Bliss At Sea Emergency and Repairs

In this episode, Bliss was joined by Mike from Washington state and we sailed from Norfolk/Hampton, Virginia to Morehead City, North Carolina. We wanted to sail directly to Key West, but while we were rounding Cape Hatteras on the Outer Banks, there was an early morning catastrophe!

The winds were gusting from 20-30 knots while we were sailing downwind in 2-3 meter swells which made that portion of the trip very tiring. At around 4am, off the tip of Cape Hatteras, the clevis pin that held the forestay to the bow’s crossbeam suddenly decided to remove itself from the equation. That resulted in the jib, furler, and forestay all blowing wildly in the wind like laundry on a clothesline in a tornado!

I immediately started the engines and yelled for Nate to come to the rescue and he quickly came up so we could (safely) rescue the furler and get it tied back down. Luckily, we still had an inner forestay for the staysail (should’ve been using that!) so it held the mast forward while we kept the boat pointing downwind to secure the forestay. In the end, we had the furler held down by two temporary dyneema lines and two halyards lashed to the crossbeam.

Of course, once the temporary rigging was done, we mapped out our nearest port which was 10 hours of stormy seas away, so we watched our loose rigging bounce around and made for Morehead City, NC for repairs. We have since replaced the pin (the pin was somehow resting on the anchor throughout the storm) and I now have two spares.

Hope you enjoy the video, and I can’t wait to see update you again soon! Please like, subscribe, and all that fun stuff to the YouTube channel! 😄