Sailing Alone Across an Ocean on a 30ft Sailboat and Losing the Rudder 1000 Miles from Hawaii

hello friends it is august 12 2021 i'm in marina del rey california and i'm getting ready to push off for hilo hawaii two months ago tomorrow i was departing for my first attempt for the hawaiian islands before my wind vein failure almost every aspect of my life since that moment has been completely turned upside down and has changed the only thing that makes sense for me to do at this point is to put to see i plan on spending about a month in the hawaiian islands and then sailing to san francisco where i'll continue my exploration down the california coast and on to mexico so let's get underway [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] sunset of day two coming up it's been kind of gloomy all day had absolutely perfect sailing conditions for most of the day like very mellow seas less than a meter had kind of 10 knots all day so we've actually been sailing all day today faster than we were motoring all all day yesterday i came out on these like calm days start out to try to get my sea legs what a difference it was on the last passage um attempt where i was beating into you know 17 knots and like the seas that accompany those for days on end and it was you know 17 with i think gusts were up to 38 points but it was um yeah this is much much more pleasant environment to start a passage out on that's for sure easy easy night boy we made great speed last night um had almost trade wind consistent winds all night and these just like completely peaceful seas and uh we're going like three and a half to five knots all night long we've covered like 72 nautical miles since our noon position yesterday it's 7 am now so we're kind of on track to almost 200 mile day today which would be fantastic sun is like coming up through the clouds wind vanes doing her job she's doing good my older brother david has been watching marine traffic and trying to let me know if there's like ships in my area been in constant contact with um him on iridium go so and he's there's also we've been watching this hurricane linda she's tracking like hard west below 25 degrees so yeah another day on the good ship tritea solo ocean sailing and all is very well time to make dinner everything is healed quite a bit got my stove gimbal action happening here making dinner on a healing sailboat is a full contact sport making some instant red beans and rice so it's like not that difficult hopefully it doesn't go flying yep life on board it's all sideways i definitely learned a ton on my last passage attempt um the boat is stowed in a much better way the weight is balanced in a much better way than it was last time um i went and bought like a like a mattress topper for a twin size bed that for my birth so this is like my underweight pilot birth it's so much more comfortable my back was killing me after like two days on that last trip and um it's it's way more comfortable now so that's good so now just gonna keep an eye on this pot make sure it doesn't end up all over my bed and um and then have some good vittles chart marking my daily positions just fun always rewarding cold and wet last night we sailed through crazy thick fog you could barely see past the bow kind of all night not kind of we definitely it was all night i had like a terrifying moment where we first went into the fog bank when i popped my head out to check for ships the masthead light was casting like this insane shadow from the sail and maybe from the windex like a stern of us and it looked like a giant it looked like the silhouette of a sail like a sailboat that was directly behind us i've myself i flew out here started looking and then quickly realized that it was a shadow on this like really thick fog that was completely surrounding us but man it gave me a heart attack but all my heroes had no technology and sailed through this stuff for you know a lot well people did for centuries but you know small boat sailors sailed through this stuff for a long time with no radar no ais no navionics you know gps so just gotta trust your stuff and you know in that case it's like it doesn't even matter like you can't even sitting watch is pointless because you can't see anything i still did my regular watch routine but um yeah pretty intense it's it's like lifted now but still cold we've been flying all night we were like we're doing four and five knots all night long and the boat was this comfortable it's like really comfortable so i guess it's just a sea state but that's good we need to put on the miles so we're stoked all right time for some breakfast i've been trying to figure out how to talk about what happened for the last five days and before that my wife camille had been on a seven week road trip across country um visiting friends and family and uh taking some of our keepsakes to her mom's house to store since we were going full time cruising and starting our slow circumnavigation and towards the end of first day we got an argument via text message and on august 1st when she was supposed to fly home she texted me that she was leaving me and within three days she had flown back to los angeles sent me a long email explaining that there was absolutely nothing i could do she