Cruising Articles

The Construction and First 5,000 Miles of The Midnight Hour

From-Multihull International, March 1990 By Rob Ward

With merely my third year’s subscription form for MI on the desk it may seem a bit presumptuous to put a new ribbon and double spacing on this battered Olympia and write a few words, the need to ‘show and tell’ seems to come with involvement in seafaring in more than one hull, after all, ‘they capsize, don’t they?’

First, the born-again sailor tells of the conversion; I used to sail monohulls (eyes cast down in shame). Five thousand miles in a battered Invicta 26, a bit like a Contessa. This nearly put paid to my sailing for ever; the Channel storm, chartwork on my knees, cooking the two-stroke’s plug on the stove, westerly projectile vomiting off Cape St. Vincent in an easterly blow. Then a shared long-keel Alan Pape design. Next a ferro Endurance - 19 days to Barbados with spinnaker and genoa up all the way. Finally back from the West Indies in a friend’s French monohull with a capsize off the Acores. (Oh, they do, too!)

Then (cut to image of daylight dawning; Debussy’s La Mer; and expansive passage), Mike started writing from Australia’s East coast about the 21ft Wharram he had built, and beautifully too judging by the photos. Tacking up and down the sound between Brisbane and Stradbroke Island; laughing at the expensive monos in a few quids worth of plywood and epoxy; beaching at full tilt; sailing flat-stick up to his mooring - it sounded good. The road to Damascus was strewn with bits of crumpled paper with doodles of boats with more than one hull on them.

To continue in a slightly more sober vein, the light having dawned (the concept being embraced) the levelheaded sailor who has seen one or more proper-job storms at sea wants to know: will a multihull cut it? This is the only excuse for this piece of writing. And before I write the last few hundred words to this I must admit that this is not a fully qualified answer.

Part Two comes in the spring when The Midnight Hour will have continued from Lanzarote. to the Caribbean and returned Insha Allah - to Restronguet. The Midnight Hour is a Woods’ Design MIRA 35. That is, an open-bridgedeck cat, built on Banshee hulls. I constructed her on the north coast of’ Cornwall in The Old Coal Store at Trevemper Mill, close to the head of the Gannel, a small tidal estuary giving out onto Crantock Beach, well-known for its picturesque lines of Atlantic rollers; we were to launch her there!

After 20 years of surfing and close involvement with board design and manufacture, I was comfortable with glassfibre work of a high order. So I altered Richard’s spee. from all-plywood bulkheads and beams and foredeck to glass/foam sandwich. The beams were shaped in foam, like a surfboard and glassed over on the bias 450, using the foam as a mould. I’d do it differently now, but when I jacked up the starboard hull under the skeg some six feet high to put in the rudders and both hulls went up silent and parallel, my confidence in the many hundreds of hours of conscientious laminating began to grow.

The removal of the front wall of the Old Coal Store and the miraculous refusal of the entire roof structure to collapse on top of 3,500 hours of hard work confirmed in me the knowledge that God loves multihulls. Tiptoeing down to the Gannel without a police licence, ('er, what 35' long and 20' wide load, officer?") went off with but one hitch; someone had parked a fishing boat in the middle of the Gannel Road. As in a dream it came together. The fishing boat was hoiked off. Gerald Northey roared up the dawn Gannel with Zarvon, his jet drive, custard-coloured crabber and towed us more gently down to our drying mooring where the next months were spent watching herons and kingfishers and fitting out.

Now the readers of this magazine will know some of the penalties paid by the Believer for his beliefs - mine were; broken bones (two), marital stress (not divorced) and financial strain (not bankrupt). But one dark, pre-dawn Spring tide in December we hauled off our shinglebank and motored under the footbridge to the mouth of the Gannel, not yet knowing how the surf would be. In the half-light it looked good. Light northerly breeze to take us off the rocks of Pentire Head; a fairish channel alongside them and only - Oh God! - a six foot swell. A set formed way outside and to our relief peeled off prettily dying into the channel. We pushed through two sets of waves before we unfurled the Profurl reefing-genoa and tacked up to Newquay harbour.

