The Offshore Voyaging Reference Site

Real Life Storm Survival Story

Drouge on Deck

Here is an email interview we conducted with AAC reader Paul Kirby, who deployed his series drogue, based on Don Jordan’s design (SDDJ), in what sounds to us like a true survival situation.


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Jerry_Levy

How would you retrieve the drogue if singlehanding?

Hans

I retrieved mine singlehandedly by simply putting it on the cockpit sheet winch, using a helper line to get one bridle arm to the winch and to bypass the junction point from bridle to leader.

The cones passed over the winch drum with very little trouble and got away just a little frayed at the edges. Took me half an hour to retrieve, in 15 to 20 knots of wind. You can’t use the self tailing device of course.

John

Roger Taylor has done it singlehanded and he has also had to cut a JSD away. He talks about his experiences in his books and on YouTube.

Martin

I would like to raise a question about deployment of the JSD.

I always imagined that there would be conditions where it may make sense to deploy less than the full length of the drogue – say 60% of its length. Say you don’t want the boat to be virtually stationary, and your boat’s hull shape is most “comfortable” when drifting at a rate of (for argument’s sake) 2-3 knots.

Early in a storm, you may need to deploy only 60% of the drogue to get the 2-3 knots. Later on, as conditions increase, you may need to release the rest (i.e. 100%) to get 2-3 knots. Or it may just be a less intense storm.

This has implications for how you configure the attachment points – one side would have to be controlled from a winch or similar, as opposed to simply fixed shackles tied onto chainplates. Potentially a rolling hitch could be considered.

Of course, there may be good reasons why you would NEVER want to deploy less than 100% of the JSD’s length. If anyone has insights into this latter question, I (and I’m sure a few other readers) would love to hear.

scott flanders

Paul’s biggest step was adding weather information. We wintered in Stewart Island and the weather is often and severe. The SW point on the mainland of NZ’s South Island (I can’t remember how to spell the point) is often in storm force conditions when the surroundings may have gale force or less. In our case, Ocens weather was spot on, almost within a couple of hours. The currents are fierce with the Tasman trying to trade water with the Pacific via Forveau Strait, and the entire Stewart/Mainland area is quite tidal.

Kettlewell

Very interesting report, and it does sound like they did very well under the circumstances. In severe conditions like that, one of the problems with a drogue off the stern is that it exposes your boat’s weaker defenses. Seeing those thimbles makes me wonder if we should be eliminating them in our anchoring systems too. I believe a BoatUS report studying mooring and anchoring gear for hurricanes indicated that cow hitches are the way to go.

Martin

Seems a lot of us dislike thimbles, and so do I, especially since I always find it difficult to splice a rope tightly around the things, and mostly fail to do a good job.

The one attractive feature of a thimble, however, is that it increases the radius of the turn in the rope, retaining more of the rope’s strength. So if you were to cow-tail the load-carrying rope to a shackle or D-ring welded to a chainplate, will this not create a much tighter radius, and will this not weaken it appreciably at that point?

Kettlewell

Do you think there is enough data to say that boats using parachute sea anchors are damaged more than those using Jordan drogues? Seems like I’ve read of a lot more accounts of boats using parachute anchors than Jordan drogues. In any case, why would that be? They both limit drag significantly, so you are comparing putting the stern into a sea vs. putting the bow into a sea. I venture to guess that most boaters not hanging on a drag device would choose the bow, given their druthers. But, I think we’ve had this argument before.