Day 2 & 3: We have [had] a problem.
Buoy 'N Sea
Phil and Trish Littman
Sat 24 Nov 2007 21:12
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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. |