Oops!
Early on in the RORC Caribbean 600 Paul Bieker’s ‘conservatively radical’ 53ft catamaran Fujin capsized. He revisits an incident that was ‘entirely avoidable’ had some relatively minor contributors to sailing the boat been handled even slightly differently…
We capsized Fujin, a 53ft catamaran of my design (issue 448), on the first night of the RORC Caribbean 600 race. We were coming around the lee side of Saba island
36 SEAHORSE
in 20-25kt of wind having just finished a very fast and wet run from Antigua in big waves and winds up to 35kt. We had sailed that section of the course with an A3 and reefed main which was manageable but in retrospect a little too fast and wet for a race as long as the 600. By the time we got to Saba the crew were a bit fatigued but still sailing the boat reasonably well. It was very dark, with no moon. We had
changed to the heavy-air jib/staysail, keep- ing the single reef in the main (the first reef is deep on Fujin). It felt like the right sail combination for those conditions. We had started to sail upwind pretty close to shore (Saba is very tall but does not have much of a wind shadow). I was trimming the main in upwind
mode. This means you do a small sheet ease and a big traveller ease in the puffs – a big sheet ease loosens the forestay and makes the jib fuller which is to be avoided. In retrospect the effect would have been less dramatic with the staysail than it is with the larger and more powerful Solent.
At this point the navigator called out
that we had a rock to avoid 0.8 miles ahead of us (Diamond Rock) and that we needed to decide whether to go above or below it; unbeknownst to me we cracked off about 10° to go below the rock. The traveller had been eased but I had
not eased the sheet from upwind mode. I am sure I did not have enough twist in the main for that point of sail. At that point we were hit by a 32kt lifted puff off the mountain. I did the initial upwind main- sheet ease but the roll did not slow down. I suspect that the initial ease may have just made matters worse. By 20-25° of heel or so I had blown the
mainsheet altogether (to slack rope) but by then it seemed as if the wind had got under the platform and we continued to roll. The inhauler was released on the staysail but I suspect the sail was still drawing at that point. By 40° of heel people start losing their footing and the jacklines get to do their job. There was a brief pause when the masthead hit the water but then the
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