SV Panta Rhei Retirement Trip

The winds have died now so I can sit in the nav seat and type a post. Last night I couldn't do that. It was rough, very rough. And dark. And it was raining sideways. At about 11 pm I noticed that the satellite phone had fallen out of its cradle and was lying on the floor. Then I heard the wind shift. You can hear 30 knot winds especially well when they are coming on the nose. The sails rattle and the boat pounds. All hands (just Karen and I, and I as mostly asleep) jumped outside to recover control of the boat. Karen went to the wheel to turn the boat off the wind and I noticed that the autopilot was off. The wind shift was because the boat had naturally headed into the wind. Why? We still have about 7 days to go on this passage and an autopilot failure is at the top of the BAD POSSIBILITIES list. I could hardly see because of the rain on my glasses and as I came to the nav station I could hear alarms. My hands were dripping wet...not a good thing around electronics. It turned out that that iridium phone had a cable attached for power and that cable had turned off an entire column of circuit breakers including both gps receivers and the autopilot.

The computer had also hiccuped and had to be completely reset to restore function. So I spent the next hour fixng things while hanging on with one hand and one foot. Then I reclaimed my bed. Karen, I said, you have the helm.