would take any of my phone calls i told her i would do anything i would stay in southern california if she wanted to stay instead of go cruising she said there was no way there was nothing that could convince her and um within three days she was just gone like that like vaporized from my life and i am still completely in shock and heartbroken i'm not going to go into all the details because it's bad enough that i have to share this publicly anyway but so many of you have followed us for years watching us build to this point to finally go cruising together and see the world so yeah that's the only reason i would even address this is for everyone that's given us so much support over the years um but at the end of the day if she's not happy with me if she would be happier without me then that's what i want because i love her very much but you know everything in life is temporary unfortunately and um i'm 46 years old i've had enough loves that i thought we're gonna be you know there forever that weren't you know either by their hand or by my hand whatever we've all been through it doesn't make it any easier when it's happening but um yeah i'm glad that the boat was ready i repaired everything that went wrong before and i was able to just put to see and try to like start this healing process and this new chapter of my life that is a very different chapter than i thought it was going to be for all the years that i dreamt of this but it's going to be a slow road and a lot of thinking but i will be very happy to step foot on hawaiian soil and start a new life so there's an oil tanker a couple miles for me um hello i just want to make sure you guys see me um i'm under cell power and have very limited maneuverability i cannot see you would you give me the position i am at 30 degrees 43 decimal 8 7 125 degrees 34 decimal eight seven i am off your starboard bow okay you are on my starboard bow okay so you want me to keep up you right ah yes please okay thanks so much my brother told me about this tanker and i set an alarm watching for him he's not on my ais which means my ass does not work this far out or something but um it's scary i mean he's probably i don't know a mile for me two miles maybe and he didn't see me which makes sense because it's like white sails with all the white caps and the rough weather but at least he responded and they had someone that spoke english on board now just keep an eye on him and make sure that he stays off of me yikes [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] i am very grumpy today last night was really hard the wind came screaming in the middle of the night i had to get up put a reef in furled in the headsoul to like a handkerchief and it's still like it was rough rough going it's just this sea state seas are back up to like eight foot um i think it's i don't know what it's actually blowing right now maybe 17 or something um it's the sea state it's so abusive though so yeah what very little i did sleep last night was like full of nightmares maybe from distress of all this stuff now i'm just gonna crawl back in the nest keep reading try to distract myself from this terrible motion it's the morning of day nine came out to shake the reef out of the mainsaw it's starting to rain a little dark skies over there i gonna wait and see how this plays out we're not going as fast as i'd like but if it gets a little squally i'd rather not have that full main up still making good time but i can always turn it up a bit you know light little rainstorm just passed more clouds over there might be more today nice to get the boat washed off i'm gonna wash my hair today that's my main agenda if it rains hard enough i'll just be able to do it out here the sea looks beautiful right now look at that gorgeous [Music] let's go [Music] so [Music] [Music] so i guess that was the first real squall which wasn't crazy but over 20 knots of wind out of nowhere um what just happened was we crash jibed and it blew out the clue of the main soul um which i s i was the one that put in that grommet and sewed it so i know who to blame but i guess the thing i just didn't take into account is the fact that this is a loose foot main so that point is under tremendous loads so yeah lessons learned um it's not like a total catastrophe i just reefed it down which i needed to anyway because the wind but since i had to re-cut it the first reef is in a weird spot it's like 11 inches above the foot so i'm just going to be able to run the main all the way to hawaii with that first reef of the original shaped mainsail um with the factory clue and everything but um yeah that was shocking um there's another swall coming i think i got the cell in a good way it'll calm down later and i'll be able to see if i can make the shape a little better but wow very exciting so we'll see what this other squall does hopefully it's kind to us it's beautiful out sun's out charging the batteries batteries were fine this morning i think my vhf was on the prince squalls on the horizon it's interesting since the entire surface of the sea is constantly moving it's kind of hard to tell which way the clouds are moving it's a weird visual thing it feels like the clouds are going this way but all the winds going that way so the seas