Years ago while skydiving with ten of my closest friends, an air traffic controller error resulted in us passing an America West 737 climbing out of Tucson. We were doing around 110 knots straight down, the aircraft perhaps 300 knots horizontally. It’s the only time I’ve ever heard something other than the roar of the wind at terminal velocity; the roar of the engines was clearly audible. We only missed the left wingtip by maybe 50 meters, and we didn’t even think to wave as we went by. We continued with our freefall formation and only after we all landed did we begin to appreciate how we narrowly avoided disaster. The close call was a result of human error, a simple geometry and physics problem that perhaps contributed to a moment of spatial disorientation. The jump plane was well above the jet when we were cleared to exit, and by the time the controller realized his error and radioed the pilot to “hold your jumpers” we were already in freefall.
We’re fortunate we didn’t get badly hurt or lose our boat during that storm. The waterspout was the first real hint that the weather forecasters might have underpredicted the severity of the system. The wind came in directions and magnitudes (hey, that’s called a vector!) that we weren’t expecting. The speed at which things went from good to marginal to extremely bad was astonishing.
I used to fly little airplanes, mostly slow ones, then we purchased a Van’s RV-6 which cruised around 155 knots. My first real flight in that airplane was from where I collected it in Florida all the way to Arizona, and the airplane was ahead of me the entire time. It took several more flights until my brain and flight management skills caught up, then we enjoyed several years of blasting around the US.
Part of our slowness to react to the deteriorating conditions in the anchorage was the misplaced faith in the forecast that said winds from the West would be reasonably light. Part was lack of experience in that sort of weather event while in a vulnerable anchorage. Perhaps a bit of our delay in responding was just plain disbelief that this couldn’t be happening to us. Regardless, we should have gotten the anchor up and headed out into the lagoon much sooner, and after the waterspout we should have had the boat completely ready to go to sea if necessary. Like skydiving, it’s the hard things that will smite you, in this case a lee shore and breaking waves in fairly shallow water.
We’ve spent the last 3 days reflecting upon our escape and how we’d handle things differently next time. We still believe we selected the most protected anchorage given the weather data we had to work with, but if and when this happens again we will depart for open water as soon as the wind and wave trends begin to go high and right. We’re safer at sea, and as long as we can navigate to avoid hard things JollyDogs is tough enough.
The question is, are we tough enough? Neither of us were challenged by the physical exertion required. At the time we handled the mental and emotional stress well. No panicking, only shouting to make our voices heard. We both did our jobs, made informed decisions and got the situation under control. After following SV Long Temps over to the number seven anchorage on Thursday, all we’ve really done is relax, snorkel, sleep, eat, and do a couple of minor projects. Nothing ambitious. We both seem to need time to chill out, to reflect upon that dangerous night, appreciate the lessons we better have learned, and calm our frayed nerves. This anchorage is gorgeous! Have a look on Google Earth. Latitude 16deg 57.083’ South, Longitude 144deg 44.528’ West.
These sorts of situations help you understand just how strong your partner is, and the strength of your relationship with that person. Over the years we’ve been through some very difficult things together, but Wednesday night was the biggest test yet. I think we passed.
We also got our anchor chain floats back!
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