The Ghost Ships Will Have To Wait
A Story about the 2007 Clipper Cup Race
and surviving a Lake Michigan storm
By Pat Nowak
I didn’t think we would make it. Nor did my crew Curt VanDuren.
Neither of us said as much as there wasn’t much point in stating the obvious.
Here we were, in pitch-black darkness, out in the center of Lake Michigan, in the middle of a raging gale, using up the last of our rapidly diminishing physical strength and mental powers trying to keep the boat upright and afloat.
How and why we placed ourselves in such precarious circumstances is something Curt and I will talk about and think about for a long time.
A little background, if you please----
I hadn’t crossed the big lake before and hoped to do so with Curt sometime this season. When Rod Leonard of Bayshore Yacht Club in Holland, MI suggested we participate in this year's Clipper Cup, a daytime race from Muskegon, MI to Port Washington, WI, we decided this was our chance to cross in the company of other sailboats, do some racing with our Alerion Express 28, and perhaps do well. We had been racing the boat in the Bayshore Yacht Club Wednesday Races and were on a bit of a roll having finished first and second in our Jib & Main fleet over the last two weeks of Wednesday Night racing.
I brought the boat up to Muskegon on Thursday, August 9 and parked it overnight at the Harbour Towne Yacht Club, race headquarters. Curt arrived early Friday morning having been driven up by there by his wife Sue who wished us well and headed back to Holland to go to work.
The Jib and Main fleet started at 9:15 AM with light air out of the northeast. We moved up through the fleet and found ourselves in second place, closing in on the Open Class boats that had started 10 minutes ahead of us. Our AE 28, Nancy Anne, was moving smartly and getting admiring glances and hollered compliments on the boat’s good looks.
The rhumb line between Muskegon and Port Washington is a few degrees north of due west so we were all hoping for a consistent wind out of the north or south to carry us across the 70 miles to the other side. The wind switched around to the southwest early on and we, along with all the spinnaker boats that started behind us, were on port tack heading northwest above the rhumb line, guessing that eventually the wind would clock around to west and we would have to sail south again and tack our way back and forth across the rhumb line. What we didn’t count on were the mid lake lulls that cost us hours of little or no forward motion. There was a 24 hour time limit to the race but that certainly seemed like ample time to cover 70 miles, adverse winds or not.
One of the things you notice out in the middle of the lake is a special smell, different from anywhere else, except way up in the mountains. It is a sweet, clean smell that you can almost taste. You also notice that it’s a long way down, seeing depths in excess of 400 feet on the depth display.
By about 9 PM on Friday, a good number of the skippers involved began to conclude that with the extended periods of no wind, they weren’t going to make it in on time, and the calls of abandonment to the Clipper Cup race committee were starting to come in. In retrospect, these boats were making the right call. Only 24 of the 47 starters did make it over to Port Washington in the 24 hour period allowed. We were making slow steady progress so we forged on, never really discussing abandonment, particularly after we were more than halfway over. The shooting stars were almost worth the price of admission.
We sailed on, fatigue beginning to put in an appearance. Curt had been digging out footings for a new porch at his home until 10:30 PM the prior night and needed to get some sleep. I was getting kind of pooped out myself so we began to take turns of short naps. The naps kept getting shorter as it took both of us to constantly work the sails and keep the boat moving in very light air.
Around midnight we sighted the lights of Port Washington. As many sailors have found out, seeing the lights at your destination is a good and bad thing. The good is that you’re in the right neighborhood and the bad is that you’re still a long way away.
By 3 AM we were considerably closer, perhaps 6 miles out, yet becalmed again for another hour. The clock was running, of course, but we still had hope of covering the last six miles in the remaining six hours as the wind freshened slightly. By 6 AM, we were just 2 miles out and the wind disappeared. When the wind returned around 8:30, we made our final push, crossing the finish line at 9:46 AM, 24 hours and 21 minutes after our 9:15 start the prior day. We were late but held out the hope that 24 hours plus our PHRF rating of 168 would buy us enough time. The scoring office said that wasn’t the case and while they admired our perseverance, we were late and that was that.
We had exhausted our battery during the night so we had to call the marina office to get a rescue boat to come and take us to an open dock. The marina lent us a battery-charging machine to restart the engine, both at no charge. Rod had said it was a hospitable crowd in Port Washington. He was right.
By the time we got the motor running, and ourselves cleaned up it was time for the awards ceremony and raffle. I won a $25 gift certificate from Ghezzi’s Market in Muskegon so that was nice.
I checked on the weather at the marina office and the display said there were thunderstorms predicted for the immediate area. There was hardly a cloud in the sky so we figured we would be long gone before they arrived. I’m an “old lady” about the weather, usually checking the Weather Channel’s “Local On The Eights” radar several times before I leave Holland for a day sail. If the wind is above 20 knots, I’ll pass. Most of the time I’m single handing the boat on Lake Macatawa or Lake Michigan and 1800 miles of day sailing and Wednesday night racing since I got the boat new in 2006 attest to the fact that I love this boat.
Curt is a conservative sailor too, with his 16-foot day sailor, usually checking with three different weather sources before putting the boat in the water. Our error was sailing to a schedule and that is always a chancy deal. On the other hand, the other Michigan boats looked at the same weather data and almost all were preparing to leave, providing some company part of the way back.
