Saturday 29th June 2013
Day 5
6.30 am my watch,
Well the ocean has settled down a lot, :-)
We still have big waves but nothing like the last two days, this kinda ocean we can handle. Not the one we just went through, it really wears you down, both physically and mentally.
We had a situation last night.
The Captain, went down to turn off the generator and just as he was about to flick the switch a big wave caught him, he fell forward and accidentally knocked the auto pilot switch off instead.
I can tell you Aut (the Auto-pilot), was not impressed at all, and just refused to talk to us, no mater what we did, we could not get him to come back to the party.
This turned into a very serious situation real quick.
With big seas like this even Aut struggles to keep us on track, so there was a mad dash, to get the things away from behind the wheel, one of the bean bags had actually fallen down there and we had just left it sitting there, man it was an effort to get that thing out.
The Captain than had to hand steer, this was so hard for him, as you can imagine in over 10ft waves and wind gusting 35knts and pitch black, not a good combination at all.
We thought we were getting thrown around before man this was shocking I had to go and hunt out the Manual ,after being thrown all over the place I finally found it, and it was useless, I was sitting here with a torch trying to read the thing and hanging on, I pressed this button and that but nothing, it said that you have to be in standby Mode to do anything, the big problem was, it's flashing an error message the whole time and we could not get it back to standby mode, and of course there was nothing in the book about that error message, everything else but that, by this time I'm throwing my hands in the air saying, I can't do anything more, The Captain, was also showing signs of stress and he had only been steering for awhile.
So went back down and turned everything off again and then back on, this time it flashed standby, then back to error code, so plan about 8 by now, I would go back down turn it off, and when I turn it back on, The Captain would let go of the steering wheel, race to Aut, and push the button before the standby code would disappear, did it work? Nope all it did was throw us and the boat in circles.
Far out am really starting to freak out here, as I know I could not steer the boat, in conditions like this and also knew The Caption could not keep up this pace for hours on end either.
In sheer desperation I went down once again, and just turned every damn thing I could off, waited 5mins, and turn them back on again and it all fired up fine, everything working, man what a relief, The Captain comes around to give me a hug, to settle me down and right at the moment he puts his arm around me a wave hits, and his head slammed so hard into to the side of my head, that it knocked us both back on our seats.
Well that's was the last straw, I just sobbed and sobbed.
The stress of the last two days finally hit, not to mention the pain in my head, he is now barred to his side of the boat....haha only joking, it was just an accident.
After we had both calmed down some, we finally got back to eating our now cold dinner, minus the cheese that the Captain tried to sprinkle on top, right when another wave hit, which resulted in cheese covering everything from the galley to the dinette, minus our plates...haha
Talk about things coming in threes, we should be right now until the next round hits us.
Well getting back to today we are now off the Columbian coast, we are making good progress and hope to be in Panama in around three days, it can't come quick enough I can tell you.
5.30 pm my watch again kinda,
I can tell you there is never a dull moment on this boat, we had another situation, it seems to always start with The Captain laying down for a sleep.
Now I had been trying to get him to have a sleep all day, as I was really tired, and I always have my sleep after his.
Not today in the end he said he was not really tired so I lay down instead.
around 4.30 pm he finally decides to lay down, this lasts about 5mins and up he jumps again, he is not happy with the sails, so fiddling around with this and that he finally decides he likes it.
This get us talking about falling over board again, as he had to go out and adjust some lines on deck.
So we are discussing what order of events he would do and what I think we should do, now we have a Man Over Board button on the chart plotter/ Radar what I usually call the NAV thingy.
We have never pushed it at all, and then we decided to push it and see if it went to a different screen, how it works is it usually puts what they call a waypoint with the exact position of where they fell in.
Then you can turn the boat around to go locate them.
So we push the button, big mistake, it goes to a different screen alright with a symbol of a little man in red waving his arms in the water and a line drawn from the boat to the symbol.
That's all cute and all but also a piercing alarm and in turn sets of a radar giving notice to all satellites around, well we freak out and try and turn the thing off and can't.
By this time I'm cracking up laughing and The Captain says will will properly have every coast guard from all over the country sending out search parties.
So we race down and once again search for another manual and it says it is sending out morse code every 30 seconds, far out this had been happening for the last ten minutes or so, we eventually managed to work out how to switch it off, and just hope like hell no one comes out here.
So after that little episode, he goes to lay down once again and I notice a boat on the radar about 20nm behind us, no big deal we have seen a lot in the last few days, so I just keep an eye on it for awhile, make sure the alarm is on the AIS and go back to reading my book, now it usually pops up on the computer screen when it's about 10nm away, so look over after some time and yeap there it is, so that's good its on both screens, then all of a sudden it disappears off the AIS, far out this means they have properly turned there AIS off, but why , I'm thinking pirates for sure, am hanging out the back of the cockpit and can just make it out, way off in the distance.
I have read the previous owners blog and was telling The Captain their two hairy experiences of what they thought may have been pirates, this puts us into combat zone, I go down and get one of our mace sprays and the stun gun, come back up with them we both go through on how to use them again, then I'm on my way back down again to get more weapons, The Captain stops me with a yell its back on the screen again, man I had a list as long as my arm of what I was going to bring up...haha
So that little drama out the way, The Captain decides to go start the generator, and yeap he turned off the Auto Pilot by mistake once again, by this time I can tell you there was a hell of a lot of pirate language coming from both of us, if they were pirates on the other boat we would of scared them just by the language on here alone.
And yeap once again all hell broke loose.
To cut another long story short, as this is almost turning into a novel already, the auto pilot stopped working, the AIS stopped working, the radar stopped, and to throw into the mix we had the huge oil tanker beating down on us, was so not fun.
We made the decision after a hundred attempts to get it all working, that at least we had to get the radar back on so we could watch the tankers direction.
The tanker finally goes past very close to us I might add, and we eventually get everything all up and running again, man I sure could of used a stiff drink, and now The Captain is banned from the instrument panel as well...hahaha
Well tomorrow is another day.