Solo Sailor Pete Hill Tackles Storm Repairs Across Tasman Sea Voyage

Climbing a mast in calm conditions is awkward enough. Doing it solo in the Tasman Sea, mid-storm, on a junk-rigged boat with everything trying to kill you, is another matter entirely. Pete Hill did it anyway, and it took him two hours.

Hill, a veteran small-boat voyager who has spent decades exploring most of the world's oceans on small, budget junk-rigged boats, endured a severe Tasman Sea storm that triggered a cascade of failures requiring improvised repairs at sea. The list was punishing: a jammed windvane tiller line, a fouled upper sheetlet after a fan-up that demanded that two-hour starboard mast climb to clear, a torn luff, damaged steering, and the loss of two drogues.

The mast climb stands out not just for the time it consumed but for what it represents in terms of seamanship under pressure. With the fan-up fouling the upper sheetlet and the sail unable to set properly, Hill had no choice. He went up the starboard mast, sorted it, and came back down. Photographs taken during the passage and credited to Hill and Linda Crew-Gee show him making sea repairs on the junk-rigged boat and working on the port sail during a brief lull in conditions.

The drogue losses, confirmed as two by Practical Boat Owner's account of the incident as reported by Graham Cox, compounded an already difficult situation. Drogues are a solo sailor's primary tool for managing a heaving vessel in storm conditions, slowing the boat and keeping the stern to breaking seas. Losing one is serious. Losing both while also dealing with damaged steering and a torn sail pushes the repair workload into genuinely dangerous territory.

That Hill handled it speaks directly to his background. Since an earlier boat named Badger, every vessel he has sailed has been junk-rigged, a rig that rewards self-sufficiency and forgives improvisation in ways that more conventional setups do not. In 2006, aboard the 22ft sloop Shanti, he came second in the inaugural Jester Challenge, the solo transatlantic race for boats under 30ft. He subsequently built Oryx, a 10m self-built plywood catamaran with a biplane aero-junk rig, and drove her from England through Brazil, South Africa, Mauritius, Tasmania, the Australian east coast, New Caledonia, New Zealand, and on through French Polynesia via the Austral Islands, Mangareva, Tahiti, and Tonga before returning to New Zealand. After Oryx he built China Moon in Cape Town, a 37ft catamaran of his own design carrying a biplane junk rig with an unstayed mast in each hull, and sailed her back into Antarctic waters, around the Atlantic, then handed her over to her new owner on a nonstop Southern Ocean crossing from Brazil to Launceston.

The Tasman Sea is not a body of water that surprises experienced offshore sailors with its potential to turn ugly. What the incident underscores, for anyone running a junk rig offshore and particularly singlehanded, is that redundancy in drogues and a well-rehearsed plan for going aloft under load are not optional preparations. Hill had the experience to work through each failure in sequence. The repairs held.