After a few weeks under Captain Sampson’s eagle eye we took her round to Falmouth via the Scillies. It was a thrill. The rolls of glass, the drums of resin, the boxes of foam had become more than the sum of their parts; a boat.

How does she go? My 5,000 miles in The Midnight Hour have been far more comprehensive miles than the 20-odd thousand miles sailed in the monohulls; they were, by and large, two-tack ocean crossings. Everyday of this summer I day-charted on the South coast. It was, as I recall it, a fairly mellow season. I did some five runs to the Scillies and passages up and down the South coast anchoring-off most days and passing not one day in the situation preferred of Insurers; a marina.

The first demanding passage was (excluding the run to Helford with 20 - no misprint - Germans aboard, and the day with my blind charter which was a joy), to run to the Scillies in a force 6 northerly. At four in the afternoon the tide was running hard to the north and, as expected, the sea began to break quite, hard.

The Midnight Hour, has a cruising rig of modest proportions, some 50 square metres. In stronger winds she suffers no disadvantage. We had two reefs in and much of the Genoa rolled up and were still logging nine knots. The difficult part for an inexperienced cat sailor was the waves which, breaking at about 3 or 4 metres, were of a size and steepness designed to lift the starboard hull far enough to cause cheers of excitement from the charterers (a gung-ho lot), and nervous pacings-about and clappings of the binoculars to the blind eye from myself. My rational self referred to the designer’s calculations which stated: won’t capsize with all sail up fully sheeted-in until force 8. So, even bearing in mind gust strength, the fact that much of our sail area was flopped between the lazy-jacks and wrapped round the forestay, allowed me to feel tensely okay about the situation.

Thereafter three days of clear skies and fair winds give us the wonderful Scillies at their best and ‘a good time was had by all’. By the end of August, we had sailed almost daily and often nightly for some four months. We embarked a small party for the trip south. We got the crossing of the Bay right, starting on day one of the charter with a stiff northerly. Fully loaded her handling was somewhat more ponderous but, under Autohelm, she still easily took off on surging surfs well past our trailed log’s max. of 10 and on past the estimated 13 before it hit the stops. Anyway , the spinner barely touched the water at these times!

The next few weeks were fun, but I don’t want this to turn into a ‘what-I-did-on-my-holidays’ anecdote of self-indulgent proportions. I would however like to pass on a couple of the moments where my experiences and mistakes may inform the general pool of knowledge of cruising multihullers. After La Coruna, we made a short passage to Camarinas rounding Cabo Villano in a force 8 and feeling its impact more fully as we reached into Camarinas. We motorsailed against a wind gusting 55 knots to an anchorage at Ligunde beach, some twenty metres offshore. Pines and the crest of a hill were breaking the wind so well that we were describing the winds as ‘light variables’, whilst the monohulls two hundred metres out spent gay nights dragging anchor up and down the Ria.

Our favourite couple was Bernard and Madeleine, (French), who had a virile alloy sloop with a range of equipment designed to terrify and paralyse its owners so that they should never set sail again from however tenuous a haven. The worst offender was the wind generator set up in the sturdy double-backstays. As the gusts came honking down the valley above Ensenada de la Vaca, the generator would set up a truly intimidating howl. Below, all would visibly shrink. Next there was the anemometer. Struth! if we’d .known we were sailing in 55 knot winds we’d have gone home immediately ( we owe the knowledge to them). Finally, there was the weather fax machine. Producing a special transparent plastic scale, Bernard demonstrated that - with the isobars pertaining in Finisterre - bearing in mind that nasty kink at the bottom, if we set sail we should, most certainly, get Gallicly bollocked.

And, of course, we did.

