Thursday, May 20, 1999
By Thatcher Drew
Turtle Knocked Out at Hatteras
Cape Hatteras (Diamond Shoals) is the darndest sight. The beach ends in a sharp point – even sharper than the chart shows, and right there, not ten yards away, the sea looks exactly like the water in a washing machine.
Have you ever held the button down and tried to watch your clothes being washed? The water spits up in your face? That’s exactly what happens off the Cape. It churns and churns until it just spits right straight up in the air eight or ten feet. The locals call them "piss-ups." They happen when the Labrador current meets the Gulf Stream. I had always figured they were something that happens a mile off shore, and then only rarely, but no. Instead of surf rolling in you see these churning seas and about ten times a minute, why there’s a piss-up.
Piss-ups are real. They’re big, and Turtle hit head-on going 12 knots. The boat was thrown five feet in the air. Another piss-up erupted under a hull. Over went the boat. Pop went the shroud. Down went the mast, and Turtle was out of the race for good.
She floated out there for about 45 minutes. Every once and a while the spinnaker would balloon out as if they were trying to rig a sail. Korakis and MacDonald got a close-up view of a whole lot of piss-ups, and were churned around until the famous Hatteras rescue service sent a jet ski and an inflatable (they don’t use oarsmen in rescue boats any more) out to rescue the sailors.
They dropped Korakis right on the point of the Cape. "It was a pretty big wave. I’ve never had a cat that high in the air before. It was like being on a giant windsurfer. This thing was up there. It was wild."
MacDonald came in a few minutes later. "Think about it. If we had lost the mast just two hundred yards up the beach, we could have rigged a sail and sailed downwind and landed on the beach. We could have fixed the boat and continued the race… We only had a hundred miles to go."
They did pretty well for having bought their boat a few weeks before the race. They had never sailed a Nacra before. They had never flown a spinnaker from a catamaran before. They were the last rookies left on the course. Everyone tried to find the silver lining in this cloud.
Korakis: "The good thing is now I am going windsurfing. It’s honking. I’m going to get my board and go off the beach up here."
MacDonald: "I saw Randy replacing his shrouds. We didn’t have any spares. We’ll be back next year and we’ll have shrouds."
Mike Worrell: "The good thing is it wasn’t raining out there. Can you imagine that scene if it was raining?"
