Puerto Rico has a few native boat classes, boats made locally and they are the native sloops and the chalanas that are skiffs. This day I was at the helm of "El jibarito", a 17 footer native sloop. These boats use a very huge mainsail and have a very deep V shape with a keel charged with lead for balance. They also use a trapeze and for bad weather we use extra ballast in the interior of the boat. Inside in what we call the working area, you walk over the bottom of the boat and there is no flat floor for to step in, as a security device, for exactly cases like this one, this boat has a sealed area fore and aft of the boat and between this areas is the working area "cockpit".

When I rounded the windward mark in first position, trying to jibe this 15 foot boom on this V shaped 17 footer with 25 knots of wind, one of the trapeze guys slipped off the deck and a second later saw us underwater. I noted that the boat didn't sink, we tried to flush the water out with a can, the waterpump wasn't helping too much - it throws out 10 gallons in five minutes and it fills again in just a second.

We worked with the boat for at least ten minutes when we also noted that were the last boat still capable of sailing out of 8 boats of our class, so if we get to the finish line we won that race and thats exactly what we did and we won! Be sure that all my friends pass a very good time with my performance. They nickname the boat as the "Crocodrile"... with the water at the eyes...

- Marerro Collazo

10/13/06