So, rather than sailing, we were moving under the power of our little outboard motor. Lake Erie was as flat and smooth as a mirror. Everything was calm and peaceful; everything, except our 3 hp outboard which was valiently trying to "kick up a storm."
The race was scheduled to start the following day, and if we wanted to have a reasonable sleep prior to the start, we were under some pressure to get to Mentor. It was already past noon and under power, we had a long way yet to go. A weather forecast we managed to get hold of gave us the hope that we would not have to motor the whole way across the lake.
A cold front, we were told was starting to move in our direction. Winds of up to 40 knots were expected and small craft warnings were up along the whole length of the lake. Having crossed half way across the lake under power, this sounded like wonderful news. "Hurray, we will be sailing!" Our vessel, a 22 ft, Alberg designed MORC (Midget Ocean Racing) sloop was not a big vessel, but past experience had proven her to be quite seaworthy. Small craft warnings were nothing much to worry about.
The first squall of the cold front reached us around 1500. A breeze came up, stiffened until it blew 25 to 30 knots. With great relief we had cut the motor and set our sails. The wind was whistling in the rigging and our vessel moved along sprightly for Mentor Harbor.
A little while later, the squall was over, leaving us becalmed once more. Then, other difficulties began. I tried to verify our dead reckoning (DR) position with the RDF (Radio Direction Finder) we had on board. But for some strange reason, I was totally unsuccessful. Not one of the many fixes I worked out bore any resemblence to our DR position. Most of them placed us far to the west of were we believed ourselves to be. It was only when the RDF tried to persuade us that, really, we weren't on Lake Erie at all, but somewhere on Lake Huron, that I gave up trying. These results, surely, proved that we were better off to ddisregard all my previous "fixes".
Before too long, the next squall arrived. This time it blew from the east. Once more the wind speed was around 30 knots, and once more the spray flew as TALARIA forged ahead. But this squall too was short-lived. And so it went; the wind blew nicely, little Talaria flew along happily, and then the wind was gone and we sat there, going absolutely nowhere. Squall followed squall; each bringing wind from a different quarter. The winds came, as I seem to remember from every possible direction. But the most exasperating thing about the squalls was that they did not last. Time and again we found ourselves becalmed and wallowing in the 3 to 4 foot, left over seas.
Our little outboard motor was being lifted out of the water with every passing wave and consequently proved to be quite unequal to the task of driving the boat (3000 lbs) to its destination. As the winds shifted and the squalls blew up and died down, we kept changing the sails. For several hours we raised and lowered sails, and changed from one tack to the other. Determining a DR position under these circumstances became pretty well impossible. We were, we knew, somewhere in the middle of Lake Erie.
Finally Doug, the builder of the boat, decided that maybe he'd have better luck with the RDF than I, and so, he went below to give it a try. To the north of us there seemed to be another of these on-again, off-again squalls building. But, having just sailed through half a dozen or more of them, I saw no reason to be concerned. Gradually the wind stiffened and TALARIA scurried southward faster and faster. I kept watching the approaching squall wondering just when it was going to hit. The colour of the clouds changed from grey to greenish-grey. The breeze continued to increase and TALARIA began to labour under full main and jib. In preparation for another sail change I asked Doug to come on deck.
Emerging from the cabin he gave an urgent shout. " Slack off all sheets!" Being not only the builder of the boat, but an experienced sailor, I responded to his warning and followed his advice. He had judged correctly; when the blast hit, even with the sails all slack it knocked TALARIA completely down and kept her there. The sails flayed violently, shaking the whole boat. The wind screamed in the rigging making communication by voice impossible. At any moment I expected the sails to be torn to shreds.
The boat was out of control; no amount of force applied to the tiller, made the slightest difference. TALARIA was down on her beam ends and stayed there. Leaving Tim, for whom this was only his third passage in a sailboat, in the cockpit, Doug and I went forward to take in the sails.
It was not an easy task. We were, after all, working on a deck that rather than being horizontal, was nearly vertical. Doug, I assume (I had no time to look), sat astride the mast reefing the main completely by rolling it up on the roller-furling boom. I had gone forward to the bow to douse the jib. With my arms embracing the aft stanchions of the bow pulpit I tried to get down the jib. My elbows being hooked onto the pulpit, I had two hands free to hold on to the sail. But, with the winds being as powerful as they were, two hands were really not enough. I could easily have used half a dozen. The jib was determined to escape and having the wind's power on its side, it often did.lTime and again the sail tore itself loose and slid back up the stay. I have no idea how long this battle between the sail and me lasted, but finally, I sort of won and managed, somehow, to tie it down.
While this battle was going on, it poured and poured and lightning struck, unceasingly, around us, everywhere.
