I just finished two very tough weeks an extremely tough year. I am originally from Louisiana so my stories are a little long and embellished by about fifteen percent for story value. You can always choose to quit reading if you wish.

Catastrophe
The story begins at the "Round the Island" race last year where we capsized my Supercat 20 Tall Rig in Destin Pass and broke the mast when the boat went turtle and the current carried us back through the bridge. The week I got back home my pregnant wife was put on bed rest for the next five month. She was not even allowed to pick up our 18 month old daughter. Things were so hectic that I did not even have time to pull the sails out of the sail box on the trailer. To add more chaos to the situation we moved from our condo into a house one week before the due date. Apparently you can't raise two kids in a two bedroom condo even if it is on the beach. The pregnancy went to term and our son was born very healthy on November 8th.

Rebuild
Last month we started to get caught up and I got the go ahead to start putting the boat back together. The three main issues on the boat were the broken mast, torn mainsail and a hole in the top of boat caused by being dragged over a metal channel buoy. Luckily I had a spare short rig mast and sails from my old Supercat 20 that was destroyed by Hurricane Wilma the day after my wedding (another story). I pulled everything out of the sail box and evaluated all the damage. Surprising the sails were in the same shape as when I put them in the box. The salt water helped deter algae and bacteria.

Now that I had a good idea what was damaged, I could start putting the boat back together. The hole in the boat was small and not in a high stress area and was easy to fix. I purchased a bench swagger so I could make my own rigging. I used all the rigging from the tall rig mast and cut it down to fit the short rig. I knew the fittings were stressed but the cable was new. The boat came together fine but I was not able to finish fitting the screacher because I was waiting on parts.

I had a good plan for the Macho Man race in Tampa. I was going to go up Thursday and set up the boat. Friday I was going to the St Pete Grand Prix to get some photos of qualifying of a client and meet with a potential new client. Saturday was the race. As with all my best laid plans, they completely fell apart. My daughter got sick on Wednesday so I had to babysit her Thursday morning while my wife met with the accountant. While watching her, my hard drive on my laptop crashed and I had to reformat the hard drive. On Friday, I had to finish loading my computer so I could work and finish up on a few items on my boat.

Macho Man
I finally got to Davis Island at sunset. I was racing with Bruce McKeever but he was not able to arrive till 11. Before I started building the boat I met John Casey, Karl Lagerfeld and other for some needed dinner. I had the mast up by the time Bruce arrived and we elected to rig the spin in the morning when we could see well.

The morning of the race we had some problems rigging the screacher and were late for the start. In hind sight we should have left the screacher behind and started on time. The wind was strong and picked up more the closer to the Skyway ridge we got. About a mile before the bridge we passed a fleet of monohul boats and one of the yelled something at us. We could not hear him so we proceeded. By this time, the wind was gusting to thirty and the seas were about a four foot chop and beating us up. The round hulls of the Supercat do not like chop. As we closed in on the bridge, I finally looked up and noticed one batten in the mainsail was missing and three other were a third the way out. There was no place we could stop to fix the main and if we tried to make the bridge/inlet we would have shredded the main. After running out of options, we decided to head back and save the boat for the Miami-Key Largo race the following weekend.

On the way home I realized I was really sick and I had to stop and take a nap on the way home. I spent all day and night Sunday in bed. I got whatever my daughter had and was trying to deny it all weekend but it really hit me hard once I got on the road.

Miami-Key Largo
After I recouped a little and got caught up on some work, I tackled my "To Do" list on the boat to prep for Miami Key Largo. At the top of the list was to find out why the battens all came out. After a careful inspection, I noticed the ones that came out had more batten sticking out of the pocket than the rest. The battens are secured by Velcro and the longer the batten the shorter the Velcro holding them in. The fix was easy, shorten the longer battens.

Thursday Rob Behrend who was supposed to be doing the race with me had to cancel for work reasons. Luckily for me, Eric Arbogast did not finish painting his boat and was available but could not get off work Friday. I ended up building the boat solo again which is a lot of work. The boat is twelve feet wide and has to be completely disassembled to fit on the eight foot wide trailer. Eric arrived in time to raise the mast. We also learned our lesson and rigged the screacher that night.

It is now race day morning and I was the first one to start rigging at the yacht club. I was determined not to be late for the start. I rigged the boat fairly quickly and loaded the safety equipment, radio (am/fm/cd) and supplies. It is now 6:45 am and Eric has not arrived and he is not answering his cell phone. About 7am I get a call from Eric, he just woke up at home in Davie. We finally crossed the start almost an hour late. If he would have called 20 minutes later, I was probably going to do the race solo.

We had a great sail. We passed the last monohulls and caught up with the tail end of the multihull at Midnight Pass. We were sailing the rhumb line and managed to catch a lot of the boats that were shadowing the west shore of the bay as we converged at Midnight pass. It was extremely shallow in the pass and Eric had to jump out once to keep the boat from Tacking. Less than a hundred yards from the finish, Eric dropped our number and we had to yell our number to the committee boat. The number was picked up by another boat and given to us at Gilberts.

Our plans for ground crew had fallen through like all my original plans and we sailed the boat back to the Miami Yacht Club on Sunday in very light tail winds. We got an early start (finally) and had winds less than 5mph for the first couple hours. Sunday was not a total loss though, we got to run the screacher all the way to Miami probably covering more than 70 miles gybing the whole way.

Hope you enjoyed the story. I left out lots of items like how come the outside of one of the hulls has been stripped of the pin stripes and not the rest of the boat. It also helped me put things in perspective.

Craig Van Eaton