Day 2 & 3: We have [had] a problem.

Buoy 'N Sea
Phil and Trish Littman
Sat 24 Nov 2007 21:12
This posting was sent directly from Buoy N Sea. We are catching up on what happened in the last few days so we are not plotting our coordinates in this post.
 
In the Bahamas
It was a beautiful day for sailing in the NW Providence Channel (between the Grand Bahama & Berry Islands). We had to keep a keen watch for other boats as this is a major freeway for cruise ships and freighters.
 
A shot of wave crashing the bow [from the low side]
 
We turned on the single side-band around 2:30PM to try to hear Herb's broadcast. Herb is Bahamian, and a Ham radio operator transmitting from Canada who provides weather/sailing forecasts for various boats that check in with him daily. We listen for boats checking in in our general location. According to many, Herb is one of the most accurate forecasters.
 
We had wraps for lunch and dinner again, supplemented by baby carrots and Hershey's dark chocolate bars for desert.
 
We're trying hard to stay East and as close as possible to the wind in order to stay near our next waypoint line. With ENE winds, we see that we're forced to go further south than we want. We're making 6.5 knots, in 20-25knts of wind, heeled over 30 degrees.
 
After midnight, we see the glow of the lights of Freeport on the horizon to our North. Due to the amount of ship traffic in the channel, we doubled up on night watch.
 
4:30am Tuesday, November, 20th
Suddenly, those awake and asleep smell electrical burning. Everyone jumps to their feet and starts running around to investigate what's going on. The high water alarm starts going off. This alarm sounds when water hits a certain level after filling up in the bilge faster than the bilge pump can pump the water out. A number of our electrical systems go down, including our instrument panel and autopilot. This sends the boat tacking unexpectedly, back winding the jib. The moon had set around 3 AM so there was no light besides the stars and our flashlights.
 
Phil yelled to the helm to level her off -- or to take her on a course that stops the boat from heeling. Very shortly thereafter, Phil diagnoses the problem. The inverter (which converts DC to AC power) burned up, due to water getting into one of the cockpit storage compartments where the panel was mounted.
 
Steve put us on a reciprocal course heading 300 towards Freeport while the rest of us continued to troubleshoot the high water problem. We assumed the worst and started to believe the trip was over and that we had to head back to FL, steering manually and navigating with a backup handheld GPS, as our navigation system was down.
 
After realizing that the high water receded as soon as we flattened the boat, we also realized that the breaker panel was tripped on a number of systems. We went through each one to see what we had working. To our surprise, all of our DC systems were working (including our instruments and navigation, auto pilot, water pressure, tri-colors/running lights, VHF, etc). The only thing that didn't work was AC power, which was used only for laptops and charging electronic equipment. We decided to turn the boat around and continue on our previous course.
 
We determined later that the boat had healed over too far due to being too close tot he wind (40 degrees off) and had wind gusts of over 25knts, and water had entered [we believe] through the chain plates.