Remember that Santana 22 that inadvertently went surfing under the Golden Gate Bridge, and got rolled and dismasted (if you haven’t seen the amazing pics yet, click here). Well, Sail magazine’s Kimball Livingston took the trouble to track down the skipper and ask, umm, “WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING?!” Here’s the key part of the story:
Ocean races passing through the Golden Gate restrict the waters between the South Tower and the shore, but usually, it’s navigable water. Schmidt had sailed through there before. On this day, however, Schmidt had been struggling with the whisker pole–a distraction–and was unable to get it out to weather. Instead, he left the jib poled out to leeward and then returned to reclaim the helm as YachtSea approached the bridge on port tack. “My intent was to get to center span, but I didn’t feel desperate about it,” he says. Then he reached a point where he was committed to go “inside” the South Tower. Then he saw the surfers: “I had never seen them that far out before.”
Fort Point was experiencing a remarkable break that day. It’s a popular spot for local, expert surfers, but on the afternoon of April 2 there was more than the usual close-in break that wraps around the point and continues all the way into the cove. Suddenly Schmidt realized that he was going to have surfers to the left of him, surfers to the right of him, and no options. Going in, he says, there were two surfers to his left, closer to the South Tower: “I can sail by feel, and I was focused on not hitting the surfers.”
The wave went vertical, and things happened fast: “Is this the way I’m going, I wondered? I didn’t know what the hell happened. It was like a freight train had hit us.”
And you can read the whole tragic tale here. There are surfers scrambling for cover and then helping make a rescue, near hypothermia and a life jacket that didn’t inflate (yes, those cylinder thingies need to be inflated more than once every 5-plus years). Wayne Lambright, who took the photos which made Schmidt and YachtSea (you’re destined for doom with a lame name like that…) a worldwide sensation, got 17,000,000 hits on his web site. That’s Paris Hilton/Anna Kournikova territory. Who says sailboating is not a popular sport…
“Hey, Skip. What the hell are you doing? My beer just spilled…”
The Earthist Chronicles 