What went wrong? And why did it happen?
We had a lot of time to think about and discuss what went wrong when we
waited for the rescue that night. These are the seven reasons we identified that caused
the problem:
| Rush |
Our primary aim was to reach our destination. Hence,
we passed by an island (Isla de Providencia)
where we actually had planned to rest for a night or two. Since we got
there in the middle of the night, we decided to keep going instead of
waiting for the next morning. (You never sail
into an unknown harbor - especially not in the third world where
lightning is poor and maps are off.)
An alternative would have been to slow the boat down enough to make land
fall on the island the next day. |
| Storm |
This guy kept us on our toes:
working the sails, clearing up stuff on deck, no real meals (since
cooking was impossible with those waves), no real sleep, and a
continuous drain of your energy. We already had been at sea for a while
and then were hit by it in addition. Had we stayed on the island as
planned we would have missed it. |
| Course |
Even though the storm was coming
right at us we decided not to change course and sail away from it (and
the coast). That maneuver would have taken us much too far off of our
general course (which was not an option looking at the first reason).
Hence, we decided on heading West instead of East - right into a known
(!) reef area in front of Honduras. |
| Maps |
At the beginning all went well:
The reefs were shown on our map, and we therefore were able to pin our
course around them while at the same time riding out the storm and
heading more or less into our planned direction. Yet, ocean maps are not
accurate. They may be off by some margin and not every single spot of
the ocean has been explored. There could be many more reefs than what
you actually see on your map. Still, we trusted ours fully. |
| Mood |
We circled around the reefs shown
on the map and made good progress. Eventually, the storm calmed down,
and -since we had made it through without problems- we started feeling
like heroes who can it all and know it all. This lead us to be less
cautious. We started to reset sails, had a great meal, and took
things easy. Yet, we had not left the reef area! We should have stayed
much more on alert. |
| Steering |
Our friend the wind vein (a self steering device
powered by water pressure) had been steering all the time through the
storm. The stronger the wind the better she works. It's very accurate
and allows the sailor to stay inside instead
of on deck while it keeps the ship on course.
It's only problem: Different from an electronic compass based auto
steering system, the vein uses
the wind direction to keep track of where to go. This works very well -
as long as the wind does not change direction. If it does, so does your
boat. And that's exactly what happened: The storm faded out and the wind
calmed down and blew a bit more out of the NE. It was not much. A few
degrees, though, made all the difference. |
| Double Checking |
Only one of us had done the
navigation work. He had checked our location, determined the course and
adjusted the steering so the boat would head in the right direction. In
addition, he had marked most reefs as waypoints in the GPS system so
that we would be able to avoid them by just looking at the GPS monitor.
Later it turned out that we had miscalculated the course - again not by
much, but a little bit. Yet, combined
with the wind vein's change of mind we ended up on
the reef that we had aimed to miss. |
Read
the epilog to see what
happened after our save return.
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