OK...Here's the story.
I'm out with my relatively new crew, teaching them the intricacies of flying a kite. It's blowing hard out of the northwest so we find a stretch of water that has a headland that allows us to set in ten knots of wind and then do a long run as the wind continues to build as we sail away from the protected shore. It's a gusty northwesterly so I'm telling them how to choke a chute when the boat starts to oscillate and roll. Everything goes according to plan. They're getting it.
We dose the chute in a near-perfect takedown and head up into the wind. We're beating back up to our original set point. This time everyone is feeling pretty cocky. We've surfed down the run, did a takedown and hardened up. Everything is sweet.
As we're heading back upwind, I suggest we use a lobster pot as our windward turning mark. We can see how good we really are. We'll come into the pot on starboard tack, do a quick hoist, and surf back down the course. All's going smoothly.
As we get to the mark, I call out "Up she goes!" The halyard man runs the kite up without a hitch. The crew on the guy pulls back on his line, which is wrapped around the secondary winch on the cabin top, and I look up at the masthead Windex to make sure I've got the perfect course to take off downwind.
Suddenly, I hear this big "chunk" sound. "Shit," I say to myself, "somebody forgot to lock a winch handle in place and it's just bounced on the deck and is on it's way overboard...there goes $80.00."
At the same time, I hear another sound which is the round retaining ring that holds the winch drum in place falling into the cockpit. My eyes look around the cabin top and there is the exposed winch gearing system staring me in the face. "Oh, shit!" I'm thinking. I't not $80.00 overboard, it's $500.00!"
Somehow, at some point during the season, the retaining clip from the winch had come off and through the season, it had just sat there. What probably happened is that we had a gear-busting race the previous Sunday where winds were reaching 27 mph and someone probably caught a piece of clothing on the ring and pulled it off without knowing it. With the spin sheet wrapped around it on Wednesday night, there was probably just enough upward pressure to pull the drum off the spindle. As they say, "the rest is history."
As luck would have it, my mainsheet man had his gps operating and punched the MOB button, so we know approximately where it went overboard...in 17 feet of water...and a muddy bottom. So long winch drum!
That's the story. Pretty bizarre, but then, that's sailing.
Bob Rude
