Sunday, August 13, 2000. What began innocently enough turned into the worst sailing day of my life. Ever. Through a combination of bad judgement calls and bad luck, all the forces of sailing karma seemed to coverge on one Hobie 16 sailing at Branched Oak Lake. Namely mine. With me on it.
     I arrived at the Lake later than usual, it was noon. There were 1/2 a dozen Hobie friends of mine already there, and I said my hello's as I began rigging the boat. I had brought the boat to the lake and left it at the beach a few days earlier, so it was already at the water and only needed me to hoist sails and attach blocks and go. The beach we sail on is on the south side of the lake, and we had a strong wind out of the south. This has good and bad points. It can make getting off the beach very easy, since the wind wants to push you out to the middle of the lake. That's good. Being as it is a wind coming off the land with some small hills and trees, the wind strength can easily be misjudged. That's bad.
     My first bad judgement call was ignoring the warning that the Bad Lake Karma was giving me. As I was rigging my boat, Mark and Ryan began pushing their Miracle 20 off the beach to go sail. They turned downwind away from shore, and just launched forward with the downwind breeze. Now when you are on a mulithull, the first 90 seconds of being underway is the most hectic. As a skipper you are struggling wth several things. You need to get the rudders down. You have to get your mainsheet in order on the tramp. You have to keep your course while focusing on other things. And, ultimately, you have to watch where you're going because there are usually other people nearby. Well, Mark was ripping out of the shallows and BAM, he absolutely clobbered a Wave Runner that was anchored in about chest deep water. Mark's fault, no way around that. Insurance info was exchanged and all was forgotten.
     My mistake, however, was that I chose to ignore this omen. The lake gods were not smiling this day, but I remained ignorant. I was ready to go, and about to make my second bad judgement call. I knew it was windy, but failed to ask those who'd already been out what the conditions on the open water were like. I chose to gear up and pushed my H16 out. I stayed away from all pwc's and was on the wire shortly after leaving the beach. Within moments I could tell I was getting into wind far bigger than single trap conditions. By not just turning around right then and there I had made my next bad call. And then a few moments later a really good blast of wind hit me. Out on the wire, I snapped the mainsheet and the blocks unspooled as fast as they could, yet I was still climbing. I've done this enough times to know that I was ok, the sail would dump enough wind soon enough and I'd come back down. Then a wierd thing happened. I'm watching the blocks unspool as I'm gaining altitude, and suddenly the blocks just STOP unspooling! Needless to say, within a microsecond I was launched through the air.
     As I came up out of the water, I thought, "Did I just imagine that, or did it really happen?" I went through the drill of uprighting the boat with no problems, and in the course of flipping, the boat was now headed back to south beach where I'd began. This was where my next bad call was to take place. As I reached south beach, instead of going in, I chose to tack again and make a run across the lake. By this time I'd convinced myself that I had merely imagined the blocks had locked up on me, and I had just gone over because, well, because I'd gone over... So I am making my way towards the mouth of the breakwater of the marina across the lake. The wind is that kind of wind where there's nothing steady about it. It's just repeated blasts of wind, up and down, up and down. All work and no play. At this point I declared it 'officially un-fun' and decided I'd return to the beach when I tacked at the marina. Then comes another blast. I uncleat the main again, and the boat is climbing as the blocks are unspooling, and IT HAPPENS AGAIN! As I'm literally flying through the air I look at the blocks as they go by and I say "This time I'm not imagining it, they are indeed locked"-SPLASH!
     This time the capsize is a little worse, because I'm out in the biggest wind and waves on the lake. The boat is on it's side, and the wind is now pushing on the bottom of the tramp, and the boat turtles. Now, If you are not familiar with multihulls, they have extruded aluminum masts that are sealed so that in the event of a turtle, the positive floatation will assist in bringing the mast back to the surface of the water, and it works fairly well. However, the mast on a Hobie 16 is 27 feet long. The bottom of the lake at this particular spot was somewhere in the neighborhood of 24 feet. So the mast was being forced into the mud in the bottom of the lake. In effect, the boat was doing a slow motion pole vault into the muddy bottom on its mast.
     I should make it clear that capsizing a Hobie is not really that big of a deal, they get dumped all the time, and if they weren't easy to upright, we wouldn't ride the ragged edge of a capsize so consistently. Turtling is less common, however, due to the floatation ability of the mast. I've sailed Hobies for seven years, and this was only my third turtle capsize ever. No worries though, I knew eventually the wind and waves would move the frame of the boat over the top of the mast and it would eventually free itself from the bottom of the lake. But there was another insidious factor at play that I was unaware of at the time, and if I had been, I'd not have taken the turtling so casually. The season before I had removed the sail feeder jaws from the base of the mast, becuase they can tear up the luff of a sail, and I like to hand feed the main sail into the track as I hoist it. What I had failed to do at the time was going to come back and haunt me over a year later, namely right now as the boat sat completely inverted in the lake. I never sealed up the four small screw holes in the aluminum mast where I'd removed the feeder jaws. Oh, the stupidity... So as I sat there on top of the bottom of the starboard hull, casually waiting unaware for the boat to upright itself, those four holes were allowing a steady stream of water to pour down to the very depths of the mast way at the bottom of the lake. I was destined never to upright this boat, but never had a clue at the time.