It was brisk in the morning with a large north swell, breaking occasionally. By midday it was strong with steep, breaking waves of four metres. By the evening it was force eight and two of us on board, after twenty years of undercalling wave sizes as surfers, were obliged to admit to some of the waves being over six metres. The Midnight Hour was surfing hard, throughout the day. We started with a double-reefed main and a goosewinged genoa. By the time things became ‘interesting’, bits and pieces of our inventory had been hauled down and we had the rather unsatisfactory arrangement of the genoa, partially furled, barbered out to port with the lazy sheet. I won’t say how fast we were going at times, but on some surfs we hammered along like a power boat, overtaking the flat in front of the swell we had surfed and dropping in on the wave face in front. In other words we were surfing faster than the swells.

The high prismatic coefficient that Richard Woods had put into the hulls seemed to keep the bows right of trouble. As a steep wave came up behind, the bows would dip in until the water level reached, say, 12" from the deck, then as she took off the dynamic lift would bring the bow out, dry as far as four feet back from the knuckle. It was a most extraordinary experience, but we became complacent. At four o’clock, wrote in the log, ‘Aaaargh! a really steep one maybe six metres,and took no further action.

Thirty minutes later the truth of the instructions in the back of the Autohelm owners’ manual was born home to me graphically, It states (as I recall), ‘the Autohelm should not be employed whilst sailing downwind in large breaking seas as it lacks anticipation’.

Don’t we all? The three of us on deck, watched the drama unfold in slow enough motion for us all to make a passable reply in unison - of the famous scene of Butch Cassidy in "Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid’ in which they are obliged to throw themselves off’ a cliff: we looked down the pit that opened up in front of the boat. We turned and saw the blueish black monster. We felt the boat lurch obligingly into a surf. Joy joined joy as the wave broke on the starboard quarter ,and slewed her aided by the genoa out to port - round to starboard and as we plunged into oblivion, three sailors with one accord cried, ‘F..argh!' The port bow submerged, water flowed back the full length of the boat into the cockpit, diagonally. The boat slowed up. The bow slowly emerged. water draining off’. The sail refilled and The Midnight Hour picked up her skirts and got on her way again.

Mike looked at me, somewhat pale, and said in a serious kind of way, ‘We just buried the lee bow’. I did what I should have done, at the stage of the first, 'argh' and reduced sail ‘drastically’ to use Donald Street’s favourite epithet. With half storm-jib sail area we cracked on some sixteen miles in the next two hours and recovered our composure.

I hope the tale makes amusing reading. I think there are a couple of lessons there. Surfing can be fun and relatively safe. Perhaps a helmsman is more to be trusted than a box of tricks. Sail maybe reduced in gale force running conditions without loss of self respect. A pair of booms would make for a balanced downwind rig in strong conditions, where on sail may lead to a broach. Cruising catamarans are designed with safety factors which would amaze a monohull sailor. The Midnight Hour never felt as if her weather quarter would follow her lee bow - really! Mike and I sailed on (after Peniche and Madeira) to fascinating anchorages in Ilhas Desertis and the Selvagen Islands.

Since when I’ve sailed daily around Lanzarote, Graciosa, Lobos and Fuerteventura. The winter has made mock of the Admiralty Pilot’s somnambulant remark that, ‘Gales force eight are rare in the area covered by this Pilot’. My respect for the cruising catamaran augments, but as I said, we’ve two crossings of the Atlantic to complete before I’d ask you to consider, my opinion informed.

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The Next 5, 000 Miles (The Midnight Hour - Part 2)

From-Multihull International, July 1990 By Rob Ward

This is written in Prickly Bay, Grenada. The Midnight Hour arrived in Barbados a week ago. We stopped in Bequia and Martinique and then took our charterers to their plane in Antique before picking up some friends, two of whom will be making the passage to Falmouth (UK) in three weeks.

We have headed south to Grenada to ‘start again at the bottom’. We ‘made’ the Atlantic. So did someone in a boiler last time I sailed it eight years ago and, dammit, a Frenchman (of course) did it on two log floats (a catamaran?) with no water or food. Mon Dieu! How we British lag behind now.

