Sines to Madeira-------------Or Tyranny of the Tiller!!!
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33:20.4N 15:50.09W
Sines to No Pictures on this one I am afraid as I am
sending it by Sat phone while on passage. We left Sines at 7am on Sunday
19th October for the 490 mile trip over to Around lunch time Norma said there was a funny noise coming from our cabin and on investigation I realised that it was the steering gear. Peter and myself stripped the mattress off the bed, no small feat in a 3m swell which had us rolling all over the place, to check things out. We quickly realised that the gears on the hydraulic pump for the self steering motor were grinding. This was potentially a major problem so I called all three of us together for a steering committee (sorry couldn’t resist that one) and we looked at our options. 1. Turn back 2. Carry on using the self steering until it failed 3. Replace the hydraulic pump at sea (I carry a spare) 4. Hand steer and keep going. 1. We agreed not to turn back as we carried a spare and we had emergency steering gear as an extra backup should everything go wrong. 2. That was just silly and could have caused irreparable damage. 3. I vetoed that as I was not willing to crack open the hydraulic steering system unless we really had to, due to the risk of losing the manual steering. 4. Hand steer and keep going, This is what we agreed to do. In order to make hand steering for long periods a practical option I changed the shifts around so that we did 2 hours on and four off which has worked pretty well up to now, as we go into night number four, tired but still functioning well. Onto more normal things we had a cracking sail for the first 24 hours and clocked up 140 miles all under sail. The second night the wind dropped and we have been engine on and off ever since as the wind keep falling away. Dolphins have been regular visitors and we also sighted a whale and a turtle. On board it has been a bit of a menagerie with a couple of little brown birds dropping in for a rest for an hour or so on a regular basis, Norma has named them Christina and Christopher. One unusual visitor has been a bat. He flew in on the morning of day two about 100 miles from the nearest land and immediately went to sleep with his head under a strap on deck. That night he disappeared and we thought that was that until I found him hanging upside down from the foresail halyard winch, again fast a sleep. Night three and he came back again and he is still there sleeping away upside down as we approach Porto Santo so he made a wise decision joining the crew, Norma has named him Batty which is pretty unoriginal I wanted to call him Vlad but was out voted. Last night the engine failed and so did my sense of humour. I fervently wished Tony my son had been on board as he likes smelly diesel engines and understands them. It took a while but I checked the fuel level all good 400 litres still in the tank, the first filter was a bit loose so I tightened that and the engine started. Big smiles all round and then it died again, bugger. I then remembered a conversation I had with the previous owner about a set of relays under the exhaust manifold. I stripped them out and found one had worked itself loose with the constant vibration so I pushed it back in with a click and then I could hear the fuel pump buzzing. After a bit of cranking she fired up and has been running sweet as a nut for the last 8 hours so big smiles all round. That’s it for now we just cut our hair and had
showers on deck, sprucing ourselves up for Tommy and Sue in Pictures of Batty Bat etc next blog I promise. |