Oops

The whole day has been far to eventful, starting with last night. When Jesse got off watch at midnight he told me the main topgallant yard broke. They were going about 10 knots and probably should have taken it in, but Baron and Dan were talking about it and decided it was doing okay. Next thing you know they hear a crack, look up and study it for a minute because there was no moon out and decided yes it broke. The shock it got from being dropped the other day probably didn’t help it that much either. They lashed her down to the shrouds and left her there for the night.

When I got up in the morning I was amazed at how it looked, kind of like a close pin, with the topgallant broken we can’t set the royal.

At capstan Robin was explaining how the British Navy use to tack back and forth to find their man overboard. So we were going to give it a try, hands sprung to braces and Tino was on the wheel going hard to port, he called for help and no one jumped up and I happened to be near by and gave a hand. I had planed on going through freezers and organizing some stuff because we weren’t rolling too badly, but I stayed on the helm with Tino for the next two hours.

What happened next was kind of unclear, Drew, Don and Mitch were hauling on the main coarse starboard brace, they were taking up slack and then hauling a little and it didn’t seem like all their effort was in it and then were was the blood curdling sound of wood splintering.

The main coarse yard broke.

About half way out on the starboard side it snapped in half, right where it hits the shrouds when it’s hard over. The theories as to why it happened, there was a weak spot around there where epoxy had previously been pored because it was un laminating itself, maybe the wind picked up right at the wrong time to something was fetched up some where. Before the thought of the huge beefy coarse yard being broken could fully sink in to anyone’s head Dan immediately called out for the topsail to be taken in and shortly after people were scurrying up to furl and take care of the coarse.

Tino and I had a great view of what was going on the whole time and I was plenty happy to be stuck there and not having to go aloft. The topgallant and the coarse had their sails taken off to take some of the weight off of them, they left the topgallant lashed to the shrouds because she is fairly small. A lot of the gear for the coarse came down quickly, yard arm tackles, mast takes and then the gear for the sail. I had to go make dinner but they did bring down the smaller part of the hard that had broken off.

At the end of the day looking back things could have been messy, but it went smoothly; the mates all jumped in the rig and gave a hand as well.

We caught a tuna in the morning that John filleted for me so we had that for dinner with teriyaki chicken. Brooke also spent a good amount of time making pretzels for the night watches.

Broken main topgallant.

Jesse holding on to a tuna.

John and Jesse.

Broken main coarse.