Zingaro makes it to Kona on Hawai’i, damaged. James and Kimi safe.

[Updated] Stony Brook Hospital†, Stony Brook, NY, 27-DEC-2019 – My friends, if I may call them that, James and Kimi on the sailing catamaran Zingaro made it safely to Kona after basically having their boat break up.

I’ve written about their Youtube channel and struck up a long distance friendship with James.

Youtube channels are generally disjointed from the actual goings-on on the vessel. Most channels, including Kimi and James’, are months behind where the boat actually is. On the Zingaro channel, they are still in Central America, while they have been in French Polynesia for a while.

In the last bunch of weeks, they sailed to the Line Islands anchoring at Fanning Island with our friends Merv and Sharon aboard Southern Cross IV.

Two days ago this email arrived:

Zingaro is a 1980s, home-built, Crowther Spindrift 37 catamaran that James bought in Florida. He lived with the then owner while making repairs and getting the boat ready to sail.

The starboard hull collapsed and then folded out, tearing along the bridgedeck joint.

Whether to repair or write-off is still an open question.

We’ve been corresponding. On Christmas day, James wrote:

We’ve decided not to fix it, too much work. We’d rather sell it [as} is and get another boat with what we can scrape together, or we can work for awhile to save. 

Decisions like this take time to make. What seemed clear in the moment changes as new information becomes available. Whether to repair or write-off is still an open question.

I had originally thought that the bridge deck gave way first and wondered about duty cycles, but this failure sounds like a catastrophic hull failure, with stringers separating and bulkheads detabbing.

I’ve followed James since before (in video blogs) he met Kimi. Though, if I read the timeline correctly, the videos did not start going onto Youtube until after they met. James and Kimi have been terribly poor, reduced to black beans and any fish they caught before getting a Patreon following. They seem to have enough income now to survive.

In private correspondence, James had told me he wanted a monohull for his next boat.

Youtube videos are like TV shows in what we expect from them: Scary risks that resolve in an episode with a happy result. The sea isn’t like that.

[The utter crap that boating is safe than driving a car makes me crazy.*]

Screw up and you can die. It is sometimes difficult to know that you screwed up. Some minor mistake made months ago, or even years causes a failure now, or a cascading failure: A bulkhead tab fails, leading to flex, which starts to pop stringers in rough weather… I don’t remember Zingaro having a life raft.

James and Kimi came close to meeting their maker.

When we’ve had potentially catastrophic failures, I don’t remember being scared, there is just too much to do. I wonder if they were frightened in the moment, or only in reflection.

James and Kimi are now land locked. Zingaro had no hull insurance.

Follow Zingaro on Youtube, follow the blog, become a patron on Patreon or just send cash.

Jennifer and I are not sure when we will be back to Hawaii. Caro Babbo can sit for years in her slip as long as I pay moorage fees. It is all predicated on my Dad.†

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†For everyone keeping track of my dad: We’re still at Stony Brook Hospital getting him ready for rehabilitation. He has recovered very little so far, but he is not locked in, as everyone had feared. It is a very tough road. We know he becomes despondent. He can say at most Yes and No by looking up for Yes and down for No. I have tried a pointer board with letters and words, with no response; the professionals here tell me it is too early; he is not ready. Like many things in life, as much as I want to, I can not take this from him.

Come visit him.

*Car fatalities are measured in deaths per hundred million miles, currently around 1.25 deaths per 100,000,000 miles driven. A sailor with 30,000 miles is highly regarded. The average american car does that in a little more than two years. There are fewer deaths per year, but in terms of death per miles I would expect cruising to be hundreds if not thousands of times more dangerous. As an aside, we have sailed about 12,000 miles in Caro Babbo since 2016.