12:19N 48:33W

daily run – 142   miles to go to Barbados 643

 

“Houston, we have a problem”. Those immortal words spoken by astronaut Jim Lovell on board Apollo 13 sent a chill down the spine of those following the space capsule’s progress to the moon. Didn’t Tom Hanks play him brilliantly? Today’s movie title is very appropriate as Bandit had her very own Houston two nights ago – we didn’t report it yesterday as we were too busy dealing with it!

The words that woke me and sent a chill down my spine came from the skipper at about 10pm. “I need you up on deck – now”. David never disturbs me during my off watch – we do sail adjustments/changes etc at change of watch so I immediately knew there was a problem. There was. Our faithful autopilot, that we fondly call Zak, had spat the dummy. After looking after us for 15,000mls, he chose a pitch black squally night, mid Atlantic to give up the ghost.  And, as Murphy would have it, it is the one piece of equipment we don’t carry a spare of, mainly due to budget constraints.

 

The skipper was keeping himself awake doing sudoku in the cockpit when Bandit veered wildly out of control. Bringing her back on course he hit the auto button – no response. It was then I got the call to go on deck so he could don his engineer’s cap (such a versatile man) and go below to see if there was an obvious problem. There wasn’t. Meanwhile, I put on my deckhand’s hat and handsteered with great difficulty as Bandit romped along at 7knots surfing down waves. It was as black as the inside of a cow (not that I’ve seen), blowing 20 knots of wind with 2-3 metre swells. The crescent of moon that was there earlier had disappeared behind clouds. For non sailors it’s like driving a car at night without headlights or streetlights and relying totally on instruments and the feel of the wind for guidance.  Yes sailors do helm their boats all the time in even worse conditions, but usually only racing or day sailors or those particularly passionate about it.  Ocean cruisers on passage seldom handsteer, relying heavily on autopilot and we fall into that category.  While we both enjoy helming when island hopping or on short passages, on a long ocean crossing it’s a waste of valuable energy.  Realising that we had no option but to handsteer all night we decided to slow Bandit down by dropping the mainsail and going under partly reefed genoa. We opted do hour on/hour off watches. In the early morning the southern cross (such a nice taste of home!) broke through the clouds and gave us something to steer by, making life a little easier.

 

In daylight the situation didn’t seem so bad – Bandit was easier to steer (or maybe I’d just got the hang of it) and the sun was beating down. After breakfast and a cup of tea the engineer went below and some hours later emerged triumphant.  After taking everything to bits he’d finally found the problem, a loose wire in the switchboard. The relief was palpable. Neither of us could have faced hand steering all the way to Barbados – it’s just too exhausting. So we have fingers, toes and everything else crossed that Zak stays on track for us. We’ve promised him a very big rum (that we’ll drink on his behalf of course) if he does! Second purchase, after the rum, will be a complete spare autopilot kit. (To hell with the budget!) While we have spares for just about everything else, the autopilot was one piece of equipment we didn’t double up on as it had never given us any trouble and the drive motor was replaced a few years ago. Ah the value of hindsight.

 

The only other news from the past 24 hours (which has mainly been taken up with catching up on sleep) is that Matador, a boat to the north of us, landed a 23kg tuna yesterday!  Made our mahimahi seem quite insignificant and as the skipper of Matador told of his prize catch on our afternoon sked I could see Bandit’s skipper rising to the challenge.  Guess we’ll be fishing all day today!