At last the preparations were completed, the ladies said their goodbyes to several young bucks who had been attracted to good looking, party loving female sailors and we cast off from the dock at Rush Cutters Bay. I was feeling fairly confident with my new-found associates. After working with Jack and watching him prepping the boat, it was clear that he knew what he was doing. He and the ladies, Kris, Nancy and Barbara now after sailing the Pacific and having encountered many and varied challenges, were very self-confident and knew their way around the boat and the ocean. And the boat, tho beamy and slow, was extremely trustworthy.
Ta’aroa was a fifty-foot, gaff-rigged ketch constructed mostly of teak and mahogany. A ketch has two masts, the forward mast is the taller and the aft mast, the mizzen, is forward of the helm. In general, there are two basic sail configurations – Marconi and gaff rigged. With the first, the sail is triangular with the leading edge attached to the mast, the bottom attached to the boom and when raised up, the sail’s hypotenuse runs from the top of the mast to the end of the boom. Now, with a gaff-rig, the sail shape is like a four-sided irregular polygon (surely you remember from hi-school geometry that a four-sided irregular polygon is a four-sided object with no side being equal nor parallel to any of the other three). The leading edge still runs up the mast and the bottom edge along the boom, but now there is a shorter boom which slides up and down the mast holding the top edge of the sail. The difference between these configurations is that the Marconi gets the top of the sail much higher while the gaff-rigged gets more sail up, but not as high. The gaff-rig is more frequently used with cruising sailboats because it can capture some higher breezes and so keeps moving in light air, the Marconi is used more for racing because it requires much more attention to keep the boat moving in the same light conditions. On Ta’aroa, both the main and the mizzen sails were gaff-rigged, so while slow, she didn’t need anywhere near as much attention as a Marconi rig. She also had a jib which is the forwardmost triangular sail and a staysail behind the jib and forward of the mainmast.
Turns out the crew I replaced was a mechanical genius while I’m sometimes challenged with getting the ignition key into the correct hole. (I do, however, have other mostly latent talents.) The upshot was that when sea water began being forced into the engine exhaust flooding the engine and rendering it inoperable, I was helpless to correct the problem. Not wanting the situation to get any worse, Jack offered a three-minute shower to anyone who volunteered to go over the transom and jam some cloth into the exhaust, preventing any further damage. Much as I would have loved a shower, three minutes in the shower would have not helped my seasickness. Fortunately, Jack and I were the strength crew members and so were disqualified from going over. Kris, his girlfriend, volunteered. She stripped down to a bikini. We arranged a line around her midsection handled by the other crew and Jack and I wrestled her over holding on to her legs. She was getting hit with every incoming wave, but bravely, after several attempts, jammed the cloth plug into place, was hauled back and went off to take her shower. Sometime later she decided, it was not worth it