Kite Night Reflections from my Journey Across the Pacific

Here we go again. This time at midnight. My spinnaker continues to play tricks on me. It has already fallen in 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 forstay. The trades are blowing fifteen knots. Gusts are twenty. A two meter swell is rolling through from the southwest. About thirteen hundred nautical miles from land, I have no option but to climb the mast again and see if I can still save my kite.

Only thirty 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 Galapagos. 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 six centimeters of milky water had been collected. The very next time I ran my engine, the collected liquid would have overflowed and then sucked into the fuel injectors. The incompressibility of water does not play well with the nature of pistons.

Fortunately, 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 auxiliary 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. Wha-lah! How proud I was then in that moment…

It was during the fuel polishing process when I heard the spinnaker’s nine hundred square footage luffing like someone swatting open a giant 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 advise of other sailors. For now my spinnaker was quickly becoming a winged pretzel.

Before engaging this next problem, I decided it best that I sort out the engine hoses and connect things back to together despite the fuel polishing process not yet finished. I could hear my old boss’ advice in my head, “Always clean up your mess before making a new one.” Of course he had been referring to electrical installation at the time but I have found the phrase to be quite applicable in many of life’s other predicaments.

With the engine hoses bled, filter swapped, and fuel mostly polished I felt ready enough to resolve this knotted beast. Upon initial examination, it seemed that untying the spinnaker sheets from the kite were the most logical answer. These are the lines that run port and starboard to the bottom of the great canvas and assist in controlling its overall shape, a very useful sort of thing when it comes to improving overall performance. After detaching them, I quickly lost the kite to the wind which took it to the sky flagging it out thirteen meters horizontally from the masthead like a great whisping tissue. It was beautiful really. Under the right circumstances, someone might think I did the whole thing on purpose.

Unfortunately, the kite had gone aloft with three clockwise wraps that had slid their way up around the furled headsail. Staring up with my headlamp I beamed, “Oh! I can just drive the vessel counterclockwise to undo the wraps!” I even recalled friends telling me about having solved a similar problem with the same method.

I started my engine and smiled knowing it was now indulging in mostly clean fuel. I began my first circle and within some 270 degrees of completion I was abruptly reminded that I had not brought in my fishing handline which was some forty meters of five hundred pound test nylon dragging behind the boat. In circling about like a broken compass, I had now run over and tangled the line around my propellor shaft, very efficiently stalling my engine. Moments like this are cause for deep inner reflection. I decided that freeing the prop of its tethers would have to wait till morning.

With the engine temporarily off along with a complete lack of steering since I had also lowered my main sail, it did not take long before the spinnaker commenced to tie itself more creatively about the upper rigging. It looked as if a paratrooper had crashed into my ship. The kite seemed to have gone over and under itself in figure eights several times about the mast, cap stays, and forstay. In case the reader is now thinking, “Why don’t you just lower the spinnaker halyard?” Please allow me to respond by saying that doing so was impossible. The kite being seized about in a knot prevented such a resolution. The only option left was to face off with the kite at its current elevation in hand to hand combat. I made absolutely sure to belt on a dive knife just in case things decided to escalate at their ongoing rate.

Using the folding steps I had bolted on some years earlier and the protective belay of my harness and grigri, ascending into the night upon the swinging vessel was not entirely perilous. Although I did regret having not brought a helmet because the ship swung about chaotically in the waves. This motion was only amplified aloft. Towards the summit of the mast I had to laugh a little at the absurdity that I was actually climbing through the kite itself. The spreaders were keeping it flagged out while I worked my way up through the opening in the center . My headlamp illuminated its swirling green canvas. The soft folding motions made it seem like I was climbing into a celestial wormhole, stars bordering it all. A cosmic tunnel through time. “Perhaps it be best if I do pass into a new dimension."

Once secure at the top, I began using all styles of pulling, squeezing, and yanking at the great canvas. Initially, I made no progress for some twenty minutes. The wind was too strong and each time I thought I was starting to make headway, the wind would violently rip the slick material from my hands before I could pass a single wrap. To make matters worse, the rolling motion would throw me swinging about from the mast, banging me up. I had achieved the status of a human piñata. Each time the ship would heave heavily in any direction, I would have to abandon whatever progress I might have made and wrap my legs and arms about the mast.

I eventually took pause to stare up at the night sky and ask the great powers that be, “Really?! You’re gonna leave me here, like this?” I suppose I convinced someone up there to listen because to my surprise I eventually began making progress. I was actually in complete disbelief when I undid the first great wrap and the canvas launched itself back out horizontally. “I might actually do this,” I thought. Very slowly, with maximum effort and my own unique war crys, more and more wraps started getting undone. It is not an exaggeration that my heart rate dropped some thirty RPM’s as I finished with the last tangle and the kite blew free.

I rappelled back down. With the aid of a short lull in the wind, I was somehow able to lower the spinnaker back to the deck. I sat down on the spinnaker piled tightly. It deflated beneath me. My body was covered in cuts and aches. Somehow I had downed beast, sword in its heart. Looking at my watch, I had been up the mast for 52 minutes.

I admit that I did not actually feel victory. I also did not move for an immeasurable time. I just felt overwhelming exhaustion with some shouldering sorrow. I think I wanted to weep but for some reason could not. I looked out across the dark ocean. There was nothing at all. There was just my small light on a small boat in a great empty sea of black. I could only hear the noise of it.

As the sun rose the following day, I wasted no time to resolve the issue of fishing line seized around the propellor. I dove in with a rope hitched about my waste, dive knife, and 15,000 feet of water below. The line cut free easy enough. The hard part was staring down into the abyss and trying to pretend that this was regular procedure, that there was not an oceanic whitetip eyeing me from the dark void below. A little striped yellow and black fish stood by though to supervise the whole thing.

Once back on deck I began sailing again immediately. With some learned hesitation I even launched the kite that same day. My solo passage from the Panama to the Marquesas took 38 days of sailing in total. I had plenty of existential thoughts out there but at no point did I ever begin talking to a volleyball. That said I mostly certainly shared words with my old nemesis and newly discovered friend, the spinnaker.

Author’s Note:

I generally do not fly my spinnaker at night anymore. In the remaining weeks while still on the same passage to the Marquesas, I sharpened my skills of launching and retrieving the spinnaker in a more controlled method. I have also found that when the kite does become bow-tie around the forstay, turning the bow into the wind can usually untangle it. A unique war cry is still recommended.