No one likes to quit. Especially today, our society is not set up to accept, let alone understand, why people quit something. Hundreds of feet of bookstore shelves have made any number of life gurus rich, telling you how to not quit.
None of them ever sailed, as far as I can tell. Yet none of the sailors I know, including me, like to retire from races. But boats retire from races all the time. Sometimes you just gotta. Such was the case with me and Dr. Phil Haydon, he of Sail4epilepsy, on the good yacht Fearless, a Sunfast 3300, in the New England Solo Twin in late July last. Organized by Newport Yacht Club and including many of the usual suspects from the Bermuda 1-2, the N.E.S.T. is a fun overnight lap on the Astro-surf off Brenton Point.
The forecast for this edition showed fresh southwesterlies until dusk, then laying down overnight. The course was from Newport to the SW corner of Block Island (for Class 1, doublehanded spinnaker, in which we sailed,) thence to a bell off Gay Head, thence back to a can just north of Block Island’s Old Harbor then to the finish off Castle Hill; 103 calculated miles. Other classes sailed shorter courses.
We had a fair start, in about 12-16 knots of Sou’wester, normal Newport summer winds. A well-sailed J/109 was under us, half a boat-length away and a bit ahead, making me nervous for a minute or three. Ultimately, we lifted off them and moved ahead. They had a reef in the main, we did not. Right about then, the two large B&G screens on the cabin’s aft facing walls and the three-screen mast display went to black. Well, that’s annoying me thinks.
Phil was steering so we changed places, and he went below to do his expensive electrician thing. He is a Neuroscientist after all, and his skills in the 12-volt world is sort of running gag between us. Five minutes went by we were doing ok on the right-hand side of the mouth of the bay. The 109 had fallen in astern of us after having tried the left, where everyone else was.
Phil was able to resuscitate the meters, for a few minutes. Not sure what he did but pretty soon we had the cartoons back on screen. Ten minutes later, back to black…OK, this is going to be an interesting race, I thought. On the other hand, we had a Windex and a compass and two hand-held VHFs and two mobile phones. Not having the meters was a PIA, but not a show-stopper. It merely interrupted our speed monitoring. And so on.
We beat out past Pt. Judith, our previously agreed decision point for going to the east or west side of Block. We chose east. We were doing well. The boats that went left were a long way away and could not cross us when they tacked. We felt pretty comfortable. Two Class40s and a 36-footer, well sailed by a local, were the boats ahead. On we sailed.
Now, I have completed two other races with no meters. One, the Marblehead to Halifax Ocean Race doublehanded on the J/105 Jaded with Peter Rugg, and another memorable J/105 Vineyard Race with the young sailors from Young American Sailing Academy. In both cases, the reason for the no meters was because we couldn’t get the engine started.
In this current failure, it was a Ghost in the Machine kind of untraceable electronic fault. Humm… Well anyway we plugged along down the east side of Block, doing what we thought was reasonably well.
We’d just put a reef in the main, when Phil came up from below remarking that the masthead VHF had “gone out.” Another Hummm. I’m an avid student of incidents at sea, and I hold the theory that “incidents” do not start in isolation. They’re the result of a cascade of events. So much so I’ve coined the phrase “C4”: Cooper’s Cascading Cluster **** Calculation.
I was wondering if we were entering into a C4… Oh, the AIS was operated through the masthead VHF too. Phil and I consulted. We were 20% into the race. Yet to come was a kite reach over to the Vineyard, just clipping the wind farm work area, and attendant work/crew boats. We knew they were chasing errant boats out of their sandbox. There were thunderstorms forecast – we could see them building in the northwest – and the coasties were on the VHF (we could rx them on the handheld) every few minutes with announcements of same.
Now here is where C4 gets curious. Here we were, a couple of perfectly capable sailors on a well-found yacht on a sunny afternoon, but we went through the what ifs:
A thundersquall like the one during the 2024 Solo Twin, that came across from Long Island and blew 50 from the SW for 5 minutes with a lot of time in the high 30s.
We were entering, sans AIS, a zone with a lot of work boats.
There had been the beginnings of a cascade already. Sure, only instruments, and the related CPU, and now the VHF (masthead version) and the AIS, but still.
Did we really want to chicken out, cry uncle and turn tail? NO, but…Let’s see what happens IF: we were in a rain squall at 0200 in the vicinity of the turbine work area, zero visibility, 40 knots of wind, trying to get the kite down, sailing on our ear, thunder all around, (impeding ability to hear anything) no AIS and so not really poised to ID trawlers or crew boats? Let alone commercial traffic: the ships, tugs and barges with which this part of Block Island Sound is littered, and fellow competitors… The turbine pylons have AIS on the towers at the corners of the field, but not on the individual pylons IN the field.
