Passage From Darwin - Part 2 - change of plan!

[Kyle]Bang!!

We were on Day Sixteen of our thirty-five to forty day passage between Darwin, Northern Territory and Ceduna, South Australia. I had just finished checking the weather on my day watch when all hell broke loose.

Begonia started shaking and banging loudly. I could see that both the mainsheet and preventer had gone slack. Normally, they oppose each other to hold the boom still. Now it was swinging back and forth until one or the other of the slack lines snapped tight and brought it to a stop.

My first thought was that the mainsheet or one of its attachment fittings had parted or at least come uncleated, but I could see all of the hardware at the end of the boom and everything looked fine.

Then I thought something must have happened to the mast. I half expected to see it in the water to one side, but as I popped my head out from under the bimini and looked up, everything seemed normal. The mast wasn't broken. The boom wasn't broken. All of the wires were in place. The spreaders were intact and the boom was still attached to the mast. Everything was fine, except the whole thing was shaking back and forth like a wet dog trying to dry itself off. It was as if the base of the mast had sunk and all of the previously tight standing rigging had gone slack.

Maryanne had been awakened by the noise, but thought I may have been tacking or something, which involves a certain unavoidable amount of banging and shaking before the flogging sails are pulled taut on the other side.

"Maryanne!!!" She could tell immediately by the tone of my voice that something had gone very wrong.

"What's wrong??"

"The mast!!" was all I could think to say at that moment.

I ran up the windward deck to the base of the mast, getting smacked by the slack shroud on the way. The mast was pivoting around on its base, crunching into the eyebrow awning over the main cabin windows. I released the main halyard and started clawing down fistfuls of mainsail. Maryanne appeared, saw the commotion for the first time and told me to get away from the swinging mast.

"I've gotta get the main down! Roll up the jib!" She blew the sheet and cranked away at the furler line.

With the sails out of the way and the boat stopped, we could get a better look at things, but everything looked superficially fine, except that the mast was still swinging all over the place. What the hell was going on? The eyebrow was still getting crunched, which meant the mast was leaning backwards more than usual. I looked at the toggle at the base of the forestay and saw that it was loose, even though the roller furling seemed pretty taut. The forestay had broken. The only thing keeping the mast from falling backwards onto us was the jib halyard and the luff of the sail itself.

I cranked the halyard as tight as I could, while Maryanne went inside to rummage for some big shackles. When she returned, we moved the spinnaker halyard forward and shackled it to a spare hole in the lower forestay tang. Then I winched it as tight as I dared, considering the strength of the line and all of the fittings along the way.

That pulled the mast forward enough to cut the swinging in half, constraining it to about one degree from the center of its normal position. One degree doesn't sound that bad, but on a near twenty-meter high mast, that leaves 2/3rds of a meter of free play between stops at the top. That is a lot of swinging, which was horrifying to look at from below. We didn't imagine it could keep that up for long before something else gave way.

Our nearest land was Christmas Island, 450 nautical miles to the north. It is a dot of an island in mid-Indian Ocean and has no repair facilities, it is also currently in lockdown due to Covid-19. Next closest was Cape Range on the Australian mainland, just over five hundred miles away, but not so isolated - that seemed like the better option despite also being closed due to Covid19; there was no way we'd make it to South Australia. We had enough fuel to motor for almost seven hundred miles on one engine, but that was in calm conditions, like in canals. Cape Range was dead upwind and straight into choppy seas. Plus, we were presently in a current that was going away from the mainland at half a knot. If the wind wasn't too strong and the seas weren't too bad, I figured we could maybe make it somewhere between five hundred and five hundred and fifty miles. The current and the winds were setting us backwards at just over a knot. We had to get an engine started and start moving NOW.

Once we were headed towards land, we pored through our charts. The ONLY port within our range was Exmouth in Western Australia, another thirteen miles past the Cape. We only had a chance of making it that far if we were very careful with our fuel.

Before we left Darwin, Maryanne had recorded all of the relevant emergency contacts we might need along the way. Now she fired off emails to the Joint Rescue Coordination Center (JRCC), and to the Exmouth Harbourmaster, explaining our situation and telling them we were on the way. We knew we had been trying to avoid Western Australia, but now we were headed straight at it. ETA: six days.

The Department of Transport (DOT) Harbourmaster wrote back first, acknowledging our email and directing us not to proceed to Exmouth until he can get confirmation from the Police that it is okay for us to come in.