Still, the passage had its interesting moments; but first to wrap up the Canaries. I spent the winter taking people, for the most part, surfing between Graciosa, Lanzarote, Lobos and Fuerteventura (we were fully booked). The boat was either at anchor or sailing, daily, for six months. It was a fair test of a boat and an education in seamanship. I believe that it was an extraordinary winter from a variety of evidence: Canaries 7, the principal local paper, reported that the reservoirs throughout the Canaries were at an historical high (it rained a lot) while the Pilot states that gales are rare (there were a lot of gales).

I have six months’ worth of weather maps from Canaries 7: depressions formed regularly over the Canaries but they didn’t necessarily arrive. The void between an Atlantic and European high - often extending into the Sahara was a convenient site for a depression. If a cold front trailed from one of the jolly high latitude storms, so much the more intense. Then there was the old favourite - a southeast gale from the Sahara - the Sirocco.

People arriving late from Gibraltar and Madeira often had long faces and very hard tales and this meant that I was rarely able to sleep at anchor and never at a single anchor after an early, salutory experience: Mike and I were on our third night off Playa Francesa - an isolated south west-facing anchorage on the island of Graciosa - having sailed from Ilha Selvagen. At 0130 in the morning, no moon, clouds, Force 6 NE, we found each other on deck after a mutual but individual sense that things were not quite right. They weren’t. Graciosa, Playa and our anchor were about two miles to the NE. The Midnight Hour had a somewhat agitated joggle to her motion. We tidied up the deck, got the dinghy on board and put away my mountain bike (soon to be stolen). The volcano, Montana Amdrilla, was just visible against the night sky and we felt our way towards the bay having come down against, spending the night off hove-to. We were most keen to avoid the reef and the surf breaking on Punta Marajos. The job sees finally made possible by a light in a tent which we recalled was tucked behind the reef.

Thanking providence that the Spanish youth takes its studies so seriously, we assembled the fisherman and dropped it in. Durring the following morning I dived and found our CQR with it’s 20m of chain. My faulty was one of excessive caution: in letting out more than enough scope to develop a useful catenary , the octoplait line to which the chain was spliced was able to drift under a ledge of volcanic rock - super sharp ! When the breeze stiffened during the night, it was cut through easily (luckily within 61’ of the chain). The thought that this could have happened when we were both three miles away on the north of the island, surfing, made me feel very peculiar. I modified my procedure as follows:

I never again left The Midnight Hour on one anchor only: I always lay two anchors; I always dived on the anchors - in Graciosa - positioning the CQR in sand and the fisherman down a convenient hole in the reef

I always dived and observed the anchor cables in the conditions that prevailed ensuring that the nylon line terminated above the bottom. This led me to believe that the numerical rules which govern anchoring procedures fail to take into account the conditions: I’d suggest, simply, more wind, more scope and VV.

In Selvagen Grande I noticed the anchor held on a flat, sandless lava bottom in 20m of water during a brisk NE trade by the weight of the 351b CQR plus 20m of chain alone, with sufficient nylon to take most of the chain onto the bottom. Finally, I lost all insouciance and readily upped anchor at unsociable hours (this facilitated in Graciosa by the extension of a westerly arm to the harbour moles in La Sociedan - not shown in the excellent 1989 RCC’s Guide to Atlantic Islands)

Two other evolutions proved stimulating one, entering the lagoon in Isla de los Lobos: Isla Lobos lies NE of Fuerteventura, not far from Corralejo. It is situated well inside the Bocaina channel between Fuerteventura to the south and Lanzarote to the north. Although the Admiralty (and local) charts give little indication of it, most multihulls should have no difficulty in entering the lagoon on high tides and enjoying the superb entirely enclosed anchorage. Drawing lm I found I touched in tides of 1.7m. I got in finally on 2.25m and later, on 2.10m.I discovered that swell wraps down the island (my charterers’ object was the world-renowned point wave on the island’s SW side). That swell then wraps around its south facing reef and right across ‘the channel’

The first time I saw the surf I just wasn’t prepared to go in. But my charterers, six young Cornish surfers, were very keen, so I sent -them to test the depth in the inflatable. They reported: ‘least depth - half an arm and an oar’. We went for it, they joyfully enthused (risking a 50m swim) but I was seriously reserved - risking 3,500 hours work. As you pass over the shallowest part of the flat lavareef, minding isolated rocks, the smallest craft is visible going about his business. A loud cheer of relief was raised as the water deepened.

