We had planned a lovely sail down to Finisterre today; wind behind most of the way... but it didn’t go quite according to plan. 

This morning at nine, we weighed anchor… at least mostly! With the anchor about 1.5m from the deck, a scream went out from the foredeck. My first thought was a dreaded ‘how bad is the injury’. 

Thank goodness nobody was hurt, but the anchor windlass, the heavy duty motor and gearing that hauls huge amounts of anchor chain back up from the sea bed, was visibly and badly broken. Stabilising the situation by pulling the last part of the anchor in by hand, we secured the anchor on deck and changed course to go back to Coruna marina to effect repairs.

Safely tied up, we set about phone calls to the windlass manufacturer, Lewmar, ironically based in Havant, a couple of miles from where Catherine and Nigel live. We discussed the problem, the spares required, and set about finding a Spanish distributer to help furnish us with a new gearbox etc. Thankfully, the local distributors are only 10 miles away from Coruna (by sea) so we can collect the spare as it arrives, hopefully Thursday by moving to Sada tomorrow.

The ‘damage’ to the the windlass is a completely rotten metal casting, corroded I think over some years, connecting the windlass gearbox and motor, to the top of the anchor locker (and on top of that, the cogs that bring in the anchor chain). One of those out of sight, out of mind things; it was only a question of time. But if it was going to happen, having just 1.5m of chain to pull up was infinitely better than 40m (well over 100kg in weight if we’d had to pull up all the chain we had out today).

This afternoon, in preparation for the new parts arriving, Nigel and I set about removing the old gearbox and motor from the anchor locker. Quite a lot of corrosion around the unit made this a difficult task; but with some ‘persuasion’ from my trusty lead-weighted plastic mallet, WD40, some lumps of wood and another hammer handle, we hammered, sprayed, levered and man-handled the broken beast from the shaft and the anchor locker. Some well chosen words finally released the rusted hold, and we were able to recover the damaged components. 

The new part, will I hope, be with us to fit on Thursday afternoon (I’m assured by my new best friend, Javi, the Spanish Lewmar distributor). With luck, and the new part needing less ‘encouragement’, verbal and physical, we’ll be ready to go again Friday or Saturday. Hopefully we’ve not missed all the lovely wind. 

A day in harbour is also the chance to do lots of washing, have proper showers and another day topping the batteries up from shore power. Small compensations.

Simon

The top section in the right hand picture should be a complete metal ring; as you can probably see, not much left of it! Right hand picture shows wider picture of the motor (black box) and the gearbox with the rotten casting above and the anchor chain coming through the deck.

Sally and Catherine visited the town again for supplies and some time away from the disaster zone! Amazing square that we returned to later for aperitif.