After suffering brutal Southern-Ocean conditions that led to a slew of damage, Randall Reeves has made a pit stop in Tasmania, and is assessing his options for continuing the Figure 8 Voyage. "Regarding next steps, my wife Joanna arrived yesterday with some much-needed affection and a suitcase full of spare parts (don’t ask me to rank those, please), and we are talking through options over the next few days. I’ll only say that the season is now late and the decisions aren’t easy," Reeves wrote us in an email last night. (Joanna Bloor will be at the Latitude 38 booth at the Pacific Sail and Power Boat show next month.)

In late February, Reeves was working his way through a low pressure system somewhere near the remote Île des Pingouins in the middle of the Southern Ocean and southeast of the Cape of Good Hope. He was sailing in relatively ‘reasonable’ winds of 35 to 45 knots, but in an appalling sea state with three steep, crumbling and disparate wave trains. Reeves suffered three separate knockdowns, and sustained a shattered window, bent rail, broken solar panel and the loss of some electronics. He made his way for port that was somewhat ‘on the way’ of the Figure 8 route, which includes a circumnavigation of the Southern Ocean before heading north along the east coast of the Americas en route to the Northwest Passage.

Reeves had hoped to reach Cape Horn by the end of April, before the onset of the Southern Hemisphere winter. He was running behind schedule after a delayed departure from San Francisco in October, and a pit stop in Ushuaia, Argentina, at the end of December following the loss of both his autopilot and self-steering wind vane. 

Reeves said in his email that he’s landed in a good spot. "The people here, and especially at the [Royal Yacht Club of Tasmania], have been amazingly helpful. Hobart is a sailing town, and when I describe the Figure 8, I get a lot of ‘good onya, mate!’"

Reeves was met at the RYCT by John Solomon, the Port Captain for the Ocean Cruising Club, who, while climbing onboard, promptly told him: "That’s the second time I’ve climbed over that damned rail of yours. Did you know this yacht used to be called Taonui, and her owner, a Tony Gooch, sailed in here once after a breakdown? I helped him move the boat to the club just as we’re doing now. You’re a Yank, aren’t you? Well, that’s OK, I guess." Gooch has been an instrumental part of Reeves’ shore team.

Reeves continued: "At the club, Solomon immediately introduced me to anyone who would hold still," Reeves wrote on his blog. "’This is that Yank who’s just sailed in from Cape Horn. He started from San Francisco, a city in Southern Canada . . .’" 

In the past few weeks, Reeves has been assessing the fateful knockdown that forced him to seek refuge in Hobart. "One thing that is coming home to me is just how far Mo went over during the knockdown that blew out her port window," he wrote in a March 11 blog. "This icebox lid, for example, came off. That’s no mean feat. The lid is about a foot long and a foot wide and six inches deep, and under normal circumstances, it takes two hands lifting straight up to unseat it. But I recall looking into the galley after we righted. Mostly I saw water sloshing everywhere, but there too was the icebox lid tipped up against a cupboard.

"This can only mean that for a brief moment, Mo was well past 90 degrees over, and I’m beginning to suspect that we weren’t simply slammed over by a breaker but actually were pushed off the top of a sea and fell into the trough.
In my estimation, only that kind of force could have blown out the window, leaving nothing but shards around the rim."

Reeves said in an email to us that the two high-latitude legs to Cape Horn and from the Horn to Tasmania "have been brutally difficult. I have made what I consider to be a number of heavy weather mistakes and (having survived) have learned a ton from them. I’m excited to apply what I’ve learned to what comes next." 

We will continue to update you on Randall Reeves’ plans, and will bring you the full story of his somewhat harrowing approach to Hobart in the April issue of Latitude.

As the California State Water Board knuckles down on copper loads in our waterways, the largest source and most toxic of pollutants seems to have escaped the government’s attention. Researchers have concluded that plastics are now one of the most common pollutants in our ocean waters worldwide. In addition to the long-term harm this non-biodegradable flotsam causes on Santa Monica Bay, we know that hundreds of species mistake plastics for their natural food, ingesting toxicants that cause liver and stomach abnormalities in fish and birds, and often choke them to death.

In 1990, the California State Legislature passed a feeble ‘Balloon Law’ to regulate the use of helium-filled foil balloons (in an effort to reduce the approximately 900 annual statewide power outages due to Mylar balloons). The billion-dollar per year party supply industry lobbied hard against any regulation of this litter, and you can find a plethora of shiny favors for sale daily at Ralph’s, Pavilions, and CVS in the Marina del Rey. The law merely requires merchants to post notices that helium-filled metallized balloons must be properly anchored. Even after this requirement was made law, none of the retail stores in the Marina del Rey appear to find it necessary to post the required signage.

On any given weekend, you can sail Santa Monica Bay and encounter 10 or 20 collapsed Mickey Mouse heads, dancing Minions or ‘Happy Birthday’ greetings adrift on the bay. To combat this plague of indestructible Mylar trash in local waters, the boaters at California Yacht Club have launched a "Balloon Fishing Tournament." Every month in 2017 the Club awarded members presenting the most "dead balloons" a free prime rib dinner for two. The results were fabulous, with the Club’s members capturing over 100 of the plasticized foil killers. The Club is continuing the tournament in 2018 and hopes to surpass last year’s catch.

In an effort to bring this to fellow residents and state leaders’ attention, the California Yacht Club is issuing a challenge to other West Coast yacht clubs and marinas to beat the "100-balloon-per-year" record and help support the precious sea life on the California Coast. For any details of the effort, please contact the CYC Dockmaster, Evan Davis, at (310) 823-4567.