Yeah, right! I have unfortunately seen this movie before. This is the plot to "Die Hard 2" (which, by the way, is not worth the electricity to download it, even if you have solar. Also in this category: "Speed 2". You'll never get those hours back.) In the movie, terrorists hijack air traffic control, point big guns at the controller's heads and tell them to deny a bunch of airliners permission to land. The pilots, played by no actor who has ever touched the controls of an airplane, respond by saying something like, "Dammit, we're going to run out of fuel!! But...okay." (Airline passengers take comfort in knowing that not even the dipshit who finished dead last in ground school would respond that way.)

Our reply was something along the lines of, "We really have no choices here, we're coming anyway. We have six days to hopefully figure it out."

Our direct emails with the Police and the JRCC were much more encouraging. They both told us to take care of ourselves, keep coming and we could deal with any issues once we were safely in port. The JRCC were particularly good about sending us regular messages saying not much more than that they were keeping an eye on our progress. My spirits weren't especially buoyed by this, but I recognized that the purpose of these was to remind us that we weren't all alone out there. I thought it was a really nice gesture.

One of the things pilots are generally better at than the average motorist is not running out of fuel. Running out of fuel in an airplane is really, really bad - way worse than running out of fuel on a sailboat. I know to a pretty high degree of accuracy what our engine's specific fuel consumption is (i.e. how fast the engine burns fuel at each power setting). That and an accurate starting quantity allows us to calculate exactly how much fuel we should have at any given moment. {Maryanne: Of course the sea and wind conditions conspire to adjust those numbers. Note: we can (and do) also measure the fuel in the tank, but in bouncy seas that isn't so accurate either.}

Thus, my two new hobbies were poring over the weather and ocean current forecasts and figuring out how much fuel we had left and what our range might be. Every time I came on watch, I would start the data downloads, check the fuel quantity to see if it was tracking with our expected burn rate and adjust that range number as necessary, then I would calculate the time remaining to what is called Bingo Fuel in aviation. Bingo Fuel is not the point at which we would run out of fuel completely, but rather the minimum fuel needed at a specified point to complete the trip, plus reserve. In our case, reserve is the amount of fuel we consider to be unusable at sea. Our fuel pickup is not at the very bottom of the tank and sloshing could cause it to suck air, which would cause the engine to fail. We may be able to use some of that fuel in calm conditions, but it can't be counted on and thus is deemed not to exist for our calculations. Thus, our time to Bingo Fuel was the time remaining until we had just enough fuel to arrive at the marina at reserve fuel, including enough to make the thirteen-mile upwind trip from the tip of the Exmouth peninsula.

With the endurance (time) number, I could multiply it by an educated guess of our expected speed in various conditions to get a range (distance) to Bingo Fuel. I could then also calculate a minimum speed over ground, and with the help of the current charts, the minimum speed through the water necessary to make it the full distance. It was close. My initial calculations were that we would have about twenty miles to spare.

When it came time for my night off-watch, I knew I had to try to sleep, but that I wouldn't. Exhaustion got me maybe two thirty-minute naps in six hours. Every time I heard a particularly loud bang, I would jump up with a start, expecting it to be followed by an even louder one and then a scream.

If the mast was going to fall it was most likely to fall backwards, so we agreed we would only go outside as necessary and would sit each of our watches inside, under the protection of the cabin roof, as close to the base of the mast as possible.

After I came on for my watch to give Maryanne her fruitless try at sleeping, I was sitting there cringing at the banging from both the mast and the slack shrouds when I had an idea.

I tied a dock line to each shroud and then ran it more or less perpendicular to the mast. Then I tightened it as much as I could when it went slack, That pulled each shroud tighter, kept the slack one from swinging and most importantly, acted as a shock absorber to slow the shroud as it straightened and pulled tight. That took another third out of the mast's free swing and changed the bangs at each stop into slightly softer thuds. 'Bang, shake' changed to, 'Thud, reverberate, thud, reverberate'. What would have been terrifying in the old days was now an improvement. That and a slightly calmer day than the one before quieted things down a bit. We should have slept better, but both of our minds were racing and wouldn't turn off.

Our progress had not been as good as I had hoped. While the seas were calming, they still seemed to be at that magic height that made it hard to push through, especially when added to the headwinds and especially on only one engine operating at reduced power. We had not been making our required minimum speed. Every revision of our range estimate whittled away at those extra twenty miles until they were gone altogether, Then we started falling short. I had to come up with a new plan.

