Escape Adventure:
Passage from Valdivia to Galapagos Part 2 (22 – 28 August)
In
Part 1, I took you through the final preparations for our passage from
Valdivia, Chile to the Galapagos Islands and the actual departure. That was Saturday, 22 June. We ended that blog saying we were starting
our first night watch after seeing the first glorious sunset. I can’t really say I slept much during the
night. I could hear the water gurgling
past the hull and the frequent SLAM of a wave hitting either the underwing
(basically the floor under the bridge deck) or one of the hulls. Each time, it sounded and felt about like
driving your car off the road and hitting a huge rock on the under carriage
with enough force to take out the oil pan, transmission, and rear differential
all in one swipe. The other thing that
made it hard to sleep was that the waves were coming from the aft quarter and
they were moving faster than we were so each one would push the stern of the
boat around to one side until the auto pilot applied enough force and angle to
the rudder to correct it. So we didn’t
really go in a straight line, but rather sashayed through the waves with the
bow sweeping back and forth about 30 degrees.
Each time I felt that, I couldn’t help, but think that the auto pilot
had dropped off line or wasn’t up to the task and that we would soon find
ourselves sideways to the waves, which is not what we wanted to do. Anyway, I was on watch when the sun came up
and it was another clear day—overcast, but no rain and the winds had maintained
about 20 knots which is what the weather forecast said they would do. For once in my lifetime, the weather forecast
was turning out to be right on and the winds were not only maintaining speed,
but were shifting to the south so they were pushing us in the direction we
wanted to go. I looked at the
speedometer and it said we were going over 10 knots speed over ground (SOG)
according to the GPS and about 12 knots through the water. I went down to my shower and looked out the
porthole at the other bow to see what it looked like to be flying along at 10
to 12 knots. I posted a movie on YouTube
at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwdYZDUjEwQ9 so you can see too.
It’s pretty impressive and gives you the illusion that you’re really making
progress. Of course, you are making
progress, but at 10 knots it takes a long time to see movement on the chart
plotter when the course is 2539 nautical miles.
I also took this movie off the back deck so you can see what it looks
like at that end of the boat when you’re cruising along at about ten
knots. (See You Tube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz0lEWl5LZg). There isn’t a lot of
entertainment other than watching the ocean go by on these long passages. The land has long disappeared, so without the
instruments (compass, chart plotter, speed and wind meters, etc.) there isn’t
much of a reference as to where you’re going or how you’re doing.
On
the first day out after sailing with the screecher and the mizzen jib for about
four hours I was sitting in the bridge deck when all of a sudden I noticed the
speed dropped to about 4 knots from 10.
I looked out and noticed that the screecher was gone. I yelled to Jay and Sven to get on deck and
help me stop the boat, which they did.
The screecher halyard (i.e., the line that holds the top of the sail up)
had chaffed through at the top of the mast allowing the huge sail to drop into
the ocean in front of the boat which was moving along at about ten knots. The forward force of the boat put tremendous
stress in the fiberglass bowsprit once it entered the water and that broke the
bowsprit where it fastens onto the seagull striker in the center of the cross
member between the two bows. Once we got
the other sail furled and the mast foils weather cocked so they weren’t propelling
the boat forward any more, we took the boat hook and tried to pull the sail in
from the bow, and again from the stern, but it just wasn’t moving. Finally, Escape drifted a little backward and
the sail stayed stationary in the water, so we were able to pull it back up
onto the trampoline by brute force. It
was wet and heavy, and had black bottom paint smeared on it, but it did not
appear to be damaged. We lost about 15
minutes recovering the sail, so now we had to move quickly to get the boat
moving again with the two jibs and get her back up to at least 7 knots so we
could stay ahead of the storm that was brewing.
