Carla Murphy

Carla Murphy
(inducted 2008)

I meant to join last year with Tim, since I was on many of his blue water sails while he was bringing Tyche up to NYC last year but I had something come up last winter which had me pretty distracted and I didn’t get a chance to. Things are all better now, so I’d like to join.

I had a lot of adventures with them in 2006 - I joined Tim and Kevin on June 3 2006 in Ponce Puerto Rico and left them on June 13 in Puerta Plata, Dominican Republic, the sail was filled with adventure – we were blown off our anchor onto a reef in the middle of the night, snapped a turnbuckle, put a hole in the boat, and damaged the rudder, so that night I learned how to kedge, in the days that followed I got to go to a lot of hardware and boat supply stores, as well as a welders – thank goodness the incident happened a few miles from my uncle’s house in puerto rico – made things a lot easier!

The hole was below the water line and there were no haulout facilities anywhere near us that were large enough for us, we tried heeling by moving everything on the boat to one side, then using large plastic garbage cans filled with water as ballast – and hanging things from the boom – didn’t do much, so we stabilized the boat by running it slightly aground on a sandy bottom, tying off to land at the stern, sending anchors off the bow and port sides, and then tying a halyard to land to starboard and winching ourselves over sideways until we had 14 inches below our waterline exposed so the fiber could be hand chiseled, sanded and patched.

We sailed further down the coast of puerto rico after the fiber had dried, had a nice day in town prepping for our trip to the Dominican republic and found that our propeller had fallen off the boat while we were anchored – so we went back into town and some nice friends I had met while Kevin was having his hair colored and Tim was shoe shopping took us to a nearby hardware store to get a nut so we could affix the spare prop to the boat – and we were off to the DR.

From the 10th to the 13th we were under sail on our way to Puerta Plata. I think my favorite moment of the trip was coming up for my watch at 3am and seeing the spinnaker full beside the full moon with phosphorescent algae sparkling in our wake. Alone on deck under that full moon a small family of dolphins came to play in our wake and keep me company until sunrise.

We hit one small storm in the passage, a few hours of calm, and then bam, great wind our last day where we got to make up tons of time, unfortunately the great wind was too much for the old spinnaker, and it blew out, we went wing on wing the rest of the way to Puerta Plata.

I learned a lot on that trip!

On July 23rd I joined them again in North Carolina for their final leg up to NYC. It was pretty quiet compared to the PR/DR trip, we had one really nasty short storm that surprised us and shredded our jib, at one point we were becalmed and attacked by a swarm of flies, and we had some engine trouble which was quite worrisome, but we finally NYC on July 28th.

Tim has told these stories in great detail on his blog at whereistyche.com, so I tried to just hit the highlights.