The big cat, the “Dead-Man’s” Reef….and the speed police..
The thing about Jim is that he doesn’t just seek “heavy entertainment”— sailing towards the edge of what is possible is his natural habitat.
I have the proof from a South Pacific midnight aboard Cheyenne, a 125-foot beast of a catamaran. This wasn’t a standard rig; she had a 60-foot beam and bows mounted on ball joints on the fwd beam, allowing them to “walk” through the waves with up to twelve feet of vertical travel. It was a machine built for the edge, but that night, we were looking right over it.
We were trapped after a series squalls kept building… 50 knots of wind was hammering 529 square meters of mainsail. Normally, to reef while running, you bore off and luff the sail with the apparent wind, but the halyard lock was jammed solid. Jim tried the standard move three times. Each time, the lock refused to budge, leaving us pinned under a lethal amount of power in 16-meter rolling seas.
So, Jim made a call that should have been suicide.
He asked the crew to pin the storm staysail out to windward and began to bring the 125-foot monster up into the teeth of the gale. It was a “dead-man’s” maneuver—if we lost momentum and got stuck into the wind, the boat was done for. But as we came up, the staysail acted like a massive hand pushing the bow back down, and the violent flogging finally shocked the halyard lock. The main dropped, and we slammed straight into two reefs.
The crisis was over, kind of… but the adrenaline wasn’t. As Jim bore away to get us back on course, the boat didn’t just accelerate—it took flight. The windward hull soared to a 30-40 degree angle, hanging forty feet over the churning black Pacific.
In that vertical chaos, as the boat accelerated like a Ferrari, the navigator’s head popped up from the hatch, illuminated by the glow of the screens, screaming: “We’re doing 47 knots over ground!”
It was the fastest the boat had ever moved. Jim, arms strained as he wrestled the 60-foot wide platform back toward the horizontal, didn’t even look at the numbers. He just barked into the dark: ”Shut the hatch! I can’t see for the light, mate!”
The bastard had just pulled off the most dangerous reefing maneouver in the Southern Ocean, set a world-class speed record, and his only complaint was the glare on his night vision. Trust Jim to get a speeding ticket while balancing a skyscraper on its side, thousands of miles from the nearest copper.
That staysail move was genius, but the sound of that main “flogging the hell” out of the rig was deafening and vibrated through the whole boat and our bodies.
Thanks for listening, Hervé Jan.
Narrated by Russel King:
Hervé Jan is a highly accomplished French professional ocean racer, watch leader, and multihull specialist. He is recognized as an elite “globe-girdler” who has secured multiple round-the-world sailing records, most notably clinching the prestigious Jules Verne Trophy. 
CHEYENNE ORYX CUP