After being hunched over the charts for a couple of hours, I had a plan. The last forty-three miles to the entrance to Exmouth Gulf should be with the wind aft of the beam. We could sail those miles, because the sail would push the mast forward, reducing the strain on our temporary stays. Before we got that far, we were going to be passing through a big area of favorable current. Instead of motoring through it, we could shut down the engine for a day and let the current tick away some free miles for us. That combination should put us back into the black, even with pessimistic speed estimates.

On Day Three after the forestay broke, conditions were somewhat calmer and I mentioned to Maryanne over breakfast that we could lower the furler to the deck so we could use the jib halyard as a backup for the spinnaker halyard. I wasn't sure it was a good idea because the furler was half of the hardware holding the mast forward and also because the furler was longer than the boat, which would make it more than a little unwieldy. Maryanne was all for it. As I was talking myself out of the idea, she was thinking it more and more the right thing to do. We decided to do the job together in daylight while the conditions remained relatively smooth.

Roller furling up, and then down

It was a bit of a palaver getting the thing down and stowed on deck while avoiding getting it caught in the shrouds and lines on the way. We stowed it on deck curved from one corner of the boat to the one opposite, leaving only about a meter sticking out at each end. It was already bent from the swinging around so we weren't too worried. I can't remember, aren't we supposed to tie a red rag to each end?

We lashed the jib halyard around the forward beam. Then I started cranking. Like with the spinnaker halyard a couple of days before, I cranked it as tight as I dared. That took some pressure off of the spinnaker halyard, so I switched to that and cranked that down some more. After alternating back and forth, we got them both bar-tight. That pulled the mast forward enough to take all of the slack out of the shrouds. With the shroud-bending dock lines re-tensioned afterwards, the mast and the hulls now moved together as if they were one solid piece.

{Maryanne: Having the mast so much more secure really helped. I went from being absolutely terrified that the mast would fall and one of us would be badly injured, to knowing I only need to worry about our fuel level from that point forward}

WHEW!! It wasn't until that moment that we realized how much anxiety we each had been carrying. For two very long days, we had been holding our breaths without even realizing it. Now we could let out a big sigh of relief. Oh, that feels good! I went to bed and slept for an hour and a half straight. Then my brain started worrying again and it was all over. Stupid brain!

My biggest worry was our upcoming period of drifting to save fuel. The wind was forecast to increase a lot when we got to that area and I was concerned it would either cancel out our progress or worse, blow us out of the good current into adjacent areas flowing the other way. With no engine running we would have little control and we didn't have enough extra fuel to start the engine. Back to the old drawing board...

At length, I figured out that if we motored directly upwind, which would slow us down a lot, we could eventually get a better wind angle to the Gulf, which would allow us to shut the engine down and start sailing twenty miles sooner. That eliminated the need for us to drift at all, which fixed the uncertainty of being able to stay in the middle of the stream.

To make matters even better, the wind died almost completely during the middle of the day. That allowed us to motor at 'canal' speeds of four to five knots, almost double our required minimum of 2.5. By dinnertime, we were looking at an extra fifty miles of fuel range. Now we were almost certain to make it with plenty to spare.

Around dinner we got an email from the JRCC asking us to call them. Maryanne got on the satellite phone. They told us they had diverted a container ship to our location and it would be arriving within the next thirty minutes to deliver some fuel to us.

I was hurt. I had done all of that work to bridge the gap and I was certain we could make it, even in the worst-case scenario. "But we don't need any fuel", I said meekly. "I mean, an extra 20 liter jerry can would be nice for piece of mind, but we don't need it."

Maryanne ignored me. They were already on the way. We were taking the fuel. We had never explicitly asked the JRCC for fuel, although they were aware that we were concerned about it. At some point, they decided better safe than sorry and sent the ship.

{Maryanne: Kyle had spent so much mental effort on finding a way to make our fuel supply get us to Exmouth and believed he had the problem cracked. The approach to Exmouth has us going through a narrow channel between land/reefs and gas rigs, not a place to run out of fuel, so I was happy to have any extra precautions possible sent our way}.

Within ten minutes, we picked up their AIS target and then saw the bridge of the ship sticking over the horizon – just the bridge, like the Earth was curved or something. It was the "Jazan", en route between Adelaide (Australia) and Jakarta (Indonesia). On our system, most vessel's AIS data tags tell the length of the vessel in feet. A very small percentage of them, maybe one or two, are so big that the length is displayed in nautical miles because there aren't enough digits on the display. This was one of those ships. It was 308 meters long, or 1,010 feet, or, as our display said: 0.165NM. This was one of the small subset of ships that is way too big to fit through either Panama Canal.

