Day 372, Year 1: Passage to New Zealand Delayed
Day 372, Year 1: Passage to New Zealand Delayed
Date: Wednesday, October 25, 2006
Weather: Clear Blue Skies and Sunny; Winds 20 to 25 North of East
Location: Nuku’alofa, Tongatapu Group, Tonga
Latitude: 21 degrees 08 minutes S
Longitude: 175 degrees 11 minutes W
Location: Nuku’alofa, Tongatapu Group, Tonga
It appears that the King of Tonga decided that Windbird should not leave Tonga without visiting the capitol city of Nuku’alofa, so he sent his secret agents out to sabotage the boat. This has caused us to delay our passage while we wait in Nuku’alofa for repairs . . . Well, maybe the King had nothing to do with this, but the fact is that we are sitting in the anchorage in Nuku’alofa this evening instead of sailing to Minerva Reef.
Last night at this time, all was well aboard Windbird. At 7:30 pm, Mark started the first watch while I went to sleep. Not long after I went down, Mark called saying he needed me in the cockpit. He never wakes me up when he is on watch, so this was the first sign of impending disaster. When I got to the cockpit, he needed me to hand steer as the auto pilot had stopped working. For those of you who are not sailors, the auto pilot is the little man that lives, in our case, under the aft cabin bed, who steers the boat for you. He is affectionately called “Auto’. (I only had four hours of sleep last night, so I think my imagination is being a little overactive.) Actually, the steering mechanism is called “Auto’. There is not little man. But I love that image. Our “Auto’ had given us trouble back in Moorea and we luckily found a person in Raitea who ordered replacements parts and got “Auto’ back up and running. In hind sight, we now realize that we should have ordered a whole new unit to the tune of $4,000 AND gotten the old one repaired for about a $1,000, including shipping and labor costs, as a back-up. We didn’t, but now we will. The technical explanation of what happened is this. Since the auto pilot repair in Raitea, we have been getting a “drivestop’ message periodically on our auto pilot that is accompanied by a series of loud beeps. Mark could find nothing about this in the manual, so we have been hitting “standby’ when we see that message. That turns off the automatic steering. We then hand steer long enough to regain our direction, and then hit “auto’. Yesterday this was happening every few minutes, but the beeping would then stop and “auto’ came back on automatically. Since it wasn’t going off course, we just let this happen. The result is that we burned up the auto pilot motor. This is going to delay our departure to New Zealand, and we won’t get to go with our friends. It is disappointing and another repair has broken our spirits temporarily, but we will bounce back. There are so many cruisers heading south that I am sure we will have company. So hopefully in another week we will be looking for that weather window once again.
But this is only the beginning of the very bad night. We have a second auto steering system on our boat. It is our wind vane steering. This looks like stainless steel scaffolding on the back of our boat with a stainless steel rudder that hangs down in the water and a wind paddle that sticks up and reads the wind. All of this is attached to the boat’s steering wheel with a series of ropes. This whole set-up can cost almost $8,000 when new. Ours came with the boat when we bought it, so we are not sure of the replacement cost. But we know the repairs needed after last night will be considerable. These will have to be done in New Zealand. Here’s the sad story of the end of our wind vane steering. I came up to hand steer while Mark checked out the problem. He found the auto pilot motor overheated and no longer working. So he set about getting the wind vane steering rigged up and working. It was very dark, very windy, and the seas were very rough. But he insisted on going to the back of the boat and hanging over the edge to lower the rudder and get the ropes attached that connect the auto steering mechanism to the wheel in the cockpit. