Once Upon a Gypsy Moon Read Online Free
Author: Michael Hurley
estimation of one surveyor, and well equipped for flights of fancy. She was my partner in the continuing quest I had begun as a boy on Chesapeake Bay. She was a tangible reminder that despite all that had occurred to make my life so much smaller, there was still a reason to dream big dreams and a means to attain them.
The fire we endure has a way of refining us and giving us a kind of rebirth. In time, new parts of my life eventually bloomed. As you read this memoir, you will learn of these blossoms and blessings, none of which would ever have appeared but for the fire in my life.
It was once famously said that Italy produced the Renaissance despite thirty years of war and struggle, while Switzerland had only the cuckoo clock to show for its many centuries of peace and harmony. Despite the struggles I faced, I well know that whatever comes of my efforts now is likely to be much closer to a cuckoo clock than to Da Vinci, but perhaps it will be a better clock than I might otherwise have made, or at least one that can tell the time. Time will tell.
So you see, August 2009 was a place of pause in my life. A moment of slack tide—that quiet hour right after something huge and once inexorable has been spent and just before something altogether new begins to move in another direction entirely. Whether such a time is the calm before the storm or that darkest hour before the dawn is a thing we can know only after we are carried off in it, as the tide waits for no man. But whatever it was, and wherever it was going, on that sunny afternoon near Annapolis, Maryland, I was not about to miss it.
Chapter 5
Preparations for Sea
The Gypsy Moon had undergone various repairs and improvements in preparation for the contingencies of an extended voyage, the need for some of which I had come to appreciate the hard way. Two years earlier, during her maiden voyage to the Bahamas, she had brushed shoulders with Tropical Storm Barry as it moved across Florida on the second of June—the first time a cyclone had come so close to those islands so early in the season in four decades. Wandering in the Abacos, far from VHF weather-radio broadcasts, I was caught unaware by remnants of the passing storm. As I made a run across fifty miles of open water from Great Sale Cay for the harbor at West End, my headsail shredded in high winds, and the sheets fouled the roller furling. Unable to make sail or lower sail, I learned then the value of old-fashioned hank-on jibs that go up when you pull the halyard and come down the same way. So one of the first changes made to the Gypsy Moon in preparation for this solo voyage was the removal of the roller furling and the replacement of the head stay.
The decision to take down a $2,000 roller furling system and switch to hanked-on headsails was a nod toward the reliability of a simple nineteenth-century design over the convenience of modern technology. Roller furling became common in the early 1980s. It allows a helmsman, while seated in the comfort of the cockpit, to deploy or stow the headsail merely by pulling a line wrapped around a drum at the base of the forestay. The line spins the drum, the drum spins the forestay, and the jib—tucked into a groove in the forestay like a window shade—furls or unfurls as the forestay swivels, depending on the direction in which you pull the line.
On a pleasant day’s sail on the bay, roller furling is a convenient thing to have. It eliminates the need to put down your gin and tonic to travel to the foredeck to raise or lower the headsail. In a rising wind on the open ocean, however, with the risk of the line fouling in a rat’s nest in the drum and the helmsman unable to retrieve or lower a flogging headsail, it is (in my opinion) of little convenience at all. Moreover, the thin fabric of sails appropriate for light winds is nothing like the cardboard-thick storm jib needed for heavy weather. You can’t accomplish that sail change with roller furling. You’ve got to
The fire we endure has a way of refining us and giving us a kind of rebirth. In time, new parts of my life eventually bloomed. As you read this memoir, you will learn of these blossoms and blessings, none of which would ever have appeared but for the fire in my life.
It was once famously said that Italy produced the Renaissance despite thirty years of war and struggle, while Switzerland had only the cuckoo clock to show for its many centuries of peace and harmony. Despite the struggles I faced, I well know that whatever comes of my efforts now is likely to be much closer to a cuckoo clock than to Da Vinci, but perhaps it will be a better clock than I might otherwise have made, or at least one that can tell the time. Time will tell.
So you see, August 2009 was a place of pause in my life. A moment of slack tide—that quiet hour right after something huge and once inexorable has been spent and just before something altogether new begins to move in another direction entirely. Whether such a time is the calm before the storm or that darkest hour before the dawn is a thing we can know only after we are carried off in it, as the tide waits for no man. But whatever it was, and wherever it was going, on that sunny afternoon near Annapolis, Maryland, I was not about to miss it.
Chapter 5
Preparations for Sea
The Gypsy Moon had undergone various repairs and improvements in preparation for the contingencies of an extended voyage, the need for some of which I had come to appreciate the hard way. Two years earlier, during her maiden voyage to the Bahamas, she had brushed shoulders with Tropical Storm Barry as it moved across Florida on the second of June—the first time a cyclone had come so close to those islands so early in the season in four decades. Wandering in the Abacos, far from VHF weather-radio broadcasts, I was caught unaware by remnants of the passing storm. As I made a run across fifty miles of open water from Great Sale Cay for the harbor at West End, my headsail shredded in high winds, and the sheets fouled the roller furling. Unable to make sail or lower sail, I learned then the value of old-fashioned hank-on jibs that go up when you pull the halyard and come down the same way. So one of the first changes made to the Gypsy Moon in preparation for this solo voyage was the removal of the roller furling and the replacement of the head stay.
The decision to take down a $2,000 roller furling system and switch to hanked-on headsails was a nod toward the reliability of a simple nineteenth-century design over the convenience of modern technology. Roller furling became common in the early 1980s. It allows a helmsman, while seated in the comfort of the cockpit, to deploy or stow the headsail merely by pulling a line wrapped around a drum at the base of the forestay. The line spins the drum, the drum spins the forestay, and the jib—tucked into a groove in the forestay like a window shade—furls or unfurls as the forestay swivels, depending on the direction in which you pull the line.
On a pleasant day’s sail on the bay, roller furling is a convenient thing to have. It eliminates the need to put down your gin and tonic to travel to the foredeck to raise or lower the headsail. In a rising wind on the open ocean, however, with the risk of the line fouling in a rat’s nest in the drum and the helmsman unable to retrieve or lower a flogging headsail, it is (in my opinion) of little convenience at all. Moreover, the thin fabric of sails appropriate for light winds is nothing like the cardboard-thick storm jib needed for heavy weather. You can’t accomplish that sail change with roller furling. You’ve got to
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