Day 7
Scott-Free’s blog
Steve & Chris
Sat 17 Jul 2010 09:38
34:05.97N
24:30.22E
Saturday 17th
July
Log
7541
Distance run in 24
hours 101
Total distance run
709
After a day of
little wind, yesterday evening saw a sudden change, with winds of 20+knots and
very confused seas. We shortened sail considerably, and sailed with 2 reefs in
the main and the yankee, and made some good speed in the right direction.
Unfortunately, the autopilot which had been giving error messages on & off
for a couple of days decided that it really had had enough now, and although it
continued to hold the wheel steady, would not turn it. This meant that we
had to hand steer, and it was easy to see why the autopilot gave up, as the
sea was constantly yanking the wheel hard over one way or the other, making
it quite hard work. We put the autopilot on from time to time to give
ourselves a rest, and as the sails were well-balanced it was able to hold the
wheel steady, but when noises started to come from the area of the autopilot
drive we decided we had better not use it any more. The backup
wheel pilot was also overwhelmed by the seas and so with over half the passage
still left to go, we now had no autopilot.
On the upside, we
were surprised to suddenly hear the beep beep of a text message arriving on one
of our mobiles which just happened to have been left on. 'Welcome to
Greece' it said, and it appeared that although we were some 50 miles off the
coast of Crete, we had picked up a mobile signal! We wasted no time
in connecting to the internet and getting the weather forecast for the next
week. This meant that we were better informed when making passage
decisions. The bad news was that there would be little wind over the next
several days and progress towards Malta would therefore be slow. The good
news was that there were no gale warnings!