Death Roll

April sailing can be a mixed bag around these parts and last week was no exception. With steady winds and an overcast skys, we had a great start to our race. We rounded the first mark and launched the spinnaker sail.  

That's when trouble began. Instead of the wind keeping a nice steady speed and direction like it had been for the last hour, the wind increased in speed, which was great for racing. And even though the wind decided upon a new steady wind speed it couldn't make up it's mind to what direction it wanted to blow.  

That's when I learned a new sailing vocabulary term. From the cockpit below I heard the spinnaker trimmer yell "Death Roll". 

Now I don't know about you, but upon hearing that I seriously wondered it I should have left my smart phone in the car. Anything with the word roll in it used during sailing usually is not good. There are a few exceptions, but with the word death tacked onto the front of it, I knew that it wasn't one of those exceptions.

To explain what a "Death Roll" is I will quote from text lifted off the wiki sailing vocab link, click on the quote to see the whole definition. Then I'll show you a video I dug up on YouTube of another boat in the midst of a "Death Roll" that will give you an idea of what our boat did. 

Here is the quote "During a death roll, the boat rolls from side to side, becoming gradually more unstable until either it capsizes or the skipper reacts correctly to prevent it." 

Our skipper reacted correctly, like the skipper in this video did. It's a long video so skip to the part we're looking for at the 12:00 min to 14:00 min section.

So, in the video you can see three distinct things that shouldn't be happening. The first is the big red and blue spinnaker sail is moving from side to side, not a good thing. That in turn, causes the boat to rock back and forth, not supposed to happen either. And last but not least, the big white main sail connected to the boom gets swung around and slammed back and forth from one side of the boat to the other. That's what we call an uncontrolled jibe!

As an example, the above picture of another crew member, shows him sitting on the boom to prevent an accidental jibe. Which is a little different than an uncontrolled jibe. Sitting on the boom like that keeps a lighter wind from sneaking behind the sail and pushing it to the other side of the boat. 

Well, that's where I was sitting when I heard "Death Roll" from the cockpit. If you watched the video, you will quickly realize that it's not smartest place to be when an uncontrolled jibe happens. As I was leaning my weight against the boom, I felt it push back against me, I pushed back a little harder, it pushed back with even more force and in the end the boom won the battle. In an effort not to be pushed out into the water I ended up lying sunny side up on the deck, with my head downhill towards that water. 

I scrambled up and moved to the front of the boat, out of the way of the boom that was sweeping back and forth across the boat. Now, we weren't the only boat having fun out there that night. A slightly larger boat that was ahead of us and off to our port side was playing the death roll game as well. Whether it was the skill of the skipper or just bad luck, that boat lost control and did a full broach causing their boat to turn sharply in front of us. 

I'll interrupt here to check out this video compilation of boats broaching. The first boat you see in the video is a good example of how the boat next to us turned sharply in front of us. In the video that skipper regained control of the boat quickly, unlike the boat next to us. The boat next to us looked more like the second boat in the video. Over completely on it's side, sail in the water and yes they did break something. If you continue watching you will see a third boat, let's just hope that doesn't ever happen.

At this point we have sketchy control over our boat, and all we can see in front of us is twenty eight feet of boat bottom, maybe thirty yards away and perpendicular to us. Kudos to our skipper as we managed to miss ramming the other boat and regained control by blowing the spinnaker sail.  Blowing the spinnaker sail is where you let all the spinnaker lines completely out in an effort to get the wind to stop filling the sail.

From the 20 second to about 36 second mark of the video of another boat, you can get an idea of what our spinnaker sail looked like when we blew it. The rest of the video shows all the different ways to have fun with the unwieldy spinnaker sail. (Ignore the weird sound effects in this video)

We got the spinnaker sail down and tucked it away as quick possible, before the wind tore it apart. All in all, it turned out to be a fun evening of racing and gave my adrenaline glands a workout.

~J~