"The Para-Anchor Advantage"
excerpt from the
March 2005 issue of Dockside.
By Cary V. Deringer
For nearly ten years, my husband and I have lived
aboard our 34-foot cutter, Illusion. The last
five of these have been spent cruising full-time.
During the years before we untied the dock lines, we did
what most cruisers do, we purchased a bounty of
equipment for reasons that ranged from safety to
comfort. Over the past 20,000-plus nautical miles of
sun and salt spray, our gear has been put to the test in
more than a few case scenarios. Fifteen items have been
selected for review. You may remember seeing these
featured a few years back within the pages of Dockside
when they were new and first installed on Illusion…
Whenever sailors gather, weather is always a topic for
discussion. Talks of weather inevitably, lead to “bad
storms at sea” stories, so when asked, “Where we
encountered the worst weather,” I always answer:
80-miles offshore of Mendocino California.
What
made rounding Cape Mendocino so rough, was being caught
within the windy cycle of their normal weather pattern
of thermal lows from land meeting a high-pressure system
offshore. The first four days of our passage from
Vancouver Island, Canada, heading to Southern California
were blissful, but the next four had us without sleep or
dry clothes, equipment breakdowns, and following seas to
20-feet, and steady winds of 45-knots and gusting.
We
hove-to in order to assess the situation. Since weather
reports called for conditions to remain unchanged, we
had to wonder if the sea state would worsen over the
next few days.
Illusion
could hold her own, we were confident about that, and
our circumstances were not life threatening. It was a
combination of things—the violent motion, the
sleeplessness, the constant grating sound of the wind,
and the inability to make a decent meal much less keep
it down – that would further take it’s toll on us both
physically and mentally.
Late
one afternoon, we decided to make a run for San
Francisco. To ensure arrival during daylight, we
decided to heave-to until early the next morning.
“Hey,” Bob screamed into my ear not more than an inch
away. “The parachute sea anchor!”
I could barely hear
him over the wind, but when he said, “blah, blah, blah
parachute,” I understood what he was trying to
say—deploy our Fiorentino Para Anchor.
When
planning our gear checklist, our main purpose for carrying a
parachute sea anchor was safety. We researched our options,
and liked the simple, innovative design of the Fiorentino
product. We contacted the company and were equally
impressed with the customer service and the technical and
practical experience of the staff.
With
our new parachute sea anchor onboard, we’d practice using it
by deploying it in protected waters on calm days. Using the
motor to imitate backward momentum, we got a feel for what
the product really is – an inflated parachute under water
that allows you to , as near as you can, anchor your boat at
sea. Next came practice in the 15 and 20-knot days too.
Fiorentino told us to keep the Para
Anchor rigged and ready for deployment in its duffel, so we
did. When we found ourselves using it off of Cape Mendicino
in 45-knots of wind, screaming gusts that shuddered our
mast, and waves that stood nearly 20-feet, deploying the
Para Anchor seemed almost too easy…."
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