LEARNING CURVE
Cara and Eddie Fucci were novices when they took their Dufour out for a romantic sail on Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana. When a storm blew in, Cara writes, they were literally caught with their pants down
A novice couple get caught out by a storm in the night
My husband Eddie and I had had the dream of becoming sailors for years, so we decided to buy a yacht. We had never sailed, but lucky for us the boat broker was also a sailing instructor who included some training in the price of our new purchase, a Dufour named Danseur du Vent, which we would keep on lake Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana.
After sailing with our instructor and other friends who were competent sailors, we decided to go out on our own. It was to be our first sail, our first night at anchor, and our first night of sleeping on the boat.
Going to sleep to the rocking of the boat was heavenly. I loved every minute of it. But by midnight the rocking was more intense and, as a storm blew in, we were alarmed but not too concerned about our safety. Until the anchor line broke.
It was about 0200, and the boat was completely free from its tether. That’s when the spinning, rolling, and yawing began with a violent force. The genoa had been tightly furled, but the winds, which had gusted up to 60 knots, had unfurled the top portion. This was causing her to brutally rotate in circles while the 7ft swells caused her to heel worryingly far. Eddie started the motor and quickly jumped into the cockpit to
try to turn into the wind, but each time he did, the genoa would pick up the wind and twist us around. This happened over and over. Pitch, spin, heel. Pitch, spin, heel. As more experienced sailors know, we should definitely have dropped the sails but back then, we just didn’t know.
CALL FOR HELP
We realised we were in trouble and it was time to call for help. I was down in the cabin crawling and retching! My stomach’s evacuation joined the layers of all the boat’s contents onto the floor. Broken coffee pots, canned food and vegetables, clothes, books and other belongings were spilled everywhere.
I had never used a radio before and was at a complete loss so I called 911 on my phone. The dispatcher told me I needed to call the coastguard and asked me to get a pen to write the number down. I began to crawl and dig through the incongruous heap of personal belongings for a pen.
Eventually I gave up and strapped myself down into the nav seat. I told the operator it was not going to happen. And I think she realised that this was serious.
She managed to patch me through to the United States Coast Guard who instructed me on how to get the radio working. And that meant turning it on!
In the meantime, my husband was at the helm in the midst of lightning strikes with no working instrumentation to tell us how far we had spun and whether we were going to crash into land.
I was trying to tell the coastguard where we were but had no idea how to get our GPS coordinates. They tried pinging my phone but the signal kept getting lost.
‘Do you have any flares?’ the serviceman asked.
‘Yes!’ I exclaimed. I was so proud that I remembered we had them and where they were. But they were no longer in the place they should be. I found them with all the other debris rattling around at the bottom of the cabin.
Under the coastguard’s instruction I stuck the flares out of the companionway to strike them together as they were road flares rather than marine distress flares, only to have them quickly turn into a wet roll of uselessness in the torrential rain and lspray.
We settled on turning the anchor light switch on and off repeatedly. That much I could do. So until they spotted us, I did a lot of flick on, flick off, and of course more vomiting.
We were spotted close to 0500.
I finally got the miraculous call on the radio that they could see us. It was the happiest news I had ever heard. We were going to be saved. Thank God for the United States Coast Guard!
A STARK REALISATION
Our first night on the boat was meant to be a romantic one, and we had gone to sleep wearing nothing and awakened in the same state. Once we realised we were in danger, we grabbed our life jackets and put them on, but nothing else.
I shouted up to Eddie that the coastguard could see us and that rescue was close, and he hastily yelled back, ‘Could you find me some pants?’ Some hurried dressing followed.
The coastguard rescue vessel was a beautiful sight. A serviceman jumped aboard our boat and told
me to stand by the outer taffrail with my hands in the air. He may have been holding my feet but as I looked at the boats passing each other, in a terrifying 10ft vertical motion, I thought I would be smashed between these two boats if I even so much as bent over.
Eddie says his view was of the two boats passing each other in an almost opposite up and down movement and all he saw was my feet fly through the air as someone on the coastguard boat grabbed my arms and pulled me up onto its rising hull in one swift motion.
I looked back at our beautiful boat being pulled sideways through the violent seas. We could see her headsail torn and tattered, the mast anything but straight and her guardrails bent from the impact of both vessels smashing together.
Eddie offered up a bit of glib humour and said, ‘Well, it was nice sailing her that one time.’
Somehow the coastguard managed to get a towline to her and as the wind died down and the rain stopped, there was a semblance of a rainbow in the sky. It was time to let out a sigh of relief.
We soon discovered, however, that this short window of tranquillity was not a sign that the storm was over. It was the eye of the almost-hurricane.
Just before we made it to the harbour, the other side of the storm hit us just as fiercely as before. This time, we watched our beautiful boat crash into the military dock, bow first.
The boards went flying into the air like splinters. Crash went the bow as the dock’s planks and timbers shattered before our eyes. Surely that was as much as she could take!
ALLOWED BACK HOME
Once the storm had completely passed, the coastguard informed us that it was safe to go. It was 1030 — it had been four hours since we had last seen our boat and we were the other side of the lake from our home.
We stepped outside, and there she was, our treasured first boat looking battered and bruised but, amazingly, still afloat after its mauling.
We couldn’t sail her but the engine seemed to be ready to take us home. As we motored across the lake, we didn’t speak a word to each other for the full four hours of the passage, before returning to the marina.
We tied up the boat and went home only to not speak of the event. Two weeks went by before Eddie looked at me and asked, ‘So, do you still want to do this sailing thing?’
I timidly responded, ‘Yes…’
We only recently transitioned from our beloved Dufour after many years of sailing her. It was definitely hard to sell her. I learned after that night how one could truly love an inanimate object just as if she was a cherished member of the family.
We learned that fateful day to never, ever, be that unprepared again.
We soon discovered, however, that this short window of tranquillity was not a sign that the storm was over