Clark February 3rd, 2016
It was 1991, and we were three fools fresh out of San Diego State. Brian had bought an old Catalina 30, and we spent six months fitting her out. Against my protests, Brian changed her name to Break‘n Wind, a boat name I’ve encountered several times over the years, and never liked any better.
Brian’s artist buddy painted the new name and hailing port on the transom, along with some sorry-ass blue palm trees. I asked the artist, “Isn’t break spelled B-R-E-A-K?” He’d spelled it Brake’n Wind. The paint had already semi-dried, so we ended up with one E wedged in there somehow, and another E rubbed out with acetone, and it never looked quite right.
The overfilled cockpit, with fresh flowers from our bon voyage party.
We finally set sail and ran down the Baja coast at night, the boat laden with windsurfers, surfboards, a guitar, scuba gear, and enough food to transit the Northwest Passage. Tim, the third crewmember, was on watch in the cockpit while Brian and I tried to sleep on opposite sides of the main salon.
I was drifting in and out of sleep when the automatic bilge pump light caught my eye. It went out and I closed my eyes again, but ten seconds later the light came on a second time. When it lit the third time I nudged Brian, “Hey, the bilge pump has gone off three times.”
Brian flipped out of his bunk, turned on the lights, and ripped up the little floorboard in the middle of the main salon. Water poured into the bilge from somewhere aft. We opened the engine compartment, where a stream of sea water flowed past the engine mounts.
“She’s taking on water!” Brian yelled.
“What!” Tim peered down the companionway, wide-eyed.
We cleared out the quarter berth to get access to the packing gland, and Brian squirmed in with a flashlight.
“It’s coming from farther aft, and it’s a lot of water now! It must be the rudder!”
We were a good fifty miles off shore, following Captain John Rains’s advice to sail well outside the shipping lanes. Panic.
We tore open the cockpit lazarettes and scattered ridiculous piles of junk on deck: scuba tanks, fins, masks, wetsuits, spears, beach chairs, a barbeque, windsurfer sails, oars, and awnings. It was the adventure of a lifetime and, well, we’d overpacked. Occasionally the beam of the flashlight met the spooked eyes of a shipmate, and around us were only blackness and a cold winter westerly. We avoided eye contact as we moved the life preservers, the ditch bag, and the EPIRB.
The automatic bilge pump ran nonstop.
We emptied the aft lazarette, which gave us access to the rudder stock. In the aft lazarette we could also see the bilge pump’s thru-hull. Next to the thru-hull, unattached, lay the bilge pump hose, with water spewing out of it, into the lazarette.
“We’re saved!”
We slid the hose back on the fitting with a new hose clamp, and the bilge pump pumped the same load of bilge water for the last time.
Bug-eyed with the adrenaline of our first mid-ocean crisis, the voyage began in earnest, and our little ship seemed more plucky and devious. At our bon voyage party a friend had given us a bottle of single malt scotch that was much too good for a couple of twenty-one year olds. We took slugs out of the bottle and talked about near misses, what ifs, what-to-dos, and all the adventures we were about to have in Mexico.
Brian and Tim drifted off as I started the 3 a.m. watch, with my first sunrise of the voyage to follow.
Break’n Wind under sail
