A fun night sail after a dinner out with friends turns harrowing for a father and son.
Issue 148: Jan/Feb 2023
In the moment before disaster struck, I distinctly remember working on the foredeck of my sailboat and then having a sudden feeling that something was very, very wrong.
It slowly dawned on me that I was in the water and the reason I could not get to the surface was that I was trapped under the sail. I would later find out that while I was holding onto the forestay to steady myself, the mast had broken, sending me over the side.
After struggling for what seemed like a long time, I finally reached the surface of the lake with an overwhelming feeling of relief, but it did not last long. The sailboat was about five boat lengths from me and moving away faster than I could swim. I could see my father in the cockpit and heard him calling for me, but he could not see me and I wasn’t able to attract his attention.
That day in late September 1989 had started out warm, sunny, and calm, with no hint of the danger ahead. Back then, I owned a Shark 24 sailboat named Mischief that was mainly used for racing and had minimal equipment onboard in order to satisfy requirements for racing on Lake Saint-Louis, in southwestern Quebec. In a reversal of the way things used to be, my father had borrowed my boat that day for a company cruise to a restaurant in the small island town of Île-Perrot.
My dad was a seasoned sailor who had completed his coastal certification in Germany during the 1970s and spent years chartering on the Adriatic Sea and in the Caribbean and the Bahamas. He chartered boats through a club he belonged to, with trips starting at the club’s base near Venice, Italy, and going as far south along the coast of what was then Yugoslavia as time allowed. He was once part of a delivery crew that brought a 40-foot ketch from Marseille back to the club’s base. When we moved from Munich to Canada in 1977, my father bought a Paceship 26 sailboat and we spent the next decade daysailing and taking annual vacation cruises up the St. Lawrence River to the Thousand Islands and Lake Ontario.
After supper that September evening, around 10:30 p.m., we were heading back to Beaconsfield Yacht Club southwest of Montreal. The wind had started picking up and we raised the sails to enjoy the breeze. As we passed Dowker Island and entered the open part of Lake Saint-Louis, the smile on my face spread from ear to ear as the boat picked up speed in the warm southerly breeze.
By the time we reached the yacht club, I had decided I could not let a wonderful warm night like that go to waste and told my father that I would be heading out again after we dropped off our guests at the club. Not surprisingly, he decided to come along.
After saying good-bye to our guests, we headed out again onto the lake and sailed for the Montreal suburb of Dorval. The sailing that night was fantastic. The wind was gradually building from the south and the wave action was minimal. We reached back and forth from Dorval to Dowker Island, a distance of about 6 to 8 miles, and again and again and the boat seemed to relish the conditions. She was easy to steer, hardly ever put her rail under, and seemed to want to fl y. More often than not, she was up on a plane with the knotmeter showing 8 knots and more. It was the sort of sail that rekindles the sailing bug on a cold and depressing February night.
Unfortunately, the excitement of the sail would not be the only memory of that night. At about 2 a.m., we had reached Dowker Island again and decided to go back to Dorval one last time. After tacking, we took the genny down since the wind had been building all night and by then was too much for the sail even on a beam reach. But under main alone, the boat was quite comfortable.
After we had reached Valois Bay, a little east of Beaconsfield, I noticed that the genoa had come undone from under the bungee cord on the foredeck and was about to go into the water. So I went up on the foredeck to secure the sail—and was soon in the water myself.
In the dark, as I began to realize the seriousness of the situation, I remembered a book I had read that summer about a couple cruising the South Pacific. One morning, the husband awoke to discover that his wife was no longer on the boat. The book detailed the fears and emotions of the couple—the husband trying to fi nd his wife and the wife afl oat in the ocean. Needless to say, it was with great relief that I saw the lights of a road onshore and realized that I at least had a target to swim for.
I finally reached the shore at about 7:30 a.m., after about five hours in the water. A kind lady who happened to be walking her dog nearby helped me out of the water. From her house, we called my mother and my girlfriend, and I was put into a tub of hot water to warm up. It struck me as somewhat ironic that I should spend a night in the lake, only to end up to my neck in water again as soon as I reached shore. Then the police arrived to take a statement and the paramedics gave me a quick checkup.
What I did not know at the time was that my father was still missing and that a body had been found in the lake that morning. It never occurred to me to wonder why the police were so interested in what my father had been wearing while they were taking my statement.
After returning to the yacht club, we organized a search for my father, who I assumed was still on the boat. The club manager and some volunteers drove along the shore of the lake until we thought we had spotted the boat. We then switched to boats, and the club manager and I steered to where we thought we had seen my sailboat, while the other boat headed off to search a part of the lake my boat could have drifted to. I was alarmed to see how rough conditions on the lake had become.
We found Mischief anchored by its stern, just outside the channel near the Royal St. Lawrence Yacht Club in Dorval. As we approached, I realized for the first time that the mast was down and no one seemed to be aboard. I went onboard to search for a note or some other sign of what had happened to my father, but all I found was the lazarette full of water and the floorboards almost afl oat.
We decided to go to the Royal St. Lawrence Yacht Club to ask if they had received any news. About halfway there, we met the other search boat and to my great relief, were told that my father had been picked up by the Coast Guard and that he was all right.
When I was finally able to talk with my dad, he told me that in the panic following the mast breaking and my disappearance off the foredeck, he could not get the motor going. He then drifted out of the channel toward a shallow, rocky part of the lake. The fi rst anchor he found was the little “lunch hook” I carried for racing. It wasn’t ready for use, and he dropped the shackle pin when he tried to connect the anchor chain to the rode.
Not wanting to risk going up to the foredeck and drifting close to the shallows, my father knotted the chain and rode together and quickly anchored the boat by the stern. He never found the larger anchor that I had stowed under the V-berth.
After that incident, my father downsized to a Bayfield 23, with which he joined a 1997 flotilla that sailed from Lake Ontario to Newfoundland to celebrate the 500th anniversary of explorer John Cabot’s arrival in Newfoundland. I joined him for the legs from Mantane, Quebec, to Burgeo, Newfoundland, and we put a lot of the lessons we learned from the incident into practice on that trip.
Matt has been a sailor since the age of 6, when his dad bought the family’s fi rst boat. Matt met his wife, Carolyn, at the local sailing club in 1989 and they have been sailing together ever since. They sail their Island Packet 31, More Mischief, in Montreal on Lake Saint-Louis and make an annual pilgrimage up the St. Lawrence Seaway to the 1000 Islands and Lake Ontario.
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