PACK YOUR CHUTE: You may never hit the silk, but the day may come when you'll be glad you've got a para-anchor

摘要

Dorymen of the 1800s, forced to spend a rough night away from their schooner, sometimes tied a line to a bucket and tossed it overboard. The bucket dragging through the water acted as a sea anchor; it held the dory's bow into the waves, and slowed itsdrift. The fundamentals of sea anchors have not changed much since then," though the engineering has come a long way. After World War II, fishermen began using surplus parachutes as sea anchors. In 1983 as a deckhand aboard a 57-foot swbrdfish boat on Georges Bank, I helped deploy an old nylon parachute during a storm with winds gusting to hurricane force. Once the chute caught, the bow smelled up to windward and all but the man on watch turned in for a bit of sleep. The easy motion of the boat lastedabout two hours before we awoke to find ourselves rolling side-to. A few minutes later we stood on the bow, eating spray and boating the silky shreds of the parachute. We spent the rest of the night running, with 20-foot seas crawling up our port quarter as we worked our way clear of Cape Cod and Nantucket.