Later, on 14th December, we were saddened to see a French cat leaving the lagoon (drawing 30cm less than The Midnight Hour) strike the reef repeatedly - audible from several hundred metres. We followed them out not taking Shoughi’s disastrous line into the surf. (It is natural to want to punch through surf bows-on but on Lobos waves must be taken obliquely on the starboard bow to stay in deeper water.) We followed Shouyhi for half a mile before turning back to Lobos to anchor up for a surf under the volcano.

Two minutes later they sent up a red distress flare. Bernird told me later that they had steered off with their outboard, their rudders on aluminium stocks being bent back 30deg. We were able to tow them into Corralejo with our Yamaha 9.9 and offer some epoxy to help their repairs. Bernard said, albeit grateful, ‘But these are not the SP containers we are used to!’ I pointed out that the resin was in a milk bottle and the hardener in a honey jar. Marie-Jose kindly gave us of bottle of wine from the village in Provence where they built Shoughi (they pronounce it Scoogy - odd name, eh? ). .

The other brief, unsolicited thrill was on a sail from Arrecife in Lanzarote to Fuerteventura. The rhumb line passes close to the reef running north from Lobos. Normally this isn’t It a problem but on this day, circumstances were a little unusual. I got my charterers to sail fairly high on the course to avoid the possibility of a close encounter as we sailed SW in a fairly typical winter Tradewind NW 6 - 7. Conditions in the lee of Lanzarote were flat with squalls coming off the land. We reefed and unreefed as required.

I predicted more swell in La Bocaina - the channel between Lanzarote and Fuerteventura - then forgot about it! Coming about a mile clear of Papagayo I took a bearing on Lobos to see if we had stayed up on our course. Looking to the west I saw a set of about eight 6m swells rising to windward, three breaking quite heavily. There wasn’t time to take the helm. We were unreefed and Steven Ross, a New Zealand surfer, was on the helm. I said, ‘OK. Concentrate now, steer straight into the breaking waves, then bear off on the back’ (pausing only to explain the phrase ‘bear off’ - Steve was in his first hour of helming! ). He handled it perfectly and our saving grace was 10 knots of boatspeed and his easy, surfer’s reaction to these very serious waves. We had gone, metaphorically, from the Solent (in the lee of Lanza) into the North Atlantic in the space of two miles. We surfed very big lobos the following day when the wind changed, fortunately not with The Midnight Hour!

On 6th April we left San Sebastian de Gomorra spending a brief period of meditation in the little church where Christopher Colon (Columbus) thanked God for Beatrice de Bobadillas’ more-than-adequate provisioning services (his mistress at the time). We sailed round to Valle Gran Rey for one night. Our first day was of light to zero wind with horrendous cross swells which wrapped around La Gomorra and came at us from the northwest and northeast redoubled. Then three hours of Force 8 rounding Hierro in a wind acceleration zone (WAZ!). The passage then differed to my last, eight years ago, in almost every respect:-

No Tradewind, for 800 miles. Actually a light NW for the most part and calms.

The Trade ‘filled in’ - a sturdy, untruthful phrase - 200 miles SW off the Cap Verde Islands and we reached with spinnaker and main nearly west, wind strength Force 2 - 3.

The beginning of the Trade, as such, was heralded by a fine waterspout, happily two or three miles downwind.

We didn’t roll.

