Well, that wasn’t so bad after all – I mean, I didn’t get hardly any sleep, but I did make it through ok.
Watching it now I can see that it’s really hard to tell the height of the waves in a 2D video – next time I guess maybe I should get lower to show some perspective. Suffice to say that at the peak of the storm the occasional wave was breaking up onto my deck, which is unnerving at the best of times, but twice as scary at 3am when everything is cold and black.
Because Tie Fighter is a trimaran she is not vulnerable to the severe rolling, or ‘heeling’, that a regular sailboat would see in a storm like this. Instead she jumps to the top of each wave, but due to the anchor line pulling her into the wind she often cannot ride gently down the other side as she’d like. In a strong wind, her bows point anywhere from 90º off of the wind, and when she’s pointed directly into the wind she’ll sometimes ride to the top of a wave and SMASH her bows down into the trough of the next, pressing me bodily into my foam mattress.
Due to their width, multihulls are much more vulnerable to “corkscrewing” in a wave system; this means that one bow will head up the incline of a wave, followed by the stern, followed by the other stern, followed by the other bow, while the first bow and stern are already on their way down the other side of the wave. Think of a bowl of soup, and imagine dipping the edge of the bowl in a circle, causing the soup to slosh in a circular wave. Now imagine that you are the soup. Corkscrewing is hell for people with motion sickness! Nights like last night make me realize just how phenomenally lucky I am that I don’t get seasick.
Engine repairs have jumped up on the priority list, yet again. I think it’s time to just have the engine pulled out and overhauled; it’s something that I really need to be stable, and currently it just isn’t. I’m now hunting for a boatyard that will do this for me, ideally one that will let me hang around and watch.