Next to the bridge grew an increasingly high stack of shipping containers like plants sprouting. They were followed by the dark flowerpot of Jazan's hull. The Captain called us and in a thick Russian accent, introduced himself and told us to maintain course and speed. He sounded good natured and happy to be of assistance.

The Jazan - approaches

Jazan started slowing from nineteen knots five miles before he got to us. By the time he told us to alter course to approach more closely, they were down to eight. We were at four. The Captain joked, "Why are you running away?"

We craned our necks to take in the enormous ship that, even though it was still a quarter of a mile away, already looked like it was looming over us. Interestingly, we had the reverse of the usual experience as we approached. We were calm and steady, the giant ship was all over the place. That's because we were on a long, soft 3m swell that slowly rose us straight up and then gently lowered us straight down. Jazan's stern was waaay back there on the crest of a swell while the bow was buried in the trough near us, so they were pitching and rolling what seemed to me like a lot.

The JRCC had asked them to deliver 20 to 40 liters of fuel – one or two jugs. The Captain asked if we didn't want one more. Nah. Twenty liters is great, forty is more than enough, sixty is just overkill. Maryanne grabbed the mic, "Sixty would be lovely. Thank You." Saw that one coming!

"Are you sure that is enough? How big is your engine? How much do you burn?"

Maryanne handed me the mic. "That's more than enough, thanks. Eighteen horsepower." A bit of quick math, "Thirteen kilowatts" (the metric equivalent). "We are burning about a liter an hour."

"How much!?"

"About a liter per hour." This was met with guffaws.

"Okay, we give you sixty liters."

He asked us how many were aboard. I told him it was just the two of us. He said we are "very risky", but he did it in an impressed tone, like he couldn't remember the English word for 'brave' or, 'intrepid', perhaps. He told us they had twenty-three aboard - "Not so much adventure". I asked about his engines and how much they burn.

"One hundred megawatts. (130,000hp) We burn one hundred tonnes of fuel per day." Great googoly moogoly, that's a lot of fuel! I did the math after they left and discovered that, to produce a given unit of power, Jazan's engines use one-twentieth the fuel ours do. That means using a gazillion Begonias to deliver a Jazan-sized load of crap from Amazon would be way slower, cost way more and pollute like crazy.

As we were approaching bow-to-bow, then alongside, it took us a long time to traverse the distance to Jazan's stern. There, three green jerry cans wrapped in blue plastic bags were lowered from the side deck into the water (diesel floats). It dawned on me that the deckhand lowering the fuel from the deck was twice as high above the water as the top of our mast is. The Captain standing on the wing bridge was twice as high as the deckhand, maybe more. We must have looked like a little mosquito to them.

The Jazan (at a near stop) - lowering fuel

After they drifted forward half a Jazan length, the Captain called us to say his propellers were stopped and we could come pick up the fuel. Maryanne caught them with a boat hook and then I left the helm to help her fish the heavy jugs out of the sea. We called the Captain again to tell him we had the fuel aboard and to thank him and his crew.

"No Problem. Happy trip!" came the reply. Then the sea behind the ship bubbled to life. By the time we started putting the fuel into our tank, Jazan was just the bridge and a bunch of antennae receding over the horizon. I guess they don't need their empty jugs. {Maryanne: It had never occurred to us that a cargo ship might be diverted to us, I'd assumed if we needed fuel, someone would deliver it once we got closer to Exmouth, maybe a local fisherman, or one of the dive boats. I can't imagine the extra fuel the Jazan must have used to simply divert to us, slow to a stop, and then speed up again. We were immensely grateful and in awe of the system, and all the people who arranged this on our behalf.}

The Jazan and Begonia drift apart
Ready for fuel pickup aboard Begonia

We had enough empty space in our tanks for two of those jugs. I opened the first one and, whew! That stuff is pungent! We had been given industrial diesel oil, while we are used to getting marine diesel. The diesel oil is the good stuff. It is thicker and slipperier, which is marvelous for the health of our engine, but I imagine it doesn't burn as clean as the thinner, low sulfur marine diesel. That smell will also make it easy to track down any leaks for a while.

Now we had no reason to worry at all about fuel. We bumped the engine up to our normal cruising rpm, which improved our speed overall, but especially when fighting headwinds and seas. We now had enough to motor the whole way to Exmouth if we needed to, although my solution of sailing the last sixty-seven miles was still predicted to be faster overall. Plus, why run an engine if you don't have to?

