23rd March 2015
“
Chinese crash gybe” on Dongfeng - crew ok, nothing broken, but paid the price in energy and time!
“Quite a few of us had never done one before, and we had to wait until we were on a Chinese boat to do it…” Yann Riou exclaimed.
It had been on the cards - Yann tweeted direct from the boat a few hours before, at the start of a very dark night - “30 knots of wind, very dark, shifty, gusts. Very difficult to drive now.. ”
When you scream down the face of a wave in the pitch black, with only the blurred glow of the wind instruments to guide the helmsman along with his ‘feel’ and the apparent wind on the back of his head, it is very easy to steer the boat just that bit too low and go in to an involuntary gybe - this kind of ‘crash’ can happen very quickly, but take a long time to sort out!
Yann continues “Anyway. Pitch black night, boat ends up heeled on its side, and took two to three hours to put everything in order again. About 300 litres of water inside the boat via the aft air vent, then via my bunk, my sleeping bag and finally the entire boat. I’ve filmed a bit but it was really dark so no idea what the result of it will be like. At least a GoPro and a camera dead, as far as I am concerned.
I’ll film a bit outside now, it’s incredible conditions. Then I’ll go to sleep. Haven’t slept more than 2 hours these past 24 hours. I’m exhausted.”
A “Chinese gybe” in this context is a gybe caused when a boat rolls excessively to windward (usually when running downwind), causing an unexpected and uncontrolled crash gybe. The boat then gets pinned down with everything on the wrong side - boom, headsail, swinging keel - it takes some time to release and reset everything to bring her back upright. And then the inside of the boat takes a long time to clear up and dry out in this case!
With what was the windward air vent open, once the boat was pinned down on the wrong side, the water will have come straight in to the boat. There are dinghy style hatch covers that can be screwed in place - but equally they are there to let the air in to the fresh air starved interior of the boat, and its not often that you expect the windward side of the boat to be under the water in this way. We suspect some other damage has been done as the boat since has been sailing higher than expected, so they may have needed to change sails - or simply sail a bit more conservatively than before. More news to come once Yann and the guys are back on track from this ‘little’ Southern Ocean classic moment…a quick tweet from Yann confirmed a few hours after the mishap “Nothing broken but a lot energy and time lost”.
First Chinese gybe for the Chinese too!
Een filmpje uit 2008/2009 toen Team Russia een Chinese gybe had
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d89-0-lp7yIK