Shakedown Cruise Part 2

The shakedown wasn’t over yet! We felt like the pounding would never stop. Lothlorien would come up over some of the swells and surf down the other side. Sometimes she would come up and pound down on the other side with a huge bang, shuddering the whole boat.

After one of those particularly hard crashes, water started flooding into the cabin until we had several inches of water standing. I really wasn't ready to have my brand new boat sink! I had an image of the entire hull splitting in half beneath us. We started to bail out water, but they had not hooked up the pump, so we had to use an empty coffee can.

We finally got most of it out, so we started trying to figure out what was happening. When the water started coming in again, this time I decided to taste it - it was fresh water! With a little investigation, we found that the hose to the faucet had come off and every time we turned the water on, we were flooding the cabin. It could have been worse, and although it turned out to be a simple problem, with an equally simple solution, it was scary.

Because we decided to motor sail rather than try to sail into that mess, we had lashed the jib down with bungee cords on the bow deck. The jib came loose and started flying all around, going over the side into the water. Once more the boys made their way along the lifelines and were securing the jib. They would go down and green water would wash up over them and the deck. All I could do was watch - and pray, "Dear God, let them come up again!" I don't know if they ever realized how much danger they were in, and of course, there were no safety lines.

After fifteen hours of non-stop pounding, and when we felt we couldn't stand any more, we finally were able to put into Newport Beach. Any one of these incidents could have been total disaster. I could have lost my boys or we could have lost our mast.

During that whole trip, all I thought was, "Peace be still! God, please quiet the storm!" Three days later, we sailed into Oceanside Harbor under fair skies and calm seas to make our home.

This was truly a woman-owned boat, held together with bobby pins and prayer.

Shakedown Cruise Part 1

I have many sea stories to tell, but one of the most memorable is that first shakedown cruise after I picked up my new boat – the Lothlorien.

I bought her in the late 1970s in the middle of winter. My sons and I went to Marina del Rey to bring the boat down to Oceanside Harbor. One of those notoriously wicked winter storms of California came up and aborted several attempts.

At last it seemed everything had finally calmed down. Our weather station predicted smooth seas, two to four foot swells, five to ten knots of wind, almost perfect sailing weather. About three hours into the trip, we ran into an even worse storm. In a phrase most of you know, but that a friend states in a little different way, the ship really hit the sand!

We had gone too far and we were in a position too dangerous to turn around. The wind was coming directly at us and getting stronger. The swells were so high that we would have broached, or rolled, if we had turned broadside to them. We had no choice but to continue on.

It was soon obvious the weather man was not where we were, and he didn't change his report until about twelve hours later. He kept saying it was calm.

This was a bona fide "shakedown cruise." Murphy's law was certainly active that day. Everything that could go wrong, did - and at the worst possible moment. We discovered very quickly that the person who commissioned our boat had forgotten to put in a few cotter pins.

First the turnbuckle on one of the starboard shrouds came loose and started swinging in the air. One of the boys managed to crawl up to it, screw it back on, then secure it with an old bobby pin that I somehow had found in the pocket of my jacket.

Then my son's friend asked what held the boom onto the mast. I said, "That little cotter pin right...there..." Well, that little cotter pin was missing, too, and the boom was starting to work its way off the mast. The boys braced themselves against the wind, wrapped themselves around the mast, and put in another bobby pin.

I was poorly prepared. I had not thought to have a supply of spare cotter pins with me on board. I quickly replaced all the bobby pins with cotter pins when I reached Oceanside Harbor.