Having, sort of , done my job, I returned to the cockpit to find the hatch still open and the water, sloshing about nearly within reach of the companionway hatch. In the flurry of activity which had followed Doug's shout of warning, no one had taken the time to close it. Quickly, I got the hatch boards out and dropped them into place and closed the sliding top. There! At least we would not simply sink and drown.
Even though my struggle with the jib had been no time for detailed observations, there were surprising visions which had stayed within my mind. The initial effect of this last, vicious squall had been the flattening of all waves and swells. Instead of wave action, which, at least, to begin with was negligible, there was a layer of a foot and a half or more of spindrift blowing along the water's surface like drifting snow along the ground.
After the sails had been doused, we managed to get TALARIA to run before the wind, which -roughly - took us in the direction of where we wanted to go. The waves had by now grown quickly to an astounding height and as, on Lake Erie, they tend to be, they were extremely short and steep. They would often rise so suddenly that the boat really had no time to stay on top of them and consequently, we were pooped several times. Even under bare poles, TALARIA was surfing down the waves exceeding her hull speed for considerable periods of time.
This was great sailing, indeed! What could be more exhilarating than going in the right direction at speeds like this? There was however one rather major difficulty which prevented us from enjoying ourselves as much as we otherwise might have done. Not only were we now quite unsure of our position, but it was raining so hard that it would have been impossible to see the shore when it actually turned up. What could we do to prevent ourselves from simply being run aground? It was vital to reduce our speed as much as possible.
Since I did not have a sea anchor, we secured a plastic pail to a line and dragged it astern through the water. As might be expected, the pail, in no time, was torn to pieces and lost. Our next sea anchor was a life jacket with a weight attached to it. It wasn't terribly effective, but it was the best we could do to slow down our headlong rush toward the shore.
Around 2100, an hour after first encountering this last, vicious squall, the wind once more eased off and - without sails - left us bobbing like so many times before.
Just as we were wondering if it was safe to again raise our sails, the western horizon cleared long enough to give us a view of the setting sun. The boiling, surging mass of clouds above us were now illuminated from below, glowing in all imaginable shades of red and orange. A breathtakingly beautiful sight it was, and yet, with the roiling, flame-like shapes above us, it was not a soothing, calming sight. Not only did it suggest that this storm was not over yet; lightning still continued to strike around us, and there was a vaguely hellish appearance despite all its beauty.
No longer raining, visibility had improved and with the approach of darkness, we could make out several navigational lights some four or five miles to our south. This, it turned out, was Fairport harbor. Since Mentor was only some four miles westward, we were surprisingly close to our intended destination. However erratic our passage through the various squalls had been, we had not been far off our intended landfall.
Some hours back, when the first squall was about to overtake us, we had twisted a heavy piece of copper wire around the backstay and had dropped the other end to drag through the water to ground the boat. The static electricity in the air had been, and still was so great that with tthe wind having eased, we could hear as it was being discharged through our grounding wire. There was a humming and buzzing from the mast and stays which crackled audibly whenever the rumbling of the thunder quieted down a bit. When a bolt of lightning passed overhead or struck nearby, the humming and crackling would stop only to resume shortly after.
At one point during our recent, rather frightening progress through the storm, I had been watching the sky for signs of what was likely to happen next. Suddenly, my attention had been drawn to the masthead by something that looked like a small stroke of lightning. With my brain, obviously, working considerably slower than any lightning would, I was still considering if we had actually been struck, when I noticed a halo-like ring near the masthead. ThisI suddenly understood, was St Elmo's fire, the "corposant" sailors have known and feared for many centuries.
But now, that we were at least in sight of the Ohio shore, I had little time to consider mythical omens. A decision had to be made quickly as to whether we would head for Mentor which we knew would be rough at its narrow entrance to the harbour, or whether we would seek shelter at Fairport, a harbour I did not know. Seeing its lights though, we were at least sure of its exact location. We also knew from our chart that it was a commercial portand thus more likely to have room for us. Beyond that, nothing was certain. Our Canadian chart (the only one I had on board) did not show the harbour in any detail. Having considered the alternatives, I decided that we would head for Fairport.
No sooner had we changed course for Fairport, the wind direction veered and blew directly out of the harbour. Tired of the constant sail changes and apprehensive of what the oddly roiling stormclouds overhead might still bring, we started the motor and chugged on under power with barely enough speed to maintain steerage.
By now it was definitely getting dark. Finally at about 2330, we entered the outer harbour, identified ourselves to some member of the coastguard, who, presumably was trying to gather some information about who had made it to safty and who hadn't. We asked where we might find a place to tie up and were directed up the Grand River, but told that even there, it being the July 4th weekend, we might have some difficulty finding space.
Some way up the river, we came to an industrial dock where several large motor cruisers had been secured. Looking around for a place to tie up, we were suddenly confronted by a very hostile voice.
"Hey you, what the ----- are you doing, riding like idiots around the harbour? Don't you know there's another storm coming! Tie up the boat and stop being a danger to yourself and others!"
