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Heavy Weather Gear and Strategies #7—Our Old Backup System

posted by John & Phyllis Web Site

As discussed earlier in this series, our primary gale and storm survival strategy is heaving-to, with or without the addition of a drogue off the bow, as discussed in this post. However, we have always carried a second system in case our rigging was damaged making heaving-to impossible. We also believe, as discussed in this post, that there may be conditions in which heaving-to, even with a drogue, just does not work.

Up until this year, we carried a 24-foot diameter PARA-TECH sea anchor and all the gear to set it as our backup system. However, despite thinking that it was the best option at the time we bought it, we have never been entirely happy with this solution, as I discussed in this post. In summary, we got rid of our sea anchor for the following reasons:

1. The deployment of so much heavy gear off the bow in storm conditions would be both difficult and dangerous.
   
   
2. I believe that the pitching and yawing in true storm conditions would be truly horrendous. Most modern sailboats, particularly with the forward windage of roller furling headsails like “Morgan’s Cloud” has, yaw a lot at anchor when it is blowing hard—imagine the same behavior in 30-40 foot seas! There are ways to ameliorate this, such as riding sails, but this is still more gear to rig and to break in survival conditions.
   
   
3. The yawing problem can be solved by using a Pardey Bridle but I have real reservations about rigging such a system on a boat the size of “Morgan’s Cloud”.
   
   
4. I think that it is unlikely that Phyllis and I would be able to retrieve the sea anchor and its associated gear, particularly after being beaten up and exhausted by several days of lying to it in storm conditions. On this subject I got an email last week from a friend who is a commercial fisherman running three draggers off the US east coast. He says “I have never needed to purchase a sea anchor. Towing a bottom trawl in the Gulf of Maine has routinely provided sea anchors of all types and shapes. Judging from what I have seen people often discard the sea anchor rather than deal with its recovery.”
   
   
5. The PARA-TECH manual, like that provided with the Galerider, demands that you deploy the drag device on a long rode so that it is immersed two to three waves back from the wave the boat is on and that the device is in the same relative point on its wave as the boat is on hers. Give me a break! Waves in storm conditions are confused and of varying heights and periods. They do not conform to the pretty diagrams in these manuals and even if they did, how, pray tell, are you to see in storm conditions with blowing spray where the thing is several waves to windward?
   
   
6. A 24-foot sea anchor, the size recommended for “Morgan’s Cloud”, is going to be essentially impossible to drag through the water. Being attached to something in storm conditions at sea that has almost no give will generate forces that are truly frightening to think about. The PARA-TECH manual calls for at least 600’ of nylon rope to ameliorate this problem. However, recent research shows that nylon rope that is being heavily cycle loaded, particularly when wet, is much more subject to failure than we all once thought. The problem lies with self heating due to friction between the fibers that can eventually lead to the rope failing through melting. I suspect that this may be the reason that many sea anchors are lost due to rode breakage, rather than the chafe that has usually been blamed. Recently I spoke with a woman who had deployed a sea anchor on a trip to Bermuda. It worked well, but the nylon rope broke during recovery after the gale. This would suggest to me that it may have been weakened by the problem noted above.
   

So, while I’m not suggesting that sea anchors never work well or discounting the fact that they have saved many lives and boats, I think there is now a better storm survival backup system, at least for us on “Morgan’s Cloud”, and that is the subject for the next post.
Earlier Posts in the Series
#1 Goals
#2 Heaving-To
#3 When Heaving-to is Dangerous
#4 Options When Heaving-to is Not Working
#5 Stopping Wave Strikes While Heaved-To
#6 Survival Storms

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Labels: Seamanship

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