A passage to Sicily, Part Two

Serafina
Rob & Sarah Bell
Tue 29 Jul 2008 14:30

38:27.0N 09:43.6E

 

Monday 28th July (continued)

So guess what we had for lunch today? (Did I mention the tuna we caught earlier?) I am no expert on fresh fish, but Sarah was raving about the delights of our truly fresh Tuna steaks, mind you peering into the fridge made me very aware of the fact that Tuna may well be making up the bulk of our meals for a few days yet!

 

Long hot day with barely 4 knots of true wind, so we motored onwards towards the Southern tip of Sardinia, with Sarah finally getting her long awaited sleep followed by a swim in the deep blue water under us, mind you she did not stay in too long and required me to keep a sharp eye out for any following sharks. The Chart plotter and autopilot started to play up a bit, by which I mean that they turned themselves off and on at random, which is apparently a ‘known’ fault and can be remedied by downloading some new software from the internet. Very strange issue, but we understand that it has something to do with the AIS receiver that we also have on board.

 

Wind started to rise about 8.00pm so we stopped the engine and unfurled the genoa and were soon bombing along at 7 – 8 knots. It was at this point that I accidentally nudged the GPS (satellite) aerial with disastrous consequences. We were unaware that this aerial, fitted on the back rail of the boat, had been fitted rather badly and the cable was twisted inside and had chaffed through, so that when I moved it slightly, the wires inside shorted out and fused ALL of our instruments. This lead to some feverish activity whilst I tried to find out what had happened and what could we do about it. The good news was that we were sailing nicely and Sarah had the boat very well balanced so we continued sailing whilst I sorted out a standby hand held GPS unit so that we could get position fixes, to plot on a chart. (Charts, remember them?) Darkness fell to complicate things and we made our plans for the night watches which now required us to sail the boat manually (no autopilot), keep a much sharper lookout (no radar and no AIS) and to plot our position on the chart every hour, to ensure we were sailing on the right course! All the non navigational electrics were fine so lights etc. all worked OK.

 

In truth, none of this is any real hardship and is really only sailing and passage making as it always used to be, indeed the old hands will tell you we had it easy with a hand held GPS for our positions. The important point now was to contact our wonderful friends and electrical gurus Robert and Joyce Forsdike in Ipswich to see what advice they could come up with. (Oh yes, the satellite telephone worked OK as well!!) Robert was out when we rang, but as soon as he got home he was on the case, which amongst other things, involved him driving to work where he had got a duplicate set of electrical drawing for Serafina, which we had made when the boat was built in Sweden, just for such an emergency.

 

The catch was that as well as wanting to solve the problem, we also had to keep sailing by hand, stay on watch and most importantly get the required rest periods otherwise with just two of you it can all become a little overwhelming. Robert F. has an excellent understanding of the systems and the nature of our problem, but needed time to pin down what to do about it, so we agreed to contact him again early the next morning which gave us time to work our proper watches and get some desperately needed sleep. Fortunately, the shipping traffic was light all night and although we were clearly on one of the ‘routes’ we did not need to take any avoiding action at all.

 

Tuesday 29th July

The wind died away finally around 3.00am and we restarted the engine and continued on our way, with the light pollution above Sardinia showing that we were drawing close to the halfway point on the passage. As dawn broke, we were off the Southern tip of Sardinia and as we were able to get an intermittent mobile phone signal, I texted Robert & Joyce to see if they had found a solution. Text proved to be unreliable so it was back to the Sat phone again and Robert F gave me a series of things to go looking for, but without much luck. He then jumped into his car and drove off to work where he did some more research and (bless him) he came up with the exact problem and its resolution! I was given a very exact description of what I had to find and what to do when I found it, and although I needed to go back with at least one more set of questions, finally at around 11.45am all the systems came back on. Well actually not quite, the culprit was the faulty GPS aerial, so we have removed it from the system as part of the remedy, so although we now have back our autopilot, wind, depth and speed instruments, we do not have our chart plotter, radar or AIS, but right now we could not care less! Thank you Robert and Joyce and we hope you catch up on some sleep yourselves tonight.

 

Meanwhile as we had been trundling along this morning we came across a Sperm Whale who seemingly was quite reluctant to move out of our way, but as we slowed down it slid below the waves. I had spotted one earlier through the binoculars, quite a distance from us, but it had dived thrashing its huge tail in the air imperiously, but the classic photo opportunity was missed as it was just too far away.

 

Another superb lunch based around beautifully prepared tuna steaks (did I mention.....oh yes.) Sarah has been at the top of her game planning an array of different presentations over the next few days.

 

Very hot again today and still no wind, so on and on we motor, but strangely there is no traffic at all around us and the flat blue sea is totally empty, even the wildlife have taken the afternoon off. We have changed our destination plans as our first choice was a small port with few services and the new plan takes us to Trapani where there is a boatyard and electrical services. The approach to Trapani is interesting and should keep us on our toes without the aid of a chart plotter etc. The hope is to arrive there early tomorrow evening but we could do with some better sailing weather to speed up our progress.

 

And the other good news I forgot to announce is that so far the generator has run just fine since leaving Palma, although in truth we have had little need of it as we have had to motor so much over the past few days.

 

Hope to get a decent internet cafe or connection in Trapani so that we can update the photo pages.