Express 27 Sailor Rescued on Saturday

It’s less a matter of luck that Wolfgang Stehr is alive today and more a matter of preparation — not that luck didn’t play a part in Saturday’s drama on San Francisco Bay. What started out as a terrific singlehanded daysail aboard his Express 27 Summer Palace turned into a potential nightmare.

"It was a perfect day," recalls Stehr. Mild winds offered the perfect opportunity for the experienced racer to set the chute on starboard tack, but when he went to jibe onto port tack, he wasn’t able to complete the maneuver. "I couldn’t reach the port spinnaker sheet in time and the boat went out of control."

Stehr made his way forward to douse the now thrashing spinnaker, but as he started pulling it down, the halyard somehow got jammed. Holding onto the majority of the spinnaker, he crawled back to the helm to jibe onto port in the hopes that he could move a little farther forward to get a better angle from which to get the chute down. Unfortunately, as he moved forward, the boat jibed back onto starboard and the boom knocked him overboard.

Though he wasn’t tethered in, Stehr was wearing an inflatable PFD, plus he was still holding onto the bulk of the spinnaker. "I tried to get back on the boat but it was out of control and moving too fast," he says, estimating that Summer Palace‘s two to three knots of boat speed was too great for him to gain enough traction to climb aboard. On top of that, as he was going over, something in his knee gave out. "At least I put it in cold water right away," he laughs.

But his situation was no laughing matter. He was holding onto the lifelines being dragged by his boat and unable to get back aboard, even from the transom. "After about 10-15 minutes of trying to get aboard, I started getting cold and exhausted," he says. As a physician, he knew he was starting to suffer from hypothermia so he pulled the handheld VHF out of his foulie pocket and called a mayday. "At the same time, the Larkspur Ferry Sonoma was pulling up behind me."

The crew quickly lowered a ladder from the ferry’s hull and Stehr had a decision to make. "It was one of the hardest moments of my life, but the hypothermia had gained over the fear of losing my boat," he recalls. "As I saw that ladder come down, I was ready to let the boat go." And that’s what he did, swimming on his back — as he learned to do in the Safety at Sea class he’d taken the weekend before. He was pulled to safety by the Sonoma‘s crew. "Hundreds of tourists were lined up on the deck, waving and taking photos!" One of them even took a video, which you can see above.

Stehr was taken to St. Francis Hospital and treated for mild hypothermia. He says that, while he can walk, the ACL in his left knee is torn and might need surgery. He also has a few things to say about lessons learned, but we’ll save that for the December issue of Latitude 38. In the meantime, Stehr wants to extend his profound thanks to Captain David Noble and his crew aboard the Sonoma, Medic 87 from SFFD and Coast Guard personnel who worked with Vessel Assist to safely tow Summer Palace to Treasure Island Marina. But for all their help, if Stehr hadn’t been as prepared as he was for the possibility of going overboard, this story might have had a very different ending.