Birvidik

Ah! - the 25th of May, Spring in the Southern Aegean. The sea and the air are warming up. Relaxing summer days and balmy summer nights beckon enticingly. Shorts, T shirts and sandals are the order of the day.

Are they bollocks. We're wrapped up enough to survive the Southern Ocean. We're wearing lifejackets for Christ's sake.

Missed weather window or not, after a week in Kalymnos it was definitely time to move on. The forecast wasn't too bad, broken cloud with a force four fine on the starboard bow. So it was when we started out on the 10 hour trip to Dhenoussa. We trimmed the sails and set off on a cracking motor sail, making about 8 knots. Einstein was drugged up to the eyeballs and slumped on a beanbag in the cockpit. The sun shone most of the time and Birvidik cut cleanly through the water, riding the low swell with an easy motion.

This lasted all of 40 minutes.

Then the wind swung round dead on the nose and freshened to a force 5. The sky clouded over and darkened and it started to rain. The wind built to a six, still dead on the nose, and proceeded to build up a short, steep sea into which Birvidik slammed with stomach-jarring regularity. We had eight hours of this until we pulled into the isolated overnight anchorage on Dhenoussa. This gave us short relief as the weather was forecast to deteriorate even further, with the Northerly 6 increasing to North Westerly 8, so we left early the next morning to try to get into the anchorage on Paros before it really hit.

Coming out of the bay involved turning into the swell which the wind had continued to build up overnight. The wind and waves were funnelled into the channel between Dhenoussa and Naxos and really threw Birvidik about. Fortunately we had had the foresight to drug everyone on the boat (Stugeron for us, sedative for Einstein) before setting off.

Things continued to fail to improve.

About halfway there, Liz took over the con and I went below for a bit of shuteye. No more than 10 minutes into my off duty an alarm started beeping continuously, which brought me up to the cockpit in short order. It turned out to be the autopilot which displayed the terse and, I thought, rather unnecessarily cryptic message 'DRIVE STOP'. No-one can think with all that beeping noise going on, so I turned the autopilot off and reverted to hand steering. Well, perhaps the phrase 'Attempted to return to hand steering' would have been more accurate. The steering was locked solid.

There are many systems on a boat that, in a pinch, you can get away without or bodge some sort of substitute for, but steering is not one of them. If you lose your electronics you can revert to trad nav. If you lose your echo sounder you can use a lead line. If you lose your engine you can use the sails. If you lose the mast you can usually jury rig something to provide some sort of propulsion. But if you lose your steering you're definitely knackered. Unable to control your direction you are left at the mercy of the sea. If it's in a bad mood, and it was definitely a bit grumpy this day, the sea makes Judge Jeffries look like Mahatma Ghandi.

Without steerage you can't control the aspect of the boat to the waves, nor can you guide it away from nasty hard sharp things, like rocks, of which there were plenty in the (dire) strait in which we found ourselves. Although on a lee shore we at least had a modicum of sea room. At a rough estimate we had about half an hour before a close encounter with one of the sharp pointy things surrounding the East coast of Naxos. Our first thought was that the violent motion had dislodged something which had then fallen into, and jammed, the steering mechanism.

The most likely place was right at the stern, where the steering mechanism operates the quadrant which turns the rudder. I dived into the aft cabin, pulled out the two drawers and the back and threw them onto the bed, scattering the contents. I slung on a headlight and wormed my way into the steering space behind the drawers, no mean feat when the room you are in is lurching randomly about. I couldn't see anything obvious, but I called to Liz to try turning the wheel to starboard while I kept my hand on the torque tube to see if I could feel anything. To our surprise, and relief, it turned and then freed itself completely. Everything now worked perfectly.

This, of course, was good news, but slightly worrying as we had no idea what had caused the problem in the first place. Had it gone away completely, or would it decide to come back at the most inopportune moments, such as when undertaking some close quarters manoeuvre between Scylla and Charybdis? We thought about attempting to track the entire steering system to find the fault. This, however, would have involved dismantling half the boat, which is difficult enough on a calm day in a marina. We decided to work on the assumption that it had sorted itself out and re-engaged the autopilot.

Just as the adrenaline levels were tapering off we came out of the Northern end of the channel and into the full force of the wind and sea. The boat pitched violently and threw itself from side to side. We also needed to change course here and that posed another problem. Currently, we had the sea on the bow, unpleasant, but cope able with. The course we needed would put the seas on the beam, which would have made an even worse motion, despite the steadying effect of the sails. I decided to continue beating into wind until we had enough sea-room to tack down wind and sea to our destination. This took a very unpleasant forty minutes during which Liz managed to rick her back when an unexpected lurch of the boat coincided with her attempt to pump out the toilet.

Then came the next little challenge. Once we were on our new course I hoped we would have the wind and sea on the starboard quarter and the motion would ease. To get there though, I had to turn through 100 degrees to port, which involved taking us through having the seas beam on. With a nice regular pattern this is doable. You judge the pattern of the waves and turn just before the crest. Then with any luck you'll pass through the beam on position and be on your next course before the next wave hits. With a confused sea such as we had, gauging this becomes far more difficult, but I gave it a go.

I blew it.

A big, irregular wave appeared out of nowhere mid-manoeuvre. It hit us square on the starboard side and knocked us on our beam ends (that's flat on your side for the non-yachties out there). I saw it coming a fraction of a second before it hit. I just had time to shout a warning down to Liz to grab hold of something and looked across to see Einstein, still in a drugged stupor, still slumped on a beanbag on the starboard cockpit seat. Clutching the wheel I braced myself with my left leg and stuck my right leg out like a geriatric Jackie Chan in a futile attempt to keep her on the seat. No such luck. The beanbag, complete with cat, slid off the seat and hung, momentarily, in mid air before plummeting to the cockpit sole with a muffled thud. She raised her head, and one eyebrow, sighed and collapsed back on the bag like a deflating balloon.

Another hour and a half of downwind tacks, luckily unaccompanied by any steering failures, led us into the calm waters of Naoussa anchorage in Paros.

Which is where we bloody well stayed until the winds decided to behave themselves.

We used the time to clear up the unholy mess in the all the sections of the boat and to search for the cause of the steering problems. No luck - everything worked perfectly.

Birthdays? Hah!