Wed June 27 2018
We spent a recent night in a beautiful and very protected anchorage, Shaw Bay, off the Wye River on the Eastern Shore of MD. We had been in the Wye River before on this and prior visits to the Chesapeake, and it is yet another beautiful setting with ospreys and other wildlife in abundance. The only thing interrupting the beauty in these once secluded creeks and coves is the growing plague of tasteless McMansions appearing on the shore lines. This morning we debated spending a 2nd night there and having a quiet day today, but after listening to the weather, we anticipated a good sailing day so we decided to up anchor and head down the bay in anticipation of meeting up with Mary Beth’s parents and others from their sailing club in a few days.
The forecast called for winds out of the south 10 to 15 knots with gusts up to 20 knots. This is great wind for our boat. In the Chesapeake, some waves would build up in this wind, but they would not be a problem. You would think we would know by now to accept the reality that the actual weather bears a random relationship (at best) to the forecast. In other words, once out in the Bay, we were surprised…again.
Out of the protection of the land the wind was already a blustery at 15 to 20 knots with gusts into the upper 20's. As I noted in a post during our Bahamas trip, the force of wind goes up with the square of the speed, so a 20 knot wind verses a 10 knot applies 4 times the force, or pressure, to things it blows against. In our case those things are a boat, its sails and us. That would not be a huge issue except that the wave height also builds way up.
The Chesapeake does not build large swells in a strong wind like the ocean does. Because it is shallow, it builds steep, choppy, irregular waves. This includes waves of different heights and widths at different spacing between them. The conditions we encountered were steep (e.g., hard to sail into because the wave “slaps” the boat rather than the boat riding up and over as it would a swell) and confused waves (e.g., coming from multiple directions at the same time). This results in waves periodically “piling up” to make what boaters and movie people like to call “rogue waves” which are much bigger than most of the waves. These rogue waves can easily be two times or more the height of the “average” waves. If you’ve seen the movie “The Perfect Storm”, the wave that killed them was a monster rogue wave.
So back to today. Conditions worsened as we sailed along and we were seeing sustained winds of 20 -25 kts and gusts into the 30s (by the way a knot, or kt is about 10% more than a mph so for example, a 10 kt wind is about 11 mph). We reefed our sails (made them smaller) so that we wouldn’t be overpowered by the wind and were able to make good progress. The wind we were experiencing was much stronger than expected and we did not prepare the boat for this. Had we known it would be this strong we would have taken the paddleboard below instead of leaving it in its brackets on the railing, we would have taken the engine off the dinghy, and just generally secured things more thoroughly before we left our anchorage. (the picture here is not ours, but that's pretty much what it looked like. We were too busy to take pictures).
Within a short time we realized we were in for a bashing. At first the waves were steep, but not unmanageable. We were soon taking water over the bow though, and after about an hour or so things had progressed so the deck was awash after many waves and we had a few roll right down the boat and crash into the dodger window protecting the cockpit. We were now seeing some very large waves, some about 7 or 8 feet and very steep with many breaking on us. This would have been fine from the safety of the cockpit, but MB noticed that the paddle board was coming loose and was about to be washed away. Guess who got sent forward. But first I adjusted the dinghy position on the aft rail because it was a risk of getting torn away too and I reached into the dinghy to grab a lifejacket. This seemed prudent to me with waves breaking over the bow, but MB said “what are you doing” to which I replied “I adjusted the dinghy and I’m getting a life jacket”. She responded: “you don’t have time for that, we’re going to lose the paddleboard”. For the record, although she now claims that she did not hear me mention the life jacket, but I was a little demoralized to realize where I stood in the "value chain".
Carefully working my way up the deck, and using what handholds I could, I crouched down next to the paddleboard. To secure it, however, required both hands. Waves were still breaking across the deck, and while I was trying to tighten one of the brackets, I felt something hit my side and head and I realized “hmm. I’m totally under water”. And I was! A second wave followed that one immediately, but was not quite so high – I don’t think it was any higher than my ears.
I did get the paddle board secured, and I made it safely back to the cockpit. I expected fish to come out of my shoes when I dumped the water out, but they didn’t. MB still claims she did not hear me say I was getting a life jacket. She later noticed the anchor breaking loose from the bow roller mount and guess who got to go up on deck to secure it, but this time I was allowed to put on a life jacket first!
David