Diary for Sailng on Windwanderer.


Wednesday 16th October 2013

2013-10-16

Wednesday 16th October 2013
Day 4
17°01'S. 159°05'W. 
870nm to go
9am

Well I have woken up to a situation and one very stressed out Captain.
It appears our main engine has a serious problem.
It's over heating, now if you remember the generator died on us a few days ago, so we are relaying on the main engine to keep the batteries topped up at night time, so this is huge.
As we have to run it every 3 hours or so to keep everything and I mean everything going.
At the moment The Captain is down there with all the floor boards up, and a lot of tools scattered around, I have not heard a word out of him in ages, this could either be really bad or a good thing.
After hours and a lot of manual reading and fixing I'm asked to go start the engine, with crossed fingers I fire it up, and watch the temperature slowly creeping up, I'm stressing out it gets quite high and then starts to go right down again, yes yes yes, he has fixed it. With a big grin and puffed out chest The Captain goes off to clean up the mess he made and a very cold shower, it was like a sweat box down there.
The rest of the day was pretty uneventful until around 5pm.
There is an almighty bang I was actually asleep and jumped up so fast, thinking oh no what now.

A bracket under the boom that holds the ropes and stuff snapped, and ropes and shackles went flying everywhere including the boom and add a flapping sail to the mix, well it was not a pretty sight, and we had rough seas.
We both fly into action The Captain straps himself into the harness and out he goes to do battle with it.
The Captain always does this kinda work I'm just the helper racing getting this for him holding onto that rope winding in the other rope, you name it I try and do what ever I can, most times I just feel helpless as there is not much I really can do.
It was really hard to do anything at the angle we were facing so I point the boat into the wind and The Captain brings in the staysail as it still has the pole attached to it, as he is winding it in, it gets tangled around itself but we decided the main sail needs attention first.

So he gets that all repaired I am holding a rope with strict instructions on not to let it go no matter what, all goes well there is still a jam in one of the ropes but that can be fixed tomorrow as it starting to get dark.

So onto the stay sail, well no matter what we could not get that untangled. It actually looked like a big pretty bow at the front of the boat...haha

The Captain spent a massive amount of time on the bow sprit I'm watching him on this roller coaster ride, I lost count of how many times he got wet with waves crashing man the front of the boat was nose diving into the water so bad I was getting tummy flips just watching him.
We eventually decided to just secure it all and leave it till morning as it was getting onto 8pm by now.
After some dinner The Captain lays down for a sleep and I notice the top of the sail is starting to unwind, The Captain gets up and has a look yeah it's fine he says but man you should of heard it flap flap flapping away, I'm thinking there is not gonna be much sleeping tonight with that thing, doing its merry dance.