Kite Night — Tangling With a Spinnaker
Here we go again. This time at midnight. My spinnaker continues to play tricks on me. It has already fallen into the water twice on this passage, and both times I have had to climb the mast to rethread the halyard. Now it is tying itself into a most interesting-looking knot about the masthead and forestay. The trades are blowing 15 knots. Gusts are 20. A 6-foot swell is rolling through from the SW. About 1,300 miles from land, I have no option but to climb the mast and see if I can still save my kite.
Only 30 minutes ago I was happily working through a different problem. My friend Micky, captain of an Oyster called Mexican Wave, had just messaged me. Several other ships in her fleet had been complaining about having received foul diesel in the Galápagos. Knowing I had refueled there as well, she had been kind enough to pass along the warning. A quick glance through the glass of my engine prefilter revealed almost 3 inches of milky water had been collected. The very next time I ran my engine, the collected liquid would have overflowed and then been sucked into the fuel injectors. The incompressibility of water does not play well with the nature of pistons.
It was fortunate that I had an auxiliary fuel pump aboard. By carefully disconnecting the fuel input and return hoses from the engine, I was able to insert my aux pump inline. Keeping the existing prefilter inline as well, I had successfully created a fuel-polishing system that would allow me to filter my diesel by running the new pump for a few hours. Once finished, I would then easily change the filter, empty the collected water, reconnect the hoses, and then carry on rambling across the Pacific. Voilà! How proud I was in that moment.…
It was in the middle of the fuel-polishing process that I heard the spinnaker’s 900-square-footage luffing like someone swatting open a newspaper repeatedly. I sprang outside. Standing naked on deck with nothing but my harness and headlamp, I quickly regretted my careless decision to fly the great kite at night against the advice of other sailors. For now, my spinnaker was quickly becoming a winged pretzel.