finally laid down we had like these big monster seas that were stacked up from a high wind event along the california coast and washington coast that were just like not to scale with the winds we were having so i am very happy that the seas have come down quite a bit should be in the trade winds tomorrow so day 13 past the halfway mark last night around midnight it's 8 sun's just now coming up we're in a different time zone that's for sure 8 am by our clocks on the boat it's blowing 20 knots she keeps trying to round up morning of day 14. lots of rain squalls especially this morning tons of rain very little wind there's another squall right there it might miss us hasn't been enough wind to pin us down with all these rolling seas so it's just been like washing machine on board pretty out it's nice to get the boat all washed off with fresh water though first rainbow of the trip some more over there so i just lost all steerage [Music] uh not sure what to do i guess first i'll put this main sole down [Music] [Music] [Music] yeah go take the main sole down and then figure it out first thing i'm going to do is put a gopro in the water and see if the rudder's still there so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so we're a thousand miles from hawaii and the rudder broke now wind vane is an auxiliary rudder system but that rudder is kind of a joke i mean it's all we got at this point it's blowing 16 knots right now i need to get in the water and try to secure the rudder to the rudder post i wish i had a ratchet strap i don't think i could steer with it but problem is the seas like this being under the boat is just gonna like could knock me out you know i took a dramamine because i'm sure with this motion i'm going to get sick yeah and a predicament i don't know i have to think on this one so [Music] well the problem is we're still sailing because of the surface of the boat so we're moving it like almost a knot i can't do this until it's totally calmed hopefully the rudder doesn't suffer damage tonight i'm going to put the cell back up so the boat is stable but um nothing i can do tonight it's blowing 20 knots right now i do think that i can flash it and then we'll go from there figure out what to do try everything in my power to get this boat to hawaii we're like 1000 miles from there [Music] so okay about to get in the water for the first actual dive try to secure the rudder because okay then i'm gonna go ahead and try to get the control line set up um if not then uh figure something else out so that was totally hopeless even with the sail down it was like we were moving we're still moving forward because the wind and the surface of the boat creates a sail basically and it was taking all of my strength i couldn't even get into my scuba gear and i felt like i was gonna be so exhausted all of my strength that i might not be able to get back on the boat so i kind of aborted that i did hang on and just look at the situation there's a weird chip out of the back of the rudder that's never been there before the piece is still in there but you can see around it where something broke it i wonder if we hit something under water they caused this we didn't hit it when it actually failed on me there was no nothing i didn't feel anything it just went away but it's very weird this chip out of the back of the rudder so i got the sail back up to stabilize the boat now i'm going to like go down and relax and eat something and think through i think i'm done for today it's afternoon already the winds are going to start coming up i might try a simpler version tomorrow of what my idea was in the first place but we'll see if i do it tomorrow i won't be with with scooby girls i'll just be snorkel here one step at a time [Music] [Applause] [Music] this is like our second or third day of drift i just rigged up the spinnaker pole to um try the steering with the drogue and um we'll see how it goes [Music] wow what a day so we are steering by drogue whoever spinnaker pull flashed aft um and uh we have control lines going to a sea squid drogue little yellow drug i call him squidward i have a four pound weight on it to keep it below the surface and after much much tinkering i finally got it to find course so we're on our course for hawaii now and i'm running down seas and downwind which means we've been getting pooped i got pooped for the first time while at the helm and got completely stoked but we've been between 12 knots and 24 knots of wind and and um and it held course so just kind of like crossing our fingers hopefully we'll be able to just like squeak this along and make our way to hawaii it was very very very difficult to get it to work out i was getting really frustrated and through iridium go messaging with captain dave stovall and captain noah peffer and they both explained different ways to go about this and what ended up working for me was a combination of the two different ways um stovall suggested adding a weight to the drug so i did that and then noah was like if you're running downwind you have you can't have your main solid you got to be head saw only so i did that and um that's when it started actually sailing and being on course so it's been on course like a rough course for an hour and a half