With a True Wind Speed (TWS) of
15.9 knots right on our tail, we were only able to get about 6.6 knots
of Speed Over Ground (SOG) which is measured by the GPS, not the speed through
the water. We had two problems: (1) the bowsprit was damaged where the pin
joins it to the seagull striker as described above, and (2) the halyard that
holds the screecher to the top of the mast had chaffed through and had fallen
down inside the mast in a pile of spaghetti at the bottom of the mast. We sent an emergency e-mail to Alwoplast via
the SSB radio explaining the situation and requesting guidance on what we could
do to make temporary repairs because in the light winds we had right behind us,
we needed the screecher to stay above 7 knots.
Between
midnight and 6 AM on the 23rd the winds were really picking up as
the weather forecast had predicted. The
winds were still from the south, but were now in the mid 20 knot range with
gusts up to 35 knots. We put one reef in
the main and two in the mizzen sail and we were flying along at 8.8 knots. These winds were pushing bigger waves now
that were crashing into us from the aft quarter and since the waves were going
faster than we were, they wanted to push the stern of the boat around. We decided to feather the mizzen mast foil so
there was less force from the wind on it and less of a tendency to turn to
weather. By noon on the 23rd
the bilge pump alarms were going off because we had several gallons of water in
the starboard engine compartment, about two gallons in the starboard bedroom
bilge, and quite a bit of water in the starboard aft hull bilge. These events triggered another flurry of
e-mails to Alwoplast and Chris White trying to find out where the water was
coming from and what to do about it.
Chris said that Pounce, the second boat in the Atlantic 47 series, had
experienced similar problems and that the source of the leaks was the bilge
pump hoses the exit in the side of the hull beneath the under wing (i.e., the
floor of the bridge deck). Essentially
what was happening is that as the big waves came underneath the boat, they
piled up under the bridge deck causing pressure on the bilge exhaust lines and
forcing water into the bilges. Another
source of leaks was the hole in the very back of the starboard hull beneath the
steps, where the steering shaft goes through the hull. The hole is about 3” in diameter and the
shaft is about 1” in diameter. It needs
the larger hole to allow sidewards motion as it moves the rudder. The obvious solution is to put a flexible
rubber boot on it, but I didn’t happen to have one on board. The solution I came up with was to stuff rags
around the shaft so that the water couldn’t just come splashing through the
hole. The leaks weren’t about to sink
the boat, but the frequent squeal of the bilge pump alarms was really annoying
so we ended up shutting them off, and just reminded ourselves to go bail out
the bilges each day after the sun came up.
Throughout the rest of the day on the 23rd and the morning of
the 24th, the winds continued to stay in the high 20’s and the waves
continued to grow to between 15’ and 20’.
We were surfing down some of the waves and on some occasions we were
reaching between 17 and 20 knots.
I’d
been reporting our position and other status updates each morning about 0800 so
I was hoping to get some insights from Alwoplast about what to do about the
broken bowsprit and the water coming into the bilges. Unfortunately, the message I got was from
Sailmail telling me they hadn’t sent my last message because I was using more
than my allotted 90 minutes per week. I
sent an e-mail to the Sailmail Admin and Operations Officer explaining that I
was out in the middle of the Pacific, I had mechanical problems, and I needed
an additional allotment of minutes. They
were very nice and said that they always provided the service we needed under
the circumstances I described so the e-mails started flowing. One of the first was from my wife, Elaine,
wishing me a Happy Anniversary and reminding me that I had been away from home
for my birthday and Fathers’ Day as well.
I also got an e-mail from Roni saying he was sending me some one-way
valves to install in the bilge pump hoses to keep the waves from forcing water
in, some flappers to go in the engine compartment exhaust hoses to keep them
from filling with water, a stainless steel fitting to repair my broken
bowsprit, and some new stainless steel guides for the top of the mast to
protect the screecher halyard from chaffing.
I told him to send them to John Rohrback, who is the brother in law of
one of my Search and Rescue buddies, and who had volunteered to come to the
Galapagos from Seattle to help me sail the boat to La Paz, Mexico. He and one of his friends, Eric Buxton, were
both coming to crew from the Galapagos to La Paz so they could carry the parts
with them, along with the VHF Radio and some other items we needed. During the rest of the 24th we
continued to have winds around 27 knots TWS and we were making between 8.5 and
9.5 knots SOG. Very late in the day on
the 24th and early in the morning of the 25th, the winds
died down to the high teens and the seas began to calm. We definitely had a better night’s sleep on
the 25th with the calmer seas and lower winds, but we had dropped
down to around 6.6 knots SOG and I was worried about getting behind schedule
and we intended to meet John Rohrback and Eric Buxton on the 7th in
the Galapagos.
