Day 14 Position Report 34 55.945 S 178 14.08 E 1200NZT

Mark_needler
Professional Skipper
Thu 15 Mar 2012 22:07
Almost there ..............or are we read on!!!
 
    Yesterday evening I was hand steering with the asymmetrical sail up and all of a sudden I couldn’t steer the boat anywhere, the steering wheel seemed to be disconnected from the rudder. After further investigation I identified that the Lewmar steering wheel does not have the correct boss fitted to it to match the shaft coming out of the pedestal.
      
    The shaft coming out of the pedestal is parallel for about 50 mm and then goes into an 20° degree taper at the very end next to the nut that secures the steering wheel. The problem being that the bore in the steering wheel boss is parallel and the key way in the shaft does not fit correctly as it is working off a tapered shaft. I recommend that a new mounting boss for the wheel is sourced and the old one replaced so that manual steering can be assured without and hiccups. In the mean time I managed to fix the problem with a little chewing gum, gaffer tape and some string...i think it will hold!
 
    At 2034 hrs yesterday we crossed the date line to NZ time.
 
We are on our final approach to the Colville channel which is about 154 nms off at the moment, we have very light winds and are motor sailing at the moment, fuel reserves are pretty low but I'm more than happy we will make it on what we have left.
 
Here’s the boring stuff! in the last hrs we covered 149 nms covered and have 197.5 nms until we reach Auckland wharfs.
 
   
 
 
Cheers
Mark