Saturday 19th October 2013
Day 7
16°26'S. 166°02'W
10.30pm
No idea how many nm to go as we are not sure where we are going.
We have had a day of sheer hell, we thought yesterday was bad today has doubled tripled that.
I finally managed to lay down around 4am, and was woken up once again by a very worried Captain, at 6am.
He had accidentally switched off the Auto pilot switch on the main switch board again.
If you remember from the last time this happened all hell broke loose, well this time it was worse.
No matter what we have tried we can not get it working again, and also it has done something to the main Nav thingy and its not working properly as well.
Talk about stress overtime, I have tried everything I can possibly think of to get them both working again.
And its rough the ocean and winds have not died down at all.
So now we have to hand steer, in this kind of weather it is not easy I can tell you, The Captain has been steering since 6am with me trying several times to steer but it's just too rough and she is to big a boat for me to handle.
I have reset all the nav equipment several times and still no luck, at least we have part of the chart plotter working so we know we are going in the right direction, we have made the decision to go to the closest island to us which is American Samoa, as they should have people there that can have a look at this stuff.
So we start the engine as we want to get there ASAP, and to be honest I am a bit of a mess the tears are flowing way too much.
And the engine over heats again, just great.
Now we have to make a decision as to who will steer and who will fix the engine, this may sound crazy but after trying to steer and being terrified the engine to me sounded like the best offer.
Down I go pull up the floor boards, which are very hard to do for me at the best of times,but being thrown all over the place trying to get them up was just crazy.
The Captain talked me through the process of bleeding the water filter thingy to get all the air out and fill up the tank again, and I even shocked myself that I got it done.
So we start it up again and yes she is purring away, well more like a lion roar, but it's not overheating.
I eventually managed a few hours sleep and before I knew it it was dinner time, I won't even bore you with that disaster but at least The Captain got some food into him, very quickly as I was steering haha.
It's about 9pm by now and The Captain was struggling so bad, so we decided to heave too, this is a process that we have not done before and do need more practice but basically you set the mizzen sail, the one at the back at a certain angle and the boat stops moving in the water and causes a slick on the water which slows down the waves kinda breaks them, and you can then both sleep.
So we set it up it does not work 100% but not too bad we are still doing a knot in the water but at least it's not too rough, well kinda, I set all the alarms and The Captain, was asleep before his head hit the pillow.
Me I was on the wrong side of The boat, so I kept getting thrown up against the wheel and then when I did fall asleep I kept waking up as I was worried about the batteries getting too low.
Well tomorrow is another day.