The wind picked up over the next three days, which, combined with building seas, slowed us back into the three-knot range. We made good work of the patch of favorable current when we got to it, which helped us even more than expected despite the disadvantage of the headwinds. The wind built and built through the night and, combined with a turn directly into it, our speed slowed to about a knot. We were crawling along, but we needed to get just a little further upwind to be able to safely raise the mainsail. Maryanne especially hates not getting anywhere and she was disappointed to tell me she had only gone ten miles during her six-hour night watch.

I checked the weather again after she went to bed and it looked like we had finally gone far enough to make the turn. Woo hoo! I hoisted the double-reefed mainsail, turned across the wind and started winding down our poor engine. What a difference! The motion was smoother. Our speed, even with so little sail up, was higher than we had seen since the accident happened. Best of all was that there wasn't the constant background grumble of a hard working engine. With a little selective forgetting, I could even convince myself that I was on a pleasant passage and sit back and enjoy the starry sky.

By afternoon, we sighted our first land in three weeks. Once we got a phone signal, we found that we had just (three minutes earlier) been given temporary entry passes into WA. Well, I'm glad we still weren't waiting on word five hundred miles back. Knowing we'd arrive after dark we had planned to anchor outside the harbour, but on our call to the Harbourmaster, he convinced us it was safe to enter in the dark and that we could tie up to an end dock at the marina; he just asked us not leave the boat until the Police saw us in the morning. He then gave us detailed information (pictures) on how to find our slip.

We rounded North West Cape, which is at the tip of the peninsula enclosing the Exmouth Gulf, as we ate dinner. Then we started the now-cold engine again, lowered the sails and motored to the marina in the dark. Our slip was waiting, cordoned off with caution tape. Once we were tied up and secure, we went to bed and slept like the dead. Neither one of us had managed to get more than two hours in a stretch, once or twice a day for six days.

Everybody was kind enough to agree not to come the next morning until 10:00. We could finally put faces to the names on the emails. After a brief preamble by the Harbourmaster, our Police contact started by saying she was so relieved that we were here and safe. Then she gave us our entry passes followed by a long list of the terms and conditions of its issue. We were told that we were required to self-quarantine for the next fourteen days, which we could do aboard Begonia. We had kind of expected this, but were hoping some of our time at sea could count, since we had near real-time tracking of our whole twenty-two day voyage. No dice. The official who signed it had dated it starting today and that's the way it was going to be. Well, we tried. We had originally expected to be at sea way past then anyway. This was a little different, though. Ordinarily, I would be excited about fourteen days with just Maryanne for company. Now, we weren't allowed to step off of the boat except to adjust the lines or hook up the hose. There was this whole new place to explore, which we can look at but is off limits to us. It's the first time I have ever felt cooped up on the boat. {Maryanne: We were so grateful to have made it to a safe harbour, we were more then happy to follow the 14-day self-quarantine required, especially so since it would be aboard Begonia and not in a hotel; we could use the time to rest and work out the full extent of any damage from the forestay breaking}

Well, now we had plenty of time to figure out what to do next. We had another late morning, just for good measure, and then I went up the mast to retrieve the other end of the broken forestay. Comparing the two ends to each other I couldn't find any evidence of corrosion or long-term fatigue. In fact, the remaining wire appears to be in really good condition. The Sta-Lok fitting that anchors the wire is also in good shape and still clamped down hard on the strands inside. It looks to me like the wire may have simply exceeded its breaking strength, failing first at the twelve outside strands, then followed by the seven inner ones. The inner ones all broke at once, which I suspect was the source of the Bang! Our sail had been rough, but none of it had seemed that bad. Maybe it was the bad hit we took on Day Fourteen. I know for sure that I went up the mast and inspected the point of ultimate failure before we left Darwin. All of the strands were intact. If they hadn't been, we wouldn't have gone. Perhaps there was a material flaw in there that I couldn't see. {Maryanne: Kyle had also been inspecting the rigging twice daily while at sea, using binoculars to view the upper hardware. The area that broke would have been the hardest to see from the deck, blocked somewhat by the roller furling hardware. So while he checked and didn't see any issues, we can't be sure if the wire failed all in the same moment/day, or had been showing any signs for a couple of days.}

Now our days in self-quarantine are filled with recording the damage and coordinating with out of town riggers, repair people and our overseas insurance company. I will conduct whatever repairs I can and that poor engine is now way overdue for an oil change. Maryanne spends most of her day sending emails with attachments back and forth. As a snapshot, the last two she just sent were to the Harbourmaster about mail pickup and the Minister of Police requesting a change our Entry Permit status so that we can stay in WA longer. Her list seems to grow faster than she can tick things off.

