Well, last Thursday on our way to Clarence Town, Long Island we heard a thump and we lost steerage. I shut the auto pilot off and tried to steer by hand and nothing happens; looked for the rudder and it still there. The shaft was turning and the rudder was not responding...Oh Oh! We take the jib in and let the boat tack from starboard to port so we are not just bouncing around in 4 to 6 ft waves. Lucky it was a nice day.
We called for a tow and two hrs later Emile showed up with his fishing boat. He towed us the last eight miles to Clarence Town. Emile being quite the entrepreneur wanted to see if we could take the rudder out right away when we got to the dock and see what was the damage. I told him to come back the next day as this was enough excitement for one day. By the way my admiral handled this pretty good; she was on the throttle when we came in.
We were lucky because the next leg of the trip would have been a 120 miles ocean passage.
To make a long story short, Emile and one of his sidekicks, Ken, give us a hand and we got the rudder fixed. We took it out at the dock, took it to a welder and Emile did the fibreglass. These guys were very good; they are used to working on Island’s race boats. It took us three days; I spent a lot of time with them to keep the cost down. There is no marina that can take the boat out here so that is why we decided to fix it and get on with the trip.
So as of today, Tuesday, we are ready to go again and it looks like Friday or Saturday will be the days. Hopefully this is enough excitement and we can carry on without any more incident.
Tomorrow we hope to go for a tour of the Island and provision for our trip.