Notable occurrences included the five-foot (honest! ) Blue Marlin that swam behind the log for ten thrilling minutes and really tried to eat our homemade fishing lure. It leaped clear of the water in sheer frustration at not being able to get hooked, although we’d have hated to kill such a beautiful creature. And this: has anyone noticed the 20deg wind back-up each night ? As our set up (reaching with spinnaker) was relatively sensitive, we observed this nightly phenomenon and made use of it to correct our course. Later, running downwind, I attempted a number of different rigs including taking the spinnaker to the end of the main boom and hauling the genoa out to windward.

None was as satisfactorily stable as twin boom downwind sailing. I shall definitely look at a pointing bowsprit to get a more solid base for reaching and at least one booming-out pole to the mast. Does anyone have any ideas?

Loaded with 7501b of people, 30 days food. water and fuel, and three anchors with their cable and chain, it detracts from the advantages of reaching downwind - at any rate in light airs. Yes, I’d go for more sail now I realise how quickly reefs can be put in. The difficulty is in persuading others that a stable cat banging along at 10 - 12 knots with no apparent fuss needs reefing. It’s difficult to tell sometimes the difference between prudence and paranoia.

We went through three Autohelms. Two older models, factory rebuilt. and one new 2000. The new 2000 was very good until the actuator arm went out. We were able to splice an older actuator on to the new motor and get 800 miles more self-steering after a few days of’ hand-tillering. Nautech (Autohelm) have been very good in sending a replacement. We found the Southern Cross and, with the aid of the Collins’ Guide to the Stars and Planets (brilliantly clear) many other constellations. And, I learned how to dismantle the Yamaha 9.9’s carburetor. Canaries’ fuel is somewhat dusty and atmospheric water alway seems to get sucked into fuel tanks and condensed. I’m putting in a diesel filter and water-separator (and remember the clean oil and filter too, or the Yamaha cuts out!

I’ll sign this off in Union Island.

We’ve just been given a barracuda for towing a local boat five miles to safety (under sail) and we had all our cash stolen from the boat last night. We look forward to beginning our Transat return passage in two weeks after our two friends, and Tris’ boy, Tobias, return by air. There are many isolated reefs and islands still to find in the Caribbean. Tris and I dived up half a dozen lobsters just a couple of days ago despite concentrated commercial diving in areas like the Tobago Bays. But there is a commercial worm in the Caribbean apple. West Africa and the remoter areas of the South Atlantic, South Pacific and Indian Ocean beckon a sturdy cruising cat. It’s the only way to sail.

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Crossing the Atlantic and Returning Home (The Midnight Hour - Part 3)

From-Multihull International, August 1990 By Rob Ward

Antigua - Flores (Azores) initially making for Bermuda-

Having returned to Antigua for the second time from the Grenadines and many strange and wonderful anchorages in between, Tris, Ray and I set about preparing The Midnight Hour for the North Atlantic. At this point the boat had been under charter for nearly ten months without break and you’d think there was a fair bit to do. In fact, we bought food, fuel and after Malcolm Dines (who spends half his year in Antigua aboard his Wharram, Kitty of Alderney) had shown us Great Bird Island and the passage out to the Atlantic - we repaired to the anchorage in its lee and scrubbed the bottom, speared a stingray, horse mackerel and barracuda, and spent the night.

The following morning a stiff trade blew onshore and combined with the sun in our eyes the passage looked dicey. Tris volunteered for the crosstrees and, with our home-made bosun’s chair (a bowline on the bight) he sang out directions in soprano. We cracked north on a reach and banged off 170 miles on Day 0, passing close by the lee of Barbuda over the Codrington shoals. Now, for this account to be of any value to anyone reading it with a mind to assimilate another’s experience of crossing an ocean in a catamaran, it has to be the truth. I don’t believe it is possible to tell the truth about any experience, completely.

Any piece of writing involves memory; and memory is a creative re-imagining of an experience. Some people have more vivid imaginations than others! So my idea is to break this up into objective parts (days runs and so on) and subjective parts. I’ll be using memory, our log and a twenty page letter to my wife which was written between 8 and 12 most nights when I should have been looking out for boats like China Prosperity (which should have been looking out for... etc.). Hopefully this will constitute an accurate enough - but not too dry - account.