so that's good um and now it's just kind of wait and see tonight will be really telling um as to how much i can tinker with it my main concern is like if the waist kick us off it's going to be hard to get back on course but i did it once so i'll be able to do it again if it comes down to it but she's been holding a pretty true line um for the last hour and a half so last night at some point the paddle of the wind vane top of it snapped off i don't know when or what but it seems to be doing okay i just taped the top of it so that no water would get in it i have another one that's like a a heavy air one that's like almost about that size anyway that i can always put on but this one seems okay but we'll see might be the next two weeks of this drogue steering and um fingers crossed it gets us there just paid some more head sill out kind of get us powered up a little bit um she held straight and arrow at her course last night it's pretty pretty slow going but she held our course which was the big test for this setup um so we'll see what the day brings hopefully we can clip off some miles today i think we've only done like 20 miles since noon yesterday but it's better than the 11 we did the day before and at least we're heading in the right direction so now we got her tuned up a little a little tricky as the wind increases she kind of wanders so you have to like tune it but i want to get us moving at least get some miles under us [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so today marks the seventh day that we've been steering by drug it's done very well um the only time it couldn't kind of keep up and hold course was last night at like 9 00 p.m we got like 25 knots of wind that was it was between 20 and 25 not to win for like two or three hours and um i could not keep any sail on and keep it pointing so i uh i ended up just kind of like back winning shooting the head so back winning it and kind of pointing just down course and just kind of limping through the night because the winds were so so gnarly last night other than that the drogue has done very well and um if you don't understand how this works the easiest way to describe it is like when you see someone in a canoe that's paddling and they'll hold their paddle down and sideways to like turn the front of the canoe that's basically what this is doing is you tighten it up on the leeward side and as you put more sail out so that as the forces try to pull the boat into the wind the droid counters that pulls it back off of the wind and it's done well the wind vane self-steering system has gotten very sloppy it's been like jumping out of gear um so hopefully it makes it the next you know i think we're like 10 to 12 days out if we hold this speed so hopefully it makes it until then but um i don't know that this would have gone so smoothly without that wind there are three albatross that have been flying a quarter mile off the bow the boat for the last couple of hours i'll see oh there's like four let's see if you can see them oh awesome hard business cold cold business as well nice to get a fresh water shower though you gotta wash my hair down below that's cold people pay good money for those rain water shower heads today was brutal after like around noon the winds just stopped just like nine knots all day it was like two squalls that passed through 20 knots each but it was for like 15 minutes and then it's just been this we are making such good runs too like 70 mile days multiple days in a row we've done like 18 miles in like eight hours or something brutal squall over there it's gonna miss us one there that's really pretty but yeah i mean at night they'll be like 20 knot blast throughs but you know then it's just this so nothing you can do can't hold a course with no wind right we're so close we're like 400 miles away from entering the channel uh to get into oahu so i think these are tuna there are so many of them [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] got one look at that [Music] [Applause] oh he took my lure poor dude now he's got the hook in him damn gave my best shot [Music] oh land ho there it is the island of molokai right there oh my god i have been squinting at the horizon all day long we're 40 miles away from molokai i couldn't understand why i couldn't see it 31 days at sea the hawaiian islands this is awesome wow awesome looks so this will be the last night on the boat maybe at sea i mean i will not miss this boat motion that's for sure you you just threw us off course yeah damn it as soon as i get my food going so it's like always at dinner always at dinner because the winds ramp up in the after like afternoon so then the sea state is ridiculous around dinner time but it's always the same gymnastics routine my cupboards are getting bare my water just it's almost at a quarter so i did good [Music] i very much look forward to eating something that's someone that is better than cooking than i am made i expect to get kind of to the channel probably tomorrow morning early tomorrow morning so looks like we'll be getting in tomorrow which is incredible really hard night last night and this morning the um the seas were so confused last night that i could not get the boat to sail at all it was easily the hardest