and average of more than 5 knots,
- April 2025
A day with few events. Despite the rain the mood was much better than yesterday night when we had to shut down the SB engine because of low voltage and low oil level alarms and heavy vibrations. In Addition there had been an occasional banging sound developing from where the starboard rudder is. Very worrying. The boat already steers very poorly with two rudders. We can only imagine how that would work out with only one. I had checked it at night from above and could not find anything. The sound later disappeared.
The wind had picked up at night and at times we were doing 7 knots today. It rained the whole night and morning, a large raincloud was moving parallel to us, Miriam said we were „riding the cloud.“ Luckily the good wind stayed once the cloud had dissolved and we had a nice run the whole day.
Today we checked the SB engine battery and oil level and also whether there is water in the oil from a potential internal damage caused by the overheating. All OK. The panel still gave the alarms when we restarted the engine. There is water leaking into the saloon from the steering column above, where the instruments are mounted. So maybe the electronics of the control panel got wet and are misfunctioning. Maybe.
The uncles also fixed the port gear cable, today, which had also become loose in the Samoa port incident.
Until a proper engine check in Fiji is done, we will only use this remaining engine for emergencies. No more playing around with the main sailing that cost us 2 hours engine running time yesterday plus the distance travelled because we have to turn into the wind until the faulty main was up (25 minutes) and then sail back the lost distance to proceed to where we turned in the wind. On our course the Genoa is good enough. It gave us 7 knots today. And we don‘t have to worry so much about somebody accidentally gybing, which already happened once.
When suggesting to seal the instrument panels with duct tape I was told that all the duct tape on board had been used to fix the lazy jacks. No more duct tape, sniff. There is some other tape, that should be waterproof, but duct tape is a very universal consumable to fix many things. We even used to fixed broken Kajaks with it. I gave the instruction to use the resources that are available on the boat only for the mission to get the boat to Fiji / the Philippines. Any non-essential things and repairs have to wait.
For dinner a Pastis was served as appetizer and there were excellent ribs and mushroom soup in the evening. The crew had spared me the last can of beer, which I highly appreciated.
Another little drama, at midnight. Quite a significant water entry in the starboard aft cabin. Around a liter per second. A crowd was inside looking at the water flowing in. Someone woke me up. I had a quick look inside the cabin and asked whether anybody had checked the hatch at the swimming platform. Nobody had. When we checked, it was wide open. Two guys had checked the rudder mechanism inside the rudder compartment a day ago to find out what caused the slack rudder, and obviously did not lock the hatch properly afterwards. Closing the hatch fixed the problem. One worry less.
The open hatch might also have made the banging sound yesterday night, with the door swinging open and closed and banging when it closed, or when a wave from behind hit it. When I checked from above, it had probably just closed so I could not see it open. I should have gone down and check but I did not want to do it at night while alone. It then opened wide and I believe that then the banging stopped. And because no more banging, we did not check anymore, assuming the banging might have come from a fishing device that got stuck first and then freed itself.
In the afternoon a large vessel was traveling easterly at the horizon from North to East. It had its ASL device turned off. I wonder what it was.
Lessons learned and hopefully internalized:
- A sound always has a cause, and if ignored it will hit back later. Always check
- Mir attention is needed for leaving a workplace in order and secured.