Most sailors dread the unintentional gybe, with good reason too.In stormy conditions it can cause you to lose your boom, your rigging, your mast, and even your boat. Get your head in the way and it can be even more serious than that.
My worst gybing incident occurred at night off Tarifa point, heading west out of the Med in a Moody 42 with a following force 8 and seas well over 5 metres. I was off watch in the forepeak at the time, getting what sleep I could in what felt like an out-of-balance tumble drier.
Suddenly it seemed the tumble drier had been unplugged and thrown down a rocky slope. Fearing the worst I donned my life jacket and harness and struggled back through the boat. As I started up the companionway I could see in front of me what looked like a mad harpist - Derek, the other crew member, was silhouetted against an electric sky, with strands of the mainsheet fluttering violently behind him. The boat was sideways on to the waves and taking a terrific pounding.
It was two long hours later before the skipper and his wife, who had beaten me to the cockpit, along with Derek and I managed to get the boat under control again.
It transpired that Derek, new to the boat as I was, had been on watch and decided - probably correctly - that the mainsail would be better out to port than starboard. Having in-mast reefing meant that we had only a small corner of sail out, but under great pressure.
To avoid a gybe, Derek had decided to turn through 360° - a good option in a chalk pit, not so clever in high seas. He might have got away with it, but he failed to take in the main sheet as it slackened. About a third of the way round, the main sheet wrapped itself round the boarding ladder, strapped to the cockpit rail. As the boat came to a virtual halt the tow generator line we were trailing dropped, wrapping itself around the wind vane rudder.
With hindsight a number of lessons were clear and fortunately learnt:
- Selecting crew, briefing them fully and giving clear authority limits, supervising and training them are all vital: always take up references and spend time making sure that they are competent and familiar with the boat before allowing them to do anything other than maintain a course and a lookout. In these conditions any change required at least two people: although the obvious way to gybe would have been to reef in completely, sheet in the boom and let it out under control on the other side before unwinding some sail
- In this case also, running on a small area foresail may have given a smoother ride and been safer
- Where there is a risk of an unintentional gybe and its consequences, always rig a boom preventer by attaching a line to the end of the boom with a snap shackle and taking it forward as far as possible. You can cleat it off, but I prefer to bring it back into the cockpit where it can be adjusted as the course changes. If a gybe is necessary, this line can be controlled along with the mainsheet to move the boom smoothly across, after which the preventer needs to be rigged on the other side. Although I have never done it, I see no reason why two lines souldn't be used, one on each side.
- Under no circumstances allow any crew member to put there head where the boon could strike it: standing on a cockpit seat and leaning on the coach roof can be particularly dangerous.