night of sailing the entire 30 this is 30 day 32 32 days hands down hardest sailing last night and we did not make a ton of ground after midnight um at like 7 a.m ships time 4 a.m local time i started the engine and started like trying to tinker with that it's really difficult because the drogue isn't strong enough to like overpower the prop walk um and the current and everything eventually i got the head sold a back wind and that helped just enough to to where we were able to move now we're in line with the channel and it seems like the seas have started to start to you know become regular again the wahoo the distance see clearly and that's what we're pointing for just trying to get in you know get it done i didn't sleep at all last night and i am very tired it's so close so the surprises just keep coming captain david stovall contacted tobot us gave my membership number they said i was covered under the gold plan and they dispatched a boat to come tomy and he said they would send him an update with an eta ten minutes later coast guard calls my name over the vhf i get on there and speak with them and they're like yeah towboatus uh they they can't help you they can't come get you and so we talked back and forth and there's no one to tow me no one's gonna tell me so they're like yeah if you can make it closer to shore then we'll put out like a a broadcast asking if anybody can come help you which is insane to me there's a tow boat us here i have a membership the gold membership so i don't know i guess i just get over getting through the channel i was nervous about the channel i just get through the channel and then maybe i like anchor off of waikiki if i can like manage to like motor around and find a spot to anchor [Music] having to sit here with my leg hanging off the transom i made a tiller handle for the auxiliary rudder steering with my leg hoping a shark doesn't take my foot off like sawyer or something so [Music] [Music] bye [Music] [Applause] [Music] and the squalls about to hit right as i'm trying to anchor blowing 20 knots right now neptune made me work for this one [Music] just dropped the hook we're at the famous waikiki beach honolulu oahu hawaii buddy of mine are range to toe those guys will be showing up around 5 30 so we're just going to be on the hook until then i can't believe it's done so crazy [Music] [Applause] [Music] good [Music] this is mike what man buddies on instagram youtube and [Music] save my ass with this one these dudes just finished the full days where their work came out to take my poor ship into a safe harbor thank you so much stoked [Music] [Music] drop the lines look at that i'm on land oh my god holy 32 days [Music] once safe in the harbor in honolulu i dove on the boat to make a jury rig to secure the rudder so tritea could be driven under motor power once i got underwater it became obvious to me that i believe we did hit a submerged object that was painted red which likely led to the failure of the rudder i want to give a very very special thanks to my shore team david frederick my older brother colby thorpe my baby brother sarah koenig one of my oldest friends in la captain david stovall you guys know him from the yacht delivery chronicles captain noah peffer of sv thylacine i also want to thank my other brother scott and my oldest friend from third grade chance and my dear friend dan johnson in the description of the video you'll find information about them and everything they helped me with i could not have successfully done this without them i am forever in their debt i shot more than 300 clips of video over the course of the 32 day passage and so many things ended up on the cutting room floor gone ahead and made an additional episode of outtakes which is a lot of me talking and a lot of it is like ship's business but to sailors it might be of interest so i've put that episode together and anyone can see it for free by going to my patreon page you don't have to sign up for patreon you can just go there and see the link so if you'd like to see outtakes from this great adventure head over to my patreon page and check it out if you'd like to read my daily blog post from the passage you can find those on the sb tritea tracker page provided by predictwind you can find the link to the tracker page in the description below [Music] you

Channel: Sailing Triteia

Views: 2,326,287

Keywords: sailing, sailing channel, alberg 30, classic plastic, classic sailboat, punk rock sailor, small boat sailing, sailing vlog, adventure, travel, blue water sailing, vlog, vlogger, california sailing, ocean sailing, solo sailing, diy, diy refit, liveaboard, solo ocean sailing, pacific ocean crossing, sailing to hawaii, Los Angeles to Hawaii, alone on the ocean

Id: 1AZXXKj0p0s

Length: 64min 27sec (3867 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 20 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/s2r888]

Haha, I hated part where his rudder broke and he had to dive below the boat to inspect the damage.

[u/LSossy16]

Probably a stupid question but can anyone buy a boat and sail around the world or do you need a license? Just thinking how incredibly dangerous this is and for other sailers if you don’t know what you’re doing.

[u/[deleted]]

Fuck. That. 4 Life!!