And Ping Went the Welds
27 December 2011 | Northwest of Monserrat
Jeff
Overnight we did fairly well only had to motor a couple of times when in the wind shadow of islands to our east. Our 24 hour run for that first day was 140 nautical miles which is a fairly respectable average of 5.8 knots. This morning started out with a bit of frustration as we were in the wind shadow of Guadeloupe forty miles to our east. So we had to motor for about an hour to make any progress. Then the wind came back up and we had a great sail the rest of the morning thru most of the afternoon and then it happened. I was on watch Pam was below getting some rest. All of a sudden I heard a ping followed by rattle rattle as the parts of a broken turning block landed on the deck in the cockpit. The turning block is used to route the control lines for our wind vane steering system. This system steers the boat while we are making passages like this one leaving us free to adjust sails and watch out for other vessel traffic. Well when the welds on the block broke the wind vane couldn't steer the boat any longer so I had to call Pam to take the helm while I tried to figure out what to do. My first thought was to put the boat on our autopilot for the rest of the passage, but that uses precious electricity. I thought about rigging the emergency tiller because it has a way to run with the wind vane. But before I resorted to that I tried to figure out how I could re-route the lines thru other spare blocks that we have on board. Well after about thirty minutes of trial and error and tying a bunch of knots I got the lines re-routed and so far for the last two hours it has worked. We hope it makes it thru the rest of the passage. If we maintain similar speeds to yesterday we should arrive in St. John US Virgin Islands just before sunset. Obviously if we can travel a little faster we can get there earlier in the day, which would be nice. I'll try to update the blog again tomorrow but if we are busy making landfall I may not be able to do it until the following day. We shall see, stay tuned.