The boys dealing with the aftermath. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
The Florence brothers are on an epic trip aboard the Vela. “Three brothers on a trip together,” Nate said. “We love it. Living the dream.”
Sailing trips, however, are rarely without incident, and this particular trip had one very big incident. A flipped dingy in rough seas about two miles from the mothership.
The whole thing started off with an unexpected squall, which are common enough in the tropics that their unexpectedness is expected.
“We currently are making our way through some lagoons with a headwind,” Nate wrote in the video you see below. “Trying to make it to a pass so we can cross to another island. Of course our weather quickly turns foul with a huge looming tropical squall.”
Soon it became evident that they’d need to pull off the freeway to wait things out, so they found a quiet pull off and put it in park, so to speak.
“We got chased in by a 48-knot storm, so we’re going to anchor up, tucked inside this little lagoon,” Nate continued. “It’s calm, but on the outside there’s a storm with some crazy winds. We’re just going to rest here. It’s too nuts out there.”
They watched from the comfort of their little lagoon as the storm squalled by, whipping up waterspouts and rainbows while the brothers took refuge in a tiny village. When the weather cleared, they pulled up anchor and set out again, looking for things to ride in the ocean. After finding a promising stretch of reef, they dropped the Vela‘s anchor and boarded their dingy, a wonderful little boat for exploring. But then disaster struck.
“Excited to surf and foil, we head out on the dingy to find some waves,” Nate said. “While I foiled, John, Ivan and Erik followed in the dingy. About two miles from the boat, downwind and near a sketchy reef, John capsized the dingy due to everyone falling to one side in the trough of a wave.”
Nate headed back to the boat to find them clinging to the sides, grabbing at possessions as they tried to float way. After a bit of futile bailing, they decided to drag the dingy to a reef, bail it out completely, and figure out what to do from there. With a dead motor and a two-mile trip back to the Vela, they were in for a hell of a mission.
“Two of us were sitting on the side and it went into a trough and it just caught,” John explained to Nate as they paddled the boat to the reef. “Then it was like half, and I was like, ‘there’s no way this thing’s flipping right now.'”
But flip it did, and after a long while of bailing, they took stock of their situation and made a decision. Luckily, this particular dingy is built to self-rescue, with oars and oar locks on the gunwale. “We decided we were fit enough to self-rescue and return to the boat on our own,” Nate said.
And so, with oars locked in the oarlocks and a couple of guys on surfboards towing, they slowly but surely paddled themselves all the way back to the safety of the Vela. Not an ideal situation, to be sure, but a situation that they’ll be laughing about for years to come. Is there anything better than a grand adventure?