On
the 26th, the winds had died sufficiently and the seas calmed enough
that we motored much of today while we lowered the foresail so we could use
it's halyard to raise Sven up the mast to install a new screecher halyard that
he had already repaired. We did that and
then raised the foresail again. We made
a temporary repair to the bowsprit with wire and epoxy by drilling two small
holes through the remaining solid material beside the hole where the pin goes
through and then running several wraps of lacing wire through the holes and
around the damaged part of the bowsprit.
We filled the gap with epoxy and smeared more epoxy on the wires to hold
them in place. While we were motoring,
the port engine stopped providing any thrust.
The engine runs fine, and the shifter seems to go through the normal
range, but the propeller does not provide any thrust. We suspect there is something keeping the folding
propeller from deploying. This triggered
more e-mails to Alwoplast and Chris White to see if they had any
suggestions. I started pouring through
the manuals for the engine controllers.
We
continued to motor or motor sail all day and through the night on the 26th
due to very light winds, but I was worrying a lot because we only had one
engine that was working and if it went out, we would have none. The winds started picking up a bit around
0900 on the 27th so we were able to shut off the starboard engine
and get under way once again under sail power although only at about 5.5
knots. Roni had suggested in an e-mail
that the Micro-Commander, that is the electronics box that controls the engines
and shifts the transmission on the sail drive, might need to be adjusted and
that it might not be moving the cable far enough to put it in gear. That matched our own observations because we
stopped once so Jay could put his diving mask on and look at the port propeller
from the starboard aft steps and he didn’t see any obstructions. So I read up on the paragraphs explaining how
to adjust the Micro-Commander and Sven and I crawled down in the engine
compartment to adjust it. That worked
and we soon had two operational engines again, and a repaired bowsprit and
screecher halyard, although we hadn’t tried them out yet because the winds had
steadily been building throughout the 27th into the high 20’s with
gusts in to the mid 30’s accompanied by 6 foot waves, but with very short
periods between the waves making for a very uncomfortable ride. Apparently, we hadn’t totally outrun the
storm. The winds were shifting to WNW
and pounding us, so I figured the storm had moved east faster than forecast and
maybe a little farther north than forecast, and that we were just on the
northern edge of the storm. If I was
right, we could use these high winds on a broad reach and make good time to
sail out of it. By the middle of the
night we had two deep reefs in the mainsail and had reefed the mizzen sail down
to about 25% of it’s normal area, and weather cocked the mizzen mast foil, and
we were still flying along at 11-12 knots.
By noon on the 28th we had largely sailed out of the effects
of the storm, the winds had subsided, and the seas calmed considerably. In the afternoon the sun came out for a
little while and we were sailing along at about 6.5 knots with 13 knots of
TWS.
Around
midnight on the 28th the Wind had shifted to the SE and died down to the point
that we could only make about 3-4 knots under sail so we started the port
engine and motor sailed at 6.5 kts. The wind picked up again around 0515 to
around 12 knots so we let out the sails and shut off the port engine.
During
the night on the 28th we saw steaming lights from another boat around
0500 at about 110˚ M. That’s the first
boat we’ve seen since we left Valdivia seven days ago. We could not pick him up on radar but we estimated
his range to be 6-10 nm. Since we had
seen no radar targets during the previous seven days, we turned the radar off
during the day because it only has a range of 35 nm and it’s several hundred nm
to any land at this point and any boats that come over the horizon, we can see
during the day time. At night we turn on
the radar and I require the crew to physically go outside and look forward and
backward at least every ten to fifteen minutes.
So far we haven’t seen any boats other than the one mentioned above and
no critters of any kind other than occasional sea birds.