It wasn't the sort of reception we had expected. "We've just come off the lake and are looking for a place to dock!"
Well, our response, certainly, seemed to have contained a "magic word", an "Open Sesame". Immediately the tone changed. "Just hold on a second and we'll clear some room. Several people in the semi-gloom of the pier, moved about, relocating vessels either ahead or back and soon, almost magically, where there had been no space, a refuge opened up. As we came alongside, our lines were taken, secured to the bollards on the pier. TALARIA had arrived.
We had escaped the clutches of Lake Erie, a lake known for its temper tantrums; we had worked hard to deal with the emergencies as they arose and, strangely there had been no time for fear. Only now, very slowly, as I came to understand that this had been a most uncommon storm, did I become aware of fear. Still, there were other things to do to keep me from paying too much attention to this hidden voice. Trying to call home to let our families know that we had arrived safely I found myself being confronted by an operator who told me, rather brusquely, that only emergency calls would be accepted. That really caught me by surprise. Sure, I had survived the storm, but didn't that very fact mean that it couldn't have been all that big a deal?
I explained that I'd just crossed the lake and I wanted to assure everyone at home that we were OK. Did that qualify, I asked, as an emergency? Once more, it seemed that I had spoken some current, magic word. Once more the tone changed dramatically. And so I made my call only to discover that my late night call had really not been necessary. The weather there had simply been a hot and lovely summer's day.
There was one more surprise to come that night. Exhausted, we had gone to sleep only to be awoken later on that night. Someone was knocking on the TALARIA's deck. When I, I suspect, rather slowly made an appearance, someone way up there on the pier, apologized for waking me but added, "You may want to ease your mooring lines, you're almost hanging from the pier."
And sure enough, the water level had dropped drastically since we had moored TALARIA, and now we were indeed, partially hanging from the pier. The wild weather of the precious day had set up a seiche sloshing about the lake and we had seemingly reached the low point of the water level.
With some difficulty and great care I eased off the mooring lines and found TALARIA settling, almost, with a splash back into her watery element. That done, I thanked the man and went back to my bunk.
Slowly, walking around Fairport the next day and seeing the damage the storm had done - seeing large motor cruisers being towed into port with not a person to be seen aboard by the coast guard, scanning newspaper headlines like this,
"Fear 200 missing on the Lake; Storm kills 7, Scores Hurt,"
I began to appreciate that TALARIA really had carried us through a major blow, a storm that would be long remembered by sailors and others as "the storm of the Fourth of July, 1969". In fact, as I just discovered searching for info on the Internet, the storm that we survived that day, so many years ago, had become "The Fireworks Derecho"! (for the meaning of the word "Derecho," see the note at the end of the story.)
But to get back to 1969, he "Trans-Erie Race" for which we had come across the lake was called off that year and the weather the next morning was still too unsettled to make an immediate departure. So our day was spent along the dock on a most hospitable cruiser, the HOBADD. The storm for obvious reasons had been topic of conversation. Everybody wondered just how strong those winds might have been.
The most powerful gusts at Mentor Harbour, had been clocked at 86 mph (knots ?), though it is quite likely the winds on the open lake had been well in excess of that. The CANADIAN GREAT LAKES PILOT VOL II, (1868) explains that winds on the open lake, generally are "stronger than those recorded at shore stations." In order to get an idea of how high the winds are over the open water, it suggests that windspeed readings ashore "should be multiplied by an average factor of 1.35 to arrive at an over-water equivalent." To use this estimate, the winds over the lake would have been somewhere around 116 mph; in fact, a freighter riding out the storm off Cleveland, had recorded winds of 120 mph (knots?).
The storm had taught me a number of things. The most important as far as my sailing career was concerned was the point made by the noted world circumnavigator Eric C. Hiscock. It was his opinion that "fortunate indeed is the man who early in his sailing career encounters and weathers a hard blow. No one who has done so can say that he enjoyed it, nor would he readily repeat the experience, but in no other way can he gain confidence in his own ability as a seaman. . . . " For me, at least, the storm had taught me both respect and fear, but also a confidence that if things got rough, I would be able to deal with them. There was no desire to look for trouble, but on the other hand, the knowledge that a cruising sailboat handled well, was able to carry her crew through some major blows, was encouraging indeed.
Despite obvious hesitation about setting out on our homeward journey, we had no choice. Still, after having seen the damage done ashore, it was hard not to appreciate just how lucky we had been to have had a chance to deal with the blow out on the lake. There, at least, there were no flying roofs, no huge trees and branches coming down to kill.
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* My account of this particular sail across Lake Erie appeared first in YACHTING, June 1971. This retelliing is an adaptation of that first story.
** To find out some meteorologic information on this violent storm, check the Internet for the "Ohio Fireworks Derecho".
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