Phil went below again to play electrician and returned unsuccessfully, in a few minutes. We both looked at each other and said almost in unison, “Cascading Cluster….” Closely followed by “I’m ok to pull the pin.”
We sailed on for a minute to make sure we were ok with the decision. A glance over our shoulders at the approaching thundersqualls sealed the deal. Not the presence of the squalls themselves. We’d both sailed through this sort of stuff before, most recently last year. Sadly, yet OK with the decision, we dropped the jib and bore away for Newport.
As it turns out we could not start the engine. This was about ten minutes later. This failure was later diagnosed as a worn-out 5-year-old engine start battery. We had emergency running lights, so needing the engine to charge batteries was not a big requirement. But trying to escape from a pylon, a crew boat, tug and tow, freighter, or a hard part of Martha’s Vineyard it would have been comforting to know there was an engine ready to roll. Another layer in the cascade….
Were we Pikers, as the Aussie say? Them’s what cannot stand the heat in the kitchen? Maybe, probably. But it ain’t just us, ya know. If we got into deep doo-doo and needed to call AAA to come and get our wet asses out of trouble, those guys and girls, the local Coasties, put themselves out there too. Not sure I’d want to fly a Helo through a thunderstorm. Probably they would not either…Another layer.
I’m still conflicted about retiring. As noted, we all hate not finishing something we start. And compared to finishing one 350-mile race doublehanded, and a 240-mile race with a boatload of high school sailors (some of the best sailors I’ve sailed with in any event, mind you) without electronics, electrics nor engine, this retirement seemed a bit, well Piker’ish. I’m sure there are plenty of other sailors who would’ve cracked on. Like the aforementioned high school sailors in the Vineyard Race in 2018. On the other hand, three other boats retired from this race. Four boats RET from 22=18%. Vendee Globe stats. One J/109, with a deadly kite wrap unsolvable even after multiple trips up the mast, by the young woman crew. One J/122, reason unknown, and one modified Hobie 33. They reported realizing that their boat was not suited to the conditions, especially since they’d just acquired it and this was their first season, their first overnight race and DH at that.
One of the things I tell high school sailors is, “If I’m asking you to do something you’re not 100% comfortable with, push back and tell me. Go with your gut.”
In the, perhaps, 2006 Vineyard Race, the top edge of the remains of a hurricane came across the east end of long Island, not long after the race started. I was in Michigan watching the trackers all heading for the barn. Old hands here will remember only three boats finished.
I called up a few owners I know and asked, “What’s the problem with a bit of 50 knots of wind”? “We do this for fun,” they all responded. “Sailing upwind in 35-40 (and building) was not fun.” Fair enough. The Ocean Race and Vendee guys and girls all get paid to stick their necks out. Sixty-odd boats in The Vineyard Race sailors or a couple old coots banging around Block Island Sound, well not so much.
Not long after we started pointing at Beavertail, the squalls came through. At one point we had lightning and thunder on top of each other. The lightning felt close enough that we went through the punch list of a lightning hit making a hole in the boat and us having to get off. Phil keeps his liferaft aboard for even these inshore races.
We reckoned the most likely scenario would be a hit to the carbon mast. It’s deck-stepped on a metal compression tube. Not much there to stop the voltage from a lightning strike punching a hole in the bottom of the boat, grounding wires notwithstanding.
We had handheld in the rope tail bags and I put mine in the kangaroo pouch in my Musto smock. I would cut the raft away – it lives in a purpose-built cut-out in the aft deck/transom. Cut the lashings, push it into the water and off we’d float. Assuming the boat’s sunk sufficiently to make such a jump warranted.
Phil would get the 406 EPIRB stowed on the inside of the cabin adjacent to the inside of the TV screens, reachable without entering the cabin, and whatever else came to hand, the plastic bin of crunchy bars, and water, and the yellow brick tracker if time permitted, and we could get off the boat in about 15 seconds. All that Safety-at-Sea training really has value, ya know.
Do I regret pulling out? Of course. Do I wish we’d kept going, Probably. Am I satisfied we made the right call? Most likely. Would I do it again? Time will tell. ■
* For non-racing sailors, RET is the abbreviation on a score sheet for a boat that retires.
Australian born, Joe ‘Coop’ Cooper stayed in the U.S. after the 1980 America’s Cup where he was the boat captain and sailed as Grinder/Sewer-man on Australia. His whole career has focused on sailing, especially the short-handed aspects of it. He lives in Middletown, RI where he coaches, consults and writes on his blog, joecoopersailing.com, when not paying attention to his wife, dog and several, mainly small, boats.
