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2008
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Tether Or Apart The breeze was 25, up to 30 at times on the Unpacific Ocean, outside the Golden Gate. Shaw figures the seas at, “Six to eight feet, with an occasional twelve. I did the wrong thing on my first approach. I tried to luff up to them and misjudged and fell short.” The Golden Gate entrance looked like this (at right), as seen through the long lens of Erik Simonson h20shots.com . . . Hmm. Maybe I’m not sorry I missed the 2008 Doublehanded Farallones, but get this. Shaw wasn’t even racing his Crowther 36 cat. He was shadowing the fleet for the fun of it - he’s a member of sponsor Bay Area Multihull Association - and doubledog get this: he also shadowed the whole 2006 Pacific Cup, San Francisco to Hawaii. “I signed up to race,” he says, “then I discovered that my insurance wouldn’t cover the rig if I was racing, so I ‘withdrew’ and went anyway.” I like this guy. Shaw’s Rainbow was about 75 yards behind the Olson 40, Pterodactyl (”We were aimed right at their transom; I was actually trying to pass them”) when Luc de Faymoreau and Disun Den Daas were ejected from the Olson. As Luc put it, “We were SNAPPED off the boat in a violent motion, what I call a pitchpole/broach.” When Pterodactyl spun out and turned erratically upwind, Shaw grabbed the binoculars. “I saw right away there was no one on the boat, so I made a sweep and there they were. Bright orange and yellow inflatables standing out very bright against cobalt blue.” //–> In making that first, missed pass, Shaw saw quickly that the two men in the water were unable to swim: “Then I remembered what they told us in the Pacific Cup safety seminar, that people in a PFD can’t swim. After that everything came straight out of the textbook. The lesson: Don’t try to do any precise maneuvering. Just get that Lifesling out there. It’s a great product.” Rainbow has a swim platform mounted low, and with two people standing aft - Shaw and crewmate Gregory Yankelovich - it stayed submerged, not threatening the men in the water and greatly aiding the recovery. The water outside the Golden Gate is cold year-round and definitely cold in the springtime. De Faymoreau and Den Daas were able to climb and help themselves aboard, with assistance, Shaw recalls, “But Luc came aboard saying that he couldn’t grip, couldn’t grip. That happens fast. I gave up two or three minutes by missing them the first time. If I’d missed a second time, and they’d gone colder, we might have had to winch them out instead of haul them over the transom.” Other lessons? “Seeing two other boats stop and stand by really helped my morale. Knowing they were there helped me calm down and focus. — from one of your editor’s favorites, Kimball Livingston, in his blog at sailmagazine.blogspot.com
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There’s always a lesson in an overboard recovery. Cliff Shaw looks back at pulling two live bodies out of the water in the recent Doublehanded Farallones Race and says, “You see people in the water and you think, This is not a drill; I have to get this right.”
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