Worst weather challenges

A storm off the Cape of Good Hope and endless gales in the Arctic

- By Ellen Massey Leonard

Editor’s note: This is the first part of a multipart series, “The toughest passages of 50,000 miles,” a look at the most difficult aspects of circumnavigators Ellen and Seth Leonard’s various ocean sailing trips.

Last summer, in the middle of our second Pacific Ocean crossing, my husband, Seth, and I realized that we had sailed 50,000 sea miles. Had conditions been favorable, we might have celebrated with a nice dinner or maybe even a glass of bubbly. As it was, reefed down hard with 25 knots and 8-foot seas on the nose, we toasted our accumulated mileage with orange juice.

We undertook this crossing, from Mexico’s Cabo San Lucas to French Polynesia’s Marquesas Islands, very late in the season. Consequently, we encountered these southerly — even southwesterly — headwinds rather than a smooth, downwind run. We were disappointed and fatigued by the endless pitching and rolling. But it could always be worse, we kept reminding ourselves. Indeed, it had been worse quite a few times before.

This thought led us to try and rank our all-time worst passages. In what category, though? Worst weather ever? Worst prolonged weather? Worst in terms of breakages? Most tedious passage?

Then, of course, there’s the fact that all sailors are optimists (or the idea of bouncing around the vast ocean on a small boat wouldn’t appeal in the first place), and so all these “worsts” have silver linings. The worst weather ones, provided both you and the boat survive intact, leave you with an uplifting sense of accomplishment. So do the worst breakage ones. Even the most tedious ones have the silver lining of being boring, which is always preferable to terrifying.