storm sailing in Puget Sound 11-7-09

Posted By: Jerry Becker
Date: 11/8/09 12:08p.m.

Report: outside forum guidelines

This is to all you hard core sailors out there...Puget Sound has had a series of low pressure fronts come through this past week. I am crazy emough to try something new...Saturday 4 of us took our M-17 Jumping Jack Flash out into one of them. We knew winds were strong, but without a wind speed indicator one can only guess the true speed, but the waves were incredible. I checked with NOAA and the coast guard station we sailed by, and found out that during the time we were out on the water, winds were 26 mph gusting to 36 mph. It was a wild ride, with waves appearing to be 4-5 feet with breaking crests. We had the third reef in the main and 1/2 the jib rolled, but increased the jib to get more drive. The boat behaved beautifully and was incredible to sail, like a cork. It felt like that roller coaster ride where you hold your hands up and do the "wave". There were only 3 other larger boats out, all reefed, and we really had good boat speed compared to the others and walked away from them. I found a photo of wave patterns that looked like what we were in. We tried to get a few actual photos of our adventure, but we were pretty wet with spray coming over the bow...one of our crew didn't want to ruin his camera. Foul weather gear was a must yesterday. We were warm with only faces wet. Nothing like the sound of wind in the rigging! Suggestion to Bob Eng about cockpit drain size,scuppers...they could be larger. That is one suggestion I have heard from other "offshore" owners of other classes of boats...that the water doesn't drain fast enough. Scuppers can't be too big. We didn't have following seas coming in, but repetitive spray built up pretty fast.