SIGHTINGS the joys of small-
randall reeves figure eights it out
continued on outside column of next sightings page Page 54 •
Latitude 38
• February, 2018
About the liveliest eight days of my life were spent in a small boat on the west coast of Korea. Never mind why I was thus voyaging up the Yellow Sea during the month of February in below-zero weather. The point is that I was in an open boat, a sampan, on a rocky coast where there were no lighthouses and where the tides ran from 30 to 60 feet. My crew were Japanese fishermen. We did not speak each other's language. Yet there was nothing monotonous
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"I'm going to get clobbered. I'm sure I'll get clobbered," Randall Reeves told us in April, months before embarking on the Figure 8 Voyage from San Francisco, around the Southern Ocean, across the Northwest Passage and back to San Francisco. Reeves was forced to make a pit stop in Ushuaia, Argentina, for repairs before resuming his voyage on January 12. As we write, the Bay Area native has begun the three-month, nearly 15,000-mile loop of the Southern Ocean aboard his 41-ft sloop Moli (or Mo), Mo heading east from South America and leaving Antarctica to starboard. After sailing under the Golden Gate in late October, Reeves was chugging south, had spent about 50 days at sea, and was about 500 miles from Cape Horn when some bad luck hit in late December. "The first was plain bad luck," Reeves wrote us from Ushuaia. "A bit of water got in the pilothouse after a knockdown and someAfter six days and 400 miles how made its way through the protective of hand-steering, Randall covering on the autopilot junction box. The Reeves arrived in Chile. second was weird bad luck," Reeves said of the freak loss of his Monitor windvane. A hinge sheared at the weld, suggesting "repeated stress at that strong point over years." Reeves said the anomalous damage may have been caused by previous owners. He added that he has full confidence in his Monitor self-steering, and sang the praises of Mike Scheck of Scanmar, the maker of the Monitor who "not only got the necessary parts together quickly, but arranged the paperwork and formulated a strategy for our approach [to Argentinian customs]." Reeves' wife Joanna acted as courier (and, later, happy tourist) and ushered the parts to Argentina. After the loss of his autopilots, Reeves had to hand-steer 400 miles to Bahía Cook (Cook's Bay), which leads to the Beagle Channel — a narrow route connecting Chilean and Argentinian waters — all while getting throttled by low-pressure systems. "Day one of this quest about did me in," Reeves wrote on the Figure 8 blog on December 23. "Sailing Mo by hand in large swells is both delicate and brutish work. The rudder is large and the tiller is short; the swell (always at least 10 feet and breaking) wants me to go one way and the sail the other. I push and push on the tiller to get back to 60 degrees, my mark, and the next wave knocks me to 90. Pull hard. Sail jibes. Repeat. Within half an hour I was endowing Mo with a rich stream of expletives and was hoarse by the end of the day. Still, I got in two four-hour shifts on the tiller and one of two hours for a total of 55 miles." After almost four days of this agonizingly slow work, a 45-knot front forced Reeves to hunker down and deploy his drogue for 24 hours just 150 miles from the entrance to Bahia Cook. When he was able to make his final push for the craggy Chilean coast the next day, Reeves worried that the big swell that had been running would make the mouth of Cook's Bay impassable. "But this [was] not the case. Mostly. That said, I don't want to lie ahull here overnight. Too dangerous for tonight's gale force winds from the NW. Gotta push on." Reeves found time to appreciate the impromptu setting. "Night is coming on. I am both fatigued and elated. It's this place! Beagle Channel. Such history." Reeves recounted the exploits in these waters of Magellan, Captain James Cook, Captain Fitzroy on the Beagle (with Charles Darwin as a passenger) and Sir Francis Drake. "Somewhere near here, [Joshua] Slocum spread tacks on the deck of Spray as protection against marauding Fuegans." As night fell, the wind picked up to 25 knots, coming at first from the stern, then clocking around to the bow. Reeves was following his chartplotter, but "Too late I realize that the land form on the radar and on the chart do not agree. I feel a
Spread: Scenes from the high latitudes. Inset: Randall Reeves had to use his drogue and sit out a 45-knot, purple-blob gale in the midst of his hand-steering odyssey to the Chilean coast.
