29/5/08  17:00

The Wind carries on North force 5 and we’re adjusting to living on a 20 degree hill. It’s all gone grey again

21:00

It’s been spitting, dark and grey. Wind has gone NW and decreased.  Boat speed down to 6 knots… and less.

30/5/08 03:00

At 22:15 on Demetri’s watch the wind dies and he starts the motor. When I log the event, I notice the engine isn’t charging.  Also the Automatic Pilot seems to be hunting and steering an erratic course.  This is cured by the expedient of turning the pilot power and instruments off and on.

I wake for my watch and hear Steve in the engine room.  The bolt which maintains tension on the alternator bracket has sheared.  We had a lot of trouble with this bracket when we first got the boat. Everytime  we fixed it, it broke somewhere else  further down the stress line. It was repaired three times, the last time with a crude but effective weld in Gibraltar (November 2004).   Moody sent us a new bracket which we decided not to use as long as the repaired one lasted, so we have a spare bolt.  Steve needs a cool engine to work over so has gone to bed.  The tricky bit will be getting the sheared bolt out, and getting the floorboard up in his cabin (where the spare bracket is stored).  It’s been so damp in Valdivia all the floorboards have swollen and are almost impossible to lift.

As I start my watch a SW Force 3 returns and it’s enough to sail at nearly 6 knots.  I am treated to a Disneyesque moonrise smiling through low horizon clouds, the earlier grey having been replaced by lots of stars and wisps of cloud. The moon is huge on the horizon.

30/5/08  11:45

I wake for my watch and hear Steve in the engine room. No it’s not Groundhog Day it’s Spindrift Day. He’s found the spare alternator bracket bits and is having to remove the 24 volt 175 amp heavy beast to get to the sheared bolt; actually it has sheared in the mounting bracket and we have a spare mounting bracket so he doesn’t have to deal with removing the bolt at this stage but it’s difficult work in a very confined space.

The fishing lines are out for the first time as we are sailing slowly enough to fish, more or less in the right direction.  There are large patches of blue sky; it’s warm enough to sit in the cockpit in a T-shirt and for the first time it feels like The
Pacific.

12:00 The alternator is charging and we are motoring again.  Yesterday’s run was 170 Miles and Easter Island is less than 900 miles away.  As the wind is light we are able to motor towards our destination very efficiently.  We can only sail nearly North and very slowly in this wind.