     My first clue that something was amiss was when the mast wouldn't come up to the surface after the turtling took place. This was very odd. I'd never had a Hobie behave this way, and this is my fourth boat I've owned. Not to mention the countless times I'd been on friends boats that went over. This was new. Eventually after exhausting myself for a good 30 minutes, I finally accepted help from one of the jet skiers who had been slowly circling at a distance like vultures waiting for their prey to die. I'd been upside down for nearly an hour now, so I was ready to let go of my pride and let this guy help me.
     Yet even with two adults, we failed to get the mast even to the surface, let alone upright the boat. This is when I concluded the mast had water in it. We had worked on it for 15 minutes, I finally said thanks, but I'll need a tow to shore. So he went on his way and I waved over a power boat that had also become part of the spectator crowd. Remember, the whole time it was blowing 20 mph and waves and wind were slowly drifting me down the lake. At no point was I ever in much danger, but the whole episode was becoming embarrasing and rediculous. This is the kind of thing that happens your first time out, not after years of sailing.
     The power boater threw me a ski line and I secured it to the front crossbar of the tramp frame, and asked him to to me to a cove just upwind and to our left on the north shore. What he'd done was secure his end of the ski rope to the right side of his own transom, thus preventing him from making a left turn. The drag of my submerged boat was just too great. With his motor completely turned, the best he could do was straight ahead. I was exasperated and exhausted at this point and asked him to just to me straight over to the second breakwater rocks and I'd take it from there. As he did this, the waves and wind were pounding over me and the hulls, and it was quite a ride. He pulled me into the outer corner of the breakwater. I waved him off, said my thank you and stood there in waist deep water near the rocky shore, just resting. It had been about two hours. The mast was still sunk, but at least me and the boat were at a shore, even if it wasn't hospitable. I needed to get the boat around the point that separated me from the cove I wanted to be in. Where I was currently at was full of concrete breakwater all along the shore, allowing no chance of beaching the boat. Where I wanted to be was on the other side of this point. But to do this I had to push the half-sunk boat around the point, fighting the headwind, the waves coming head on into me and the tramp, the mud sucking at my feet, and the mast that was full of water and sunk. We later did the math and calculated that a submerged H16 mast holds about 240 pounds of water. There was no chance I was going to get this boat upright. Plus, with the mast full of water, it had lost all it's buoyancy, and the weight of the mast itself wanted to go to the bottom. I'm guessing an H16 mast weighs about 45 pounds.
     To make the long story short, it took me an hour to push the boat into the wind and around this rocky point to the safety of the cove with its sandy shore where I could unrig the boat. After an eternity of fighting wind, waves, mud, and submerged mast (with sails still on of course), I reached the sandy beach of the cove. I sat down heavily at the water's edge.
     "My dad asked me to come see if you needed any help", says this voice behind me. I look up to see a boy, about 9 years old, looking down at me. "No, I'm ok now. My boat is just broken", I say. In his childlike curiosity, he asks what's wrong with the boat. I tried to explain my epic adventure as simply as I could to a 9 year old boy. In all of his sweet innocence, before wandering off, his simple reply was, "Maybe you oughta think about gettin' a different boat."
     "Yeah, I'll think about that" What else was I going to say?
     From here it was a short walk to the marina, and John, the marina owner gave me a ride back to the other side of the lake where I retrieved my truck and trailer, and came back to dismantle my boat in the cove. By this time it was late in the day and most of the lake populace had retreated to the resturaunt up the hill to listen to the band play Bob Marley covers. I wrestled the sails off and brought the mast up to the shore. Not only was there mud on it, there were true geologic core samples represented all along the top 4 feet of the mast where it had been forced into the bottom of the lake. My mast was a fine representation of the mososoic era of the midwest. I struggled with it, and eventually uprighted the boat alone there on the shoreline. As it came upright, the jets of water coming horizontally out of the base of the mast throught the four screw holes revealed to me for the first time where my first mistake of that day had been made, over a year earlier when I'd backed those four screws out and for some inexplicable reason failed to seal them. Rest assured, they are now sealed.
     So, the moral of the story is, listen to nine year olds. Ok, really, the moral of the story is that a small wrong decision can multiply its consequences and become a big wrong decision if you allow it. You have to break the chain of events, or the situation will snowball out of control and you'll be sorry. Probably the most exhausting 3 hours of my life. But don't think for a minute that I'm not going back out there...