We had planned on getting some sleep Saturday morning, presuming our arrival would have been sometime late Friday or early Saturday. When we arrived midmorning Saturday and worked on getting our battery restored, the time for sleeping had passed. The new plan was to leave Port Washington at 4 PM, alternating watches every hour, getting our sleep in small amounts.
We left about 4:15, hoisted the sails, and motor sailed south east on a warm beautiful day, exhausted but happy to be heading home.
About 7 PM we started to see the storm clouds gathering in the west. They also began to appear to the north, and then suddenly in front of us. The sails came down, rain suits put on, and the hatch was closed. The rain and wind arrived along with lightning, lots of lightning close by.
As the night wore on the rain never let up, with winds building to 20-25 knots. Our pretty Alerion Express 28 has a freeboard of about two feet so we were more than a little worried about wave height. These big waves would roll up to the boat, often quite a bit higher than our cockpit coaming, and the boat would be lifted up slightly before rolling hard to leeward and then violently back to windward. Around 4 AM, the winds increased to 30-40 knots.
We couldn’t see the waves very well in the darkness, which probably was a good thing as we weren’t seeing the “cliffs we were close to driving over.” We might have been even more frightened than we were. Curt saw a really big one coming in the light of the stern light, probably 10 feet higher than the boat that broke over the covered rear deck. That covering probably kept a great deal of water from flooding our cockpit. From then on, Curt would call the waves out, “My quarter, your quarter, astern,” trying to make him self heard above the wind.
We were trying to keep the boat heading toward Holland, a bearing of 110-120 degrees. Every so often we could see big breaking waves in the glow from the steaming light or hear the roar of the big ones coming at us. Our defense was turn up 15-20 degrees into the wave to keep from getting rolled. This went on for most of the night, until it got worse.
The wind began to build above 40 knots and there were three separate 15-minute episodes of extremely high winds. I checked the instruments later in the night for maximum wind speed observed and it said 78 knots. I don’t know how high the wind actually got as instruments can be affected by the extreme conditions. During the first episode of very high winds, with the waves threatening to roll us, we decided that our only hope from getting rolled or knocked off the boat was to keep the boat headed dead down wind, relying on the wind instrument to tell us the direction of the true wind. Later on, Curt said he would never forget the sound of the wind blowing through the rigging. Even with the engine speed down to 1400 rpms, we were still moving at 6-7 knots.
I stared at that wind gauge for 15 minutes straight, seeing double, sometimes seeing nothing as my sight was failing, the consequence of being up for almost 48 hours with a just few minutes of sleep here and there. The wind dropped back to 25 knots and we thought we were in the clear but then it started up again, somewhere above 40 knots. One of us noticed a lake freighter approaching from our right, seemingly on a collision course with us. I told Curt we had to go in the direction where the wind was sending us and had few options to avoid a collision. The big boat seemed to slow down, take our stern, and turn slowly away to the south.
We kept checking our six-gallon diesel fuel tank as we sure didn’t want to run out and lose the engine at a critical moment. It was full when we left Muskegon, burning very little getting to the starting line the day before. We had another full six-gallon portable tank on board but I can’t imagine how we would transfer fuel through a funnel on that rolling deck.
The wind let up a bit and then returned stronger than ever. We had survived the first two blows but had very little left in our bank of survival skills. Now the wind was getting much stronger and probably was the wind that registered 78 knots. I couldn’t keep my eyes open.
I started to see things that weren’t there, hallucinating really. I began to see masts of sailing ships but there were no boats at the bottom of the masts. These seemed like rigs of ghost ships that had risen from the bottom to see if we going to join them. The significance of no boats below the masts was not lost on me.
My brain was fried, reflexes shot, just barely hanging on mentally and physically. One mistake on the tiller and we would be rolled or worse. I couldn’t keep it up much longer. I had nothing left. Finally the wind dropped to around 20-25 knots and we settled into a routine of 10-minute shifts as anything longer than that had us seeing double or not seeing anything.
The lightning was still close by but we couldn’t hear the thunder because the wind was so strong. I told Curt that wherever the wind took us we were going, even if it was back to Port Washington. I asked him if he knew any good prayers and he said he was saying every one he knew. He also sang, to himself, every Christian hymn he could remember. I was saying prayers too. We were both frightened, seriously afraid for our lives. Please, God, give us another sunrise.
We were always worried about the rogue waves, the super tall bank of water that would knock us down and out of the boat. We had lines right in front of us to grab if the roll angle increased much over 45 degrees. Rod Leonard told me later on that one of those rogues struck his Hunter Legend 45 during the night and the whole boat shuddered. He thought of us and what one of those rogue waves would do to our little craft.
We made it back to Holland about 11 AM Sunday, absolutely nackered, as the English would say. But we made it. Rod Leonard was there at our berth to greet us, greatly relieved that we were still alive.
The Alerion Express 28 took the blows, the Yanmar diesel ran for 19 hours on one six gallon tank of fuel and didn’t miss a beat. My crew, Curt VanDuren, never wavered. He was the ideal crew: strong, smart, resourceful, and brave.
Thank You, Lord. The ghost ships will have to wait.
Pat Nowak's latest book "Forty Cars That Owned Me", is a collection of "war stories" about forty unique cars including an Aston Martin DB-5, three vintage Jaguars, road racing cars, Pro Rally cars, most of the domestic brands, and the author's all time favorite, a 1962 Triumph TR-3B roadster.
Check out his Web site at: http://www.fortycars.com/
Thanks Pat for the story... John Wolf