The Crew

Tris Cokes - windsurf builder, gardener. Sailing experience - Falmouth, Scillies and back, two weeks in the Caribbean.

Ray McCusker - (large) builder. Sailing experience - as above.

Myself - builder of The Midnight Hour, charterer of the same. Sailing experience - as above plus 30,000 miles on one tack.

Days Runs

These are included less to impress (more than some, less than many) than to give a picture of what a modestly canvassed, strong, cruising cat might achieve in the circumstances in which it was achieved. They were calculated on distance Made Good using a Walker 5050 SatNav by subtracting midday’s great circle distance to Waypoint One (mostly the Lizard) from the previous day.

Our log spinner had fallen off by Ile de Ronde and we were intending to pick up another in Bermuda where my wife had sent it. The Midnight Hour is a Woods Designs Mira 35 open bridgedeck cat built on Palamos Banshee hulls with low profile keels. Her construction was foam and balsa sandwich (including the six main bulkheads) with a Profurl roller reefing genoa and fully-battened North main with Harken deck gear.

Logs are not known for their deathless prose (and letters to wives can be unprintable for other reasons). There is much that cannot be reproduced : shaky writing during a gale, the slightly forced cheerfulness of the remarks, the great watery smudges where your foulweather gear decanted a sleeveful. Still, here the story is told by the log, the letter and a few helpful comments.

Day 4 (2200 hrs)

‘Assorted bangings, whistlings and splashings suggest movement and a 400 yard phosphorescent wake. But it’s too dark to be sure . .. the riot squad have dimmed the stars, the moon’s on sick leave and no-one’s in charge.’ Hmmm ... touch of the Donald Crowhurst here

Day 5

Broad-reaching through broken seas. Petrel and Corey’s Shearwater on wake’. This was the first bit of fast sailing I had done in open ocean conditions in The Midnight Hour with a ‘proper-job’ breaking sea right on the beam. Rob James in Multihulls Offshore points out the difficulty of this particular point of sailing. The windward hull lifts alarmingly and the breaking sea often does so right between the hulls. This, I found, was not dangerous but was noisy and alarming.

So we get from Tris (Let’s get a spinnaker up) a cheerful:
0700: ‘Some good surfing to be done’, and later from me at
0800: ‘Four turns in genoa, second reef down’, 0830: ‘Third reef down. Main overpowering on surfs’, then a variety of comments indicating slight anxiety (never suffered by the crew. It was my job to be anxious and I did it rather well ! ).
0900: Hazy sunshine. High cloud, flecks of cloud in middle layers, black squall passes without effect. Swell 2 - 3 metres.
1000: Rough, reaching across breaking seas with occasional heavy surf. Odd cloud mix.
1140: Mamma in cloud overhead, wind increase.
1200: Rougher. I expect you get MY drift. Now back to the boys !
1500: Reaching nicely. Then Tris’s fatal remark:-
2000: ‘Looks like a quiet night’, at which I screeched;
2100: Don’t write that ! ! ! Well, as it goes we didn’t get a REAL blow that night although I wrote at one point
2200: Third reef in main and about eight rolls in the genoa. The last squall went by an hour ago. We’ve been surfing hard until I put the final reef in. Many waves breaking heavily but Midnight Hour rises well to all breaking waves as we reach across them.
2300: Breaking- wave pours onto watchkeeper’s head having obscured obscure horizon. ‘Unsteady’ sums it up - ‘noisy’ perhaps. How come gales always arrive at night ? I know, I know, they just feel like gales. Well, here’s how our best gale started.
0100: Whispering along under full cloud cover.
0300: Muggy, wet and miserable ... so's the weather.
0600: Blasting along on reach. Overcast, wind increasing.
0800: Heavy sea. Third reef down. A/C 100 to port to put sea on quarter.
0850: Six rolls in genoa. Surfing hard in powerful gusts.
1000: Mar Grueso ... not southern ocean yet though. Look out for the big one.
1200: Gale. Hand steering. Helmsman tied in.

