At my age it shouldn’t still surprise me as how quickly things can go from going along, enjoying the present to “O sh ...!” For instance, one moment you’re sitting on the foredeck preparing to douse the spinnaker, still savoring the sensation of an almost-flawless crossing of the Strait of Juan DeFuca, run through Cattle Pass, and up the Friday Harbor Channel. The next moment you’re floundering around under a tangle of sail fabric with lots of questions racing through your mind. Or am I the only one that’s happened to?

Without a clear idea of what was going on, I continued doing what I’d intended to do all along, stuff things down the forward hatch. In that process I quickly realized that I had been covered not only by a fairly light spinnaker but also a much heavier 150 Genoa. The next realization came once both sails were down in the V-berth: I only had five lines to deal with and not the six that ought to be there. In fact, the jib halyard was right where it had been all along: the end at the top of the mast.

Since Friday Harbor is one of the busiest ports in Puget Sound, its entrance is a bad place to try and troubleshoot a problem. Therefore, I waited until we were safely tied up at our assigned slip on H Dock before analyzing my situation. A look through binoculars confirmed the suspicion that the snap shackle on the jib halyard had, true to its name, snapped open.

I had unrolled the Genoa in order to blanket the spinnaker and make it easier to douse in the fresh breeze and wind shift we’d encountered after Turn Island. Apparently, I hadn’t fallen off to lee far enough and air flowing around the Genny had lifted the spinnaker, allowing the spinnaker halyard to pop open the jib shackle.

I also observed that on the boat directly in front of us a young child was joyfully swinging back and forth across the bow on a bo’sun’s chair that had been rigged up on a spinnaker pole. Shortly thereafter, I was in the bo’sun’s chair. Susan, although lighter than I, is terrified of heights. Two sturdy young men attempted to lift me up the mast to no avail. Even my sturdiest winches weren’t up to the task.

Plan B, of course, was to go find a bar and think things over. The challenge of retrieving something from the top of a 38-foot mast is daunting, and I faced the possibility of wasting a couple of days motoring into Everett to have the mast de-stepped.

In the meantime, Susan was outside having a cigarette and a conversation with a guy who worked for the marina. The conversation continued back inside the bar while I bought a couple more rounds of drinks. The plan that evolved was ingenious and combined the fact that the marina had a couple of fairly long pike poles and the pedestrian walkway out to the breakwater and seaplane dock was a dozen or so feet above the water.

The next morning, with Nauti Dog tied moored to a floating dock below the elevated walkway, I tried to put the plan into action. But long as the pike pole was, I still couldn’t touch the jib shackle. Duct taping the second pike pole to the first one enabled me to reach out and touch the shackle, but now the resultant pole was too heavy and ungainly for me to do more than occasionally tag the shackle during a swipe.

The addition of a length of coat-hanger to the end of the pole didn’t increase the effectiveness of the technique, but made it look less like an ingenious solution and more like a Wiley E. Coyote plan for catching roadrunners.

I had also tried running the mainsail halyard over to the far railing on the walkway in an effort to heel the boat over and bring the top of the mast closer. Pulling as hard as I could and only getting the boat to heel slightly more than five degrees gave me an insight as to how the term heavy air came to be.

You can understand my desire to have been performing all of this in the privacy of some out of the way location. As it was, I was providing entertainment for quite a number of spectators. Susan, on the other hand, saw it as an opportunity. At first she finished answering questions by assuring the person that if they could retrieve the shackle and halyard, they’d win a bottle of Scotch. Soon she was performing like a carnival barker, openly advertising the offer to any within earshot.

One spectator was Jeremiah, a deckhand from a fishing boat. After watching my struggles for a time he casually approached. “You want me to get that down for you?”
“Oh, if you would, PLEASE!”

Following a brief discussion, Susan returned to F Dock to borrow the bo’sun’s chair from our erstwhile neighbors, I prepared the mainsail and spinnaker halyards, and Jeremiah quickly tied a complex but elegant knot he referred to as a Spanish Bowline.

The combination of the Spanish Bowline and the bo’sun’s chair worked like a mast climber; Jeremiah would sit in the chair, slip the bowline up the mast a foot or so, then stand up in its twin loops while Susan and I each cranked a winch to raise the chair. With a brief pause to move the bowline above the spreaders, Jeremiah soon reached the top of the mast, untangled the jib halyard and threaded it down to us on the deck.

He accepted my profuse thanks with nonchalance. He declined my offer of a bottle of Scotch but said he did like rum. Then returned to the boat he’d been working on. While Susan made a trip up town for the most expensive bottle of rum she could find.

I returned the borrowed items and then reconfigured Nauti Dog to continue on our journey. This time when I attached the Genoa to the halyard I ensured the shackle would stay closed by securing it with two sturdy cable ties and some electrical tape. Shortly after noon, we dodged traffic out of Friday Harbor and back into the channel.

Lessons learned: Shackles that snap open and closed when you want them to can also do that when you don’t. In a crisis, sometimes a trip to the bar is the best action. You can still depend on the kindness of strangers, especially the ones you meet on the water.

Mike Farley, Nauti Dog