look downwind and your height of eye is only 3 feet above the water) you can’t see it at all. It looks just like a layer of spray. You would almost swear that the wave shape changed as the gust came through from a trochoid wave to a wave form with a flat top, The peak was gone and all that remained was a steeper leading edge of solid water with less spray hugging the surface near the top and a backside that had a surface layer of spray and foam that was several inches thick. As the boat makes it to the peak of the wave the boat will have lost a large amount of stability and just falls over. I know the rule about a wave being limited to a height of 1/7 of its own wavelength. But I would swear on a stack of bibles that the relationship doesn’t hold up in a gust condition and the wavelength will close up much faster then you would expect. It’s as if the wave changes in speed faster then it can change in height. The angle that you read about as the greatest angle that the face of a wave can support, I think its 130 degrees. Forget about that, I saw a wave go by that had a face that was close to vertical and it was as stable as a rock. Within seconds of the gust passing, the wave pattern will return to what it was immediately before the gust and the wavelength increases again. All in all, it was an experience that I would not want to repeat. But if you want to try it, be my guest and have fun. Good sailing and enjoy the weather, Robert Gainer
