News Archive
24 June 2006
Adrian tip-toes past the dragon
'Since making my turn at the antipodal point, I have moved beyond the reach of the north east trades. Winds will now become much more variable, particularly as I approacch and transit the "horse latitudes" between 30 degrees and 40 degrees north, some 300 miles from my current position. The name is derived from a bygone sea faring age when horse-carrying ships became beset in the frequent calms and soaring summer temperatures (as I write I have a wet cloth draped across my shoulders to catch the sweat dripping from my face and neck). Without sufficient water to sustain crew and livestock, the horses were thrown over the side (or perhaps eaten?).
A high pressure system is centred directly over me, so very little wind. The sky is blue, the sea calm. But this is a dangerous area. The typhoon (translated from Chinese to mean "Great Wind") season has begun - Japan was hit last month - news I learnt while in Honolulu. I am in the path that typhoons tend to track along. These systems can develop suddenly and move with ferocious velocity. For the moment though, I have only the warm zephyrs of the dragon's breath to propel me north.
The other danger comes from rogue waves and tsunami. The Izu-Ogasawara and Japan trenchs, submarine cracks in the earth's crust ten miles beneath my keel, run along Japan's eastern seaboard. As a child living in Yokohama, I remember the frequency of earth tremors as these tectonic plates jarred and slid against one another. A teacher's instruction to get beneath our desks as the classroom vibrated was almost as routine as basic arithmetic and playing marbles in the wire-meshed recreation compound.
My defence against a hurricane is a piece of equipment called a Jordan Series Drogue - constructed specially for Barrabas and flown over from the US just prior to my departure. It is a 300-foot length of one and a half inch braided line into which are sewn 160 mini drogues or pararchutes each of about 8-inch diameter. (They are similar to the parachute of my childhood "Action Man" and tested by hurling him from the eighteenth storey of our apartment building in Hong Kong. He''s still MIA!)
The JSD, designed by a former US aeronautical engineer and sailor, Don Jordon and developed with the US Coast Guard was conceived in the aftermath of the Fastnet and Sydney-Hobart disasters. The drogue is deployed from the stern and will bring the stern to wind and sea thereby and reducing risk of broach (sideways knockdown as happened to Barrabas at Cape Horn) or worse, side impact from a breaking wave which could roll the boat 360. Its effect is also to slow the boat (carrying no sail or just a handkerchief of headsail). The sensation is apparently as though the boat were attached to a giant bungee. I had two steel brackets welded to the aft edge of the after deck to which the drogue's bridles are attached. The JSD is stowed on deck ready for rapid deployment.
But for now, the dragon sleeps.'