From here on the gale established itself as boss by inducing everything to go wrong. So, the SatNav, solar panels, battery and engine packed in one by one. Entries in the log were reduced to one every two hours. Things got done between entries. Terminals cleaned, got a battery back. Twelve hours passed before a dismantled carburettor got the engine back on line for charging. And later still we filtered all our West Indian fuel through a coffee filter (the coffee had long since run out) and a T-shirt to remove the dirt and water, and the fuel pump biopsies. The solar panel remained down, badly corroded and is being replaced, cheerfully, by BP Solar who have made improvements to the product.

It wasn’t over.

1600: Barograph in steep decline.
1900: Gale.
2000: Stronger. Down to pocket handkerchief. Rain etc. Pretty much running before.
2030: (in shaky, small writing) - Rain, occasional slap. Not surfing now with very small genoa. No sooner written than giant surf takes place.
2200: Running with the waves.
0300: Daylight comin’ and me wanna go home.

That was about it. Tris and I did the steering. We both surf and Ray doesn’t and he was very unhappy on the helm so it seemed wiser for us to try and cope. The wind dropped. The sea remained large and ugly but the great tumbles of breaking sea were no longer there and the danger was gone. We just had to mop up our fatigue and get dry.

There doesn’t seem to me much point in denying that a gale at sea - I mean beyond all hope of a harbour of refuge and a dry bed - is a miserable and frightening experience. And I’m not talking about a survival storm. On deck seeing what The Midnight Hour was up to, how she handled the surfs and the breaking seas I felt fine. Below, ‘resting’... well, there’s the irony. Each surf was an unknown commodity: will she broach ? Capsize ? The answer was No and No. Never, ever, felt like it - on deck ! I wondered if the worry was greater in a catamaran than a monohull. But I cast my mind back to the capsize in a Gibsea 104 some distance north of the Azores eight years ago and the apprehension was in every way identical. With the difference that in the Gibsea I had to jam myself into the quarterberth to prevent being slammed from side to side.

In The Midnight Hour, although I fretted as before, I barely moved from the centre of the double berth I occupied, however alarming were the kinesthetic sensations of surge, acceleration, surf. The noise, of course, is there: a combination of high pressure fire hose striking the hull side on a big surf, and the maniac with a rubber sledge hammer trying to stove in the hullside. But he didn’t succeed and I have no doubt in saying I’d rather be in a cat in a gale than in a similar size mono. And I’d rather not be in one at all. And we achieved this on our passage from Flores to Falmouth ... because we were in a cat ! See below. I’ll leave the log here.

At some point, with winds freshening from the direction of Bermuda, we passed on the long windward passage to Hamilton (for the sake of fresh food, gas and water) and turned towards our homes and wives. Later, after departing the strange and disturbing weather around the confluence of the Labrador current and the Gulf Stream, we fell into high pressure. At this point it became clear that, for a detour of 160 miles to the Azores, we could eat our lentils, brown rice and pasta, COOKED ! And, after excusing myself to my wife for this detour, I wrote to her:

(Day 17) ‘This afternoon we were visited by many dolphins. Tris and I put on masks and flippers and went swimming with them alongside the boat (we were sailing at about 2 knots), underneath and holding on to a rope astern. We saw the dolphins clearly but they were shy of us and swam deep, sometimes approaching a little way and looking quizzically at us with heads bent forwards or rolling over to look at us sideways. Then, as we were drawn along by the boat, we found ourselves in the midst of many strangely shaped ‘jellyfish’ (for want of a better description). These things were translucent and had a reddish nucleus and were formed in bands, spirals and spheres. The water was clear and very blue, but rich and milky too and every now and then a teardrop-shaped school of baby squid passed by or between us. It was like drifting silently through the cosmos in a space capsule; it was out, of this world.