This weekend autumn finally caught up with us on the east coast. We were racing in Annapolis at the Eastport Yacht Club on Saturday and practicing Sunday with Stu McNay’s new (to him) Melges 24. We sailed with US Sailing team members Dave Hughes and Brian Boyd as well as former Georgetown women’s team captain Jackie Schmitz covering pit. All in a given weekend, we had good tacks and bad tacks, good sets bad sets, we hooked a crab-pot so badly that we had to douse the spinnaker, go head to wind, and back down to get the darn thing off, we even saved a guy. No joke, we actually saved a J80 sailor’s life. The breeze was up in the teens, and the first cool dry air of this fall made for some blustery and chilly conditions. The J80 fleet had finished ahead of us and we were just pulling the spinnaker down after the finish when we saw something in the water just ahead. I could barely get the words out to Stu before we almost ran over the guy, “Turn right! There’s a guy in the water!” Somehow one of the J80’s had lost a man overboard. As we luckily missed him we understood very quickly that he was in trouble. “Help me!,” he screamed as we slid past still in the process of taking the chute down only fifteen seconds after finishing the race. We realized that the J80s were circling unsuccessfully to pick the guy up and we immediately jibed onto port and tacked back towards the target. It couldn’t have been more than twenty more seconds after we went past that we had him along side and he clawed onto Dave Hughes’ arms on the mid-bow. We handed him off to the low-scoop transom of the Melges 24 and hauled him aboard. After a cursory scan for bleeding we asked the guy’s name: “Jim.” That’s all he said for the next ten minutes. I made sure to keep a hand on him in case he keeled over. The guy was shaking, not so much from the cold as from shock. The water was nearly 65 degrees, but we had no idea how long he’d been in the water, and without a lifejacket and in full foul weather gear, there was no doubt Jim had been in the water far too long for his comfort. Judging by how heavy he and his water-logged gear was when we pulled him aboard, I’m not sure he would have been able to swim much longer. We offered him some gatorade and another jacket and then waved the mark-set boat over to us. We couldn’t figure out why that boat hadn’t picked him up until they tried to make a landing on the Melges 24. We finally came side by side the whaler and helped Jim off our boat onto the committee boat, with instructions to take him directly to the dock. We sailed by Jim’s boat “Puffinator” and informed them that the guy was clearly in shock and possibly hypothermia and that we’d told the committee boat to take him in. Not entirely sure they’d understood, they sailed off towards the dock and about a minute later, just long enough for us to figure out what had just happened, much less ready us for the next race, the five minute gun went off and we were back racing.
I guess, if Jim or anybody from the Eastport YC is reading this, Stu, Brian, Dave, Jackie and I are curious to make sure that Jim’s alright. We never saw the boat when we got back to the dock. I just hope the guy gets a decent life jacket for next time he goes out racing. Who are we to say, but I’m not sure that the guy would have been picked up had we not nearly run him over and then spun round to get him. All of us and sailors in general should be a bit better trained in our MOB drills and have a protocol in terms of throwing a life-jacket and then getting into a position for pickup as fast as possible. I never thought that a weekend racing series would demand that kind of seamanship, but I’m glad that Stu and the rest of our team had the wherewithal to recognize what was happening then the skill to get back and get a hold of him in such short order.
More to come from this weekend and how the racing actually went. Hopefully we hear something from Jim and we’ll be able to get back to you about his impressions.
Jay kehoe
Nice Job with the MOB the Morning Light coaching must have come in handy.
Back to the racing… how did it go?
Bill
Great work picking up the MOB. Jim is apparently okay. Got hit in the head by the boom by an auto-gybe just after finishing, which knocked him off the boat. Props to you guys for your quick reaction and ability to assess and take control of the situation by picking him up. Many thanks on behalf of EYC.
