[quote=2out2sea]well, i'm hoping that my old monohull stories will be accepted here as the only cat story i have is pitchpoling a h16 20+ years ago.
here goes...we were in the midst of a transatlantic delivery on a custom ron holland designed 88' cutter rigged sloop. there were 7 of us and we had a 4 hour rotating watch schedule. the weather out of tortola was good for the first couple of days. we had a 6-8' quartering sea on a broad reach and about 15kts of breeze. our vmg was steady at around 10kts. almost perfect. but, it was well into the summer storm season and late to be doing a crossing.
sure enough about day 4 the winds starting picking up. the seas built slowly, but steadily. it all culminated on my watch at about 3am (doesn't it always happen like that). the seas eventually built to 15'+ and were very unorganized. there was a steady driving rain and the wind which had been blowing a steady 20kts bumped up to 30 on the anemometer. i watched as the wind speed went from 30 to 40. then it went from 40-50. finally it topped out at 60kts. we were sailing under a storm tri-sail with the main safely furled at this point. the seas were chaotic and i was glad to be clipped into my lifeline. as we surfed off of the backside of waves and passed the theoretical hull speed everything would start to resonate and hum. the boat would shudder and i could feel the cavitation over the rudder as we surfed at up to 18kts off of the big rollers. there was a huge rooster tail shooting out of the back of the boat making a hissing sound that you could hear after the boat would slow into wave troughs and the humming/resonating would diminish.
after about 2 hours of this we started having alarms going off for flooding in the forward compartment. all of the crew was awake at this point and ran to check. turns out someone had left the door to the forecastle open and the entire forward compartment was taking on water through the anchor howse each time we buried the bow into a wave crest.
the forecastle hatch was sealed and the pumps started doing their job, but the forecastle was completely full of sea water. the forecastle was about 10-20sqft and stored all of the fenders and lines for the boat. with the watertight hatch secured the pressure in the forecastle must have been astronomical each time the bow was buried into a wave. finally the deck hatch hinges on the forecastle failed and the 4'x4' aluminum hatch was blown off of it's hinges and into the sea!
we spent at least another 1/2 day sailing through that craziness. we had a 10* bow down attitude b/c of the forecastle flooding. things finally settled down and we were able to put into to faial, azores for repairs. i'll talk about the seized up engines and sailing an 88' sloop into a slip with only bowthrusters in the next installment.[/quote]
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