I also managed to put our third jug of sea-delivery fuel into the tank. It turns out that had we not added any, we would have made it with fifteen miles to spare. That's just under 3% remaining. Talk about the needle being below 'E'! Cosmo Kramer would be proud. Still, I'm glad we had it because it saved me having to worry about it on a minute-by-minute basis the rest of the way. It also saved me from having to see the 'Told you so!' look on Maryanne's face in the event that my calculations had been off by more than 3%.

[Maryanne]We've had plenty of time to reflect on everything and think about what we could have done differently. Clearly once we had made it to Darwin, and when Western Australia (WA) kept pushing back their opening time for their Covid19 protection (especially after the big outbreak in Victoria), we had effectively shot ourselves in the foot. We had to move on and get away from the cyclone area and while originally that would have been well away from Australia, now our only choice was to go South. With WA denying our Good-2-Go entry permit, we felt we were best off simply sailing around WA. While it was a long distance, we had done multiple passages longer than that (in distance and time); we were not at all concerned regarding our own abilities, nor for the safety of the boat. Kyle had gone up the mast before we left Darwin to check on everything (as he always does) and we also had a professional rigger inspect the rigging earlier in the year. We believe the really mixed seas on the passage (where the waves come from multiple directions and rather than form gentle rolling hills, look more like the top of a lemon meringue pie) must have caused the stresses that led to the failure in the wire forestay, but I guess we'll never know. For now we are relieved to be safe. The logistics of getting everything fixed will be a relatively simple challenge for the coming months (when compared to the stress of making it to safe harour at least).

We've strived to be honest and clear in our accounts. While we welcome helpful advice, we trust that the armchair sailors out there won't be judging us too harshly, but can celebrate with us on our safe arrival, and share our gratitude of the amazing rescue services looking out for all mariners.

Summary of damage identified to date

What follows is a summary of everything we've found since the forestay broke. Some may be cosmetic and of no concern, some can be repaired, others will need to be replaced, and this is what will be keeping us busy over the coming weeks (and months). Additionally we still don't have permission to remain in WA to complete any repairs (we are working on that too).

Rigging - based on our initial (non-professional) inspection

• Forestay broken (wire) - temp fix/installation proposed as short term fix - full replacement when possible
• Roller furling system - Profurl - unit to be identified possibly LCI 42 or an NCI 42 - I've sent the serial number to Profurl for clarification.
  • Foils - bent? Stressed - lots of metal bits at all joins found when we first unrolled jib - need replaced
  • Upper bearing unit
    • "halyard wrap stop" part missing (fell off when forestay broke?)
    • holes/fixing hardware elongated,
    • bearings seem stiff (this would have taken a lot of seawater baths once it was stowed on deck after lowering).
    • Worn "Top Bearing Holder Stop" - should be round on upper edge but ground flat against mast.
    • Hardware ring/holes have all elongated from the stresses
• Shrouds - expect to replace (since they took several days of quite miserable slamming around until we could better secure the mast at sea)
• Mast - various areas of damage - inspect - fix? OK?
  • Damage at base - from rocking when loose and for the several days until we could better secure it.
  • Damage to upper section - ground around jib halyard sheave - looks bad
  • Damage to upper section - wear around forestay attachment point on mast
  • Mast - damage around spinnaker block
  • Forestay Tang - we think it looks OK, but the insurance assessor seems quite concerned about it.
  • Damage to spare halyard sheave housing
  • Sheaves for Jib and Spinnaker halyard may be deformed - to inspect/verify
• Gull striker damage/wear - to inspect/determine - fix? Replace? Ok?

Jib - replace or repair

• Sun cover - to patch/replace? - damage from lines used to help stop swinging.
• Bolt rope - to replace - Multiple areas of damage (at foil joins)
• Luff padding section - torn/ripped - to replace

Additional items

• Damage to fiberglass/gelcoat behind mast (Cabin top 'eyebrow')
• Damage to Bimini cover from boom (as mast fell back slightly)
• Replace reefing lines for main (ground when mast fell back against cabin top)
• Replace anchor ball halyard (broke in chaos)
• Possible replacement of SSB antenna (tbd)
• Replace SSB halyard line (broke in chaos)