On Sun, 23 Nov 2008 20:10:15 -0600, Vic Smith
wrote:

On Sun, 23 Nov 2008 21:06:42 -0500, Wayne.B
wrote:

On Sun, 23 Nov 2008 19:59:59 -0500, wrote:

We immediately struck
sails and tied everything down tight.

It's been my experience on several different boats that you are better
off with a double or triple reefed main and no jib. Having a little
bit of main sail up gives you far more control with only minimal risk
of being over powered. On boats with a very large main sail and/or
minimal reef points, a small staysail or storm jib might be the way to
go.

But then you don't have the mighty Yammie 9.9 OB to keep way,
do you?
Hey, just kidding.


I know you're kidding but you raise an interesting point regarding
outboards as a sailing aux. Because of the mounting location at the
far stern of the boat, outboards, even with a long shaft, are very
vulnerable to pulling the prop out of the water as the boat pitches in
big waves. This is not conducive to good motoring efficiency needless
to say and is tough on the motor as it over revs.

In a severe squall or gale however, even with an inboard aux, it
becomes difficult to bring the bow into the wind unless there is a
small amount of mainsail up to balance the boat. As the bow lifts
over big waves it catches the wind enough that the the boat is pivoted
off to leeward and no amount of power will bring it back up to
windward. We found this out the hard way in our very first squall
experience back in the 70s. Coming out of Long Island Sound just
after sunset and halfway to Block Island, we got hit with a real doozy
out of the west. The wind blew over 60 kts for the better part of 45
minutes. Waves built to over 10 feet in no time at all and we got
really hammered. There was no choice except to run off before the
wind under bare poles, making about 7 kts of speed as we surfed down
the waves in the dark, hoping that the storm would end before we
arrived at Block Island the hard way.

Friends of ours from Atlanta were onboard who were used to day sailing
on Lake Lanier. They kised the dock after we arrived safely. The
same storm spawned several tornados 30 miles further east blowing
large numbers of anchored boats aground at Cutty Hunk Harbor south of
Cape Cod.

By contrast we got hit with a similar squall in the late 80s going
north from Cape Cod towards Maine. There was a fair amount of advance
warning, so we battened everything down, took down the jib and put a
triple reef in the mainsail before it hit. The boat maintained very
good control about 50 degrees off the wind making a comfortable 1 or 2
kts in a safe direction.