d n a s m r Sto
s e t Pira by Kitty and Scott Kuhner New York Station
M
ost people have no idea what it’s like to be out on the ocean away from our very comfortable lifestyle here in the United States. Back in the early 1970s, Kitty and I spent four years circumnavigating the globe on our 30-foot Allied Seawind ketch, Bebinka. When we returned home to Westport, Connecticut, the first thing that friends asked was, “Weren’t you afraid of storms?”
We’d never been much afraid of storms because whenever the wind started to blow, we would heave to and ride out the bad weather. However, on July 14, 1974, midway between Cape Hatteras and Bermuda and only 500 miles from completing the voyage, we got caught in a fearsome storm and finally understood why others were always so concerned about such things. When the wind started to come up, we hove to. A few hours later, the wind continued to build, and the roar was deafening. The wind-speed indicator showed 70 knots. We took all sails down and lay ahull. We became lulled by the apparent calm from the way Bebinka was riding out the storm, heeling over with the wind. That changed in the middle of the night, when we fell off a wave and hit a trough upside down with such force that the main hatch blew right off, as did the teak grab rails on the cabin top, our spray dodger, and our self-steering wind vane. Kitty and I had been down below, and as Bebinka fell over, we both rolled onto the cabin top. As we righted, the now-open hatch scooped up so much water that down below it came up to the level of the bunks. When we fully righted, I looked out and saw that the life raft was still in the cockpit. I thought, at least we still had a safety net. I thanked the Lord that it was
Bebinka headed for the Panama Canal.
there, because had it been on deck, it would have been blown off with the rest of the stuff. I grabbed the piece of plywood that had been over the life raft to keep us from stepping on it and bolted it over the open companionway to prevent more waves from breaking over us and coming down below. Meanwhile, Kitty grabbed the big wastebasket that had been in the galley and ferociously started scooping up water, dumping it out the companionway. The next morning, we reviewed all the damage. Seeing that everything had been blown off the cabin top and even the main boom had broken in two, we couldn’t believe we had survived. We thankfully saw that the mast was still standing, no doubt because in New Zealand we had rerigged with galvanized steel two sizes bigger than we’d had previously. We had also taken both the jibs below and furled and tied the main and mizzen sails to the boom. After cleaning up the mess down below, issue 61 2019
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