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LETTER OF THE MONTH
Check your storm sail
Crosbie Lorimer’s wonderful article ‘Rolling the Dice’ captured the many challenges facing yachts in this year’s Rolex Sydney Hobart Race (Yachting World March 2024).
However, Kurt Arrigo’s stunning photographs at Cape Raoul prompt me to write. Some readers may have spotted the Swan Class 45 Amazingrace with a loose-luffed storm trysail and wondered: was it a crew oversight or a sailmaker’s error? Neither!
Conditions had moderated considerably by the time we reached Cape Raoul; a few hours earlier at Tasman Island we faced multiple hail storms and rain squalls with gusts up to 62 knots along with 8m seas and 4 knots of adverse drift!
It was in these conditions the luff slides on our 20-year-old storm trysail parted one at a time – no doubt a result of age and corrosion.
There was at least one other case in the fleet where the mainsail luff track parted from the mast.
We’ve all paraded our storm sails prerace or rolled them out for crew training sessions, but if we’re sailing offshore and relying on our storm sails we must carefully check the luff hanks and slides to make sure they’ll be reliable in storm force winds.
A vexed question
A good friend of mine used to go sailing with Bernard Hayman (Yachting World editor, 1963-1979) and from Hayman heard of the final part of the Master Mariner’s exam in the days of sailing ships.
There was a whole slew of questions, e.g. Your vessel is listing in a heavy storm/heading for the rocks (disaster, at any rate), so what do you do? Answer: You do X. Question: Right, you have done that, but your vessel is still heading for the rocks (let’s say), what do you do? And so the interrogation continues until the final question: Right, you have done all that, and still you are about to crash onto the rocks/flounder in the deep, so what do you do? The final and correct answer was: ‘I commend my soul to my Maker.’
By any remote chance do you know of this test, or know someone who does, and
