Skipshot wrote:
Seeing the crew's harness tangled in the rigging was scary enough, but to watch the skipper swim away to right the boat before helping untangle the crew made the feeling worse. I can understand wanting to counteract the wind pressure on the boat to turtle, which may have been the reason for grabbing the righting line, but using one's buoyancy and grabbing the mast may have been more effective if that were the case.
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I agree with everything else you said... but I have noticed this comment a couple times as the video circulates the web.. I think he did the right thing here..
a 16 in those conditions will go turtle in a second... let alone with crew hung up in the sail..
I don't think he was trying to right the boat, but simply keep it from going turtle. Your buoyancy wouldn't be enough to lift the mast with the crew weight in the sail.. Typically your own buoyancy is barely enough to lift the mast out of the water in totally normal conditions.
So I think he done good there.. It was the second he noticed his sister drifting away and started losing his cool little by little that each small mistake started stacking up into very big problems.
What the heck was he thinking trying to right the boat with the jib still hung up.. Heck.. in those conditions he could have hiked out and still had the boat blow over if he had dropped the main and was under the jib alone. Then to lose the down haul... Oh my..
all this is pretty easy to armchair quarterback... But it is very teachable and I appreciate the lesson..
This is very much a classic case of "Slow down to Speed up"
A couple nice long deep breaths during one of his capsizes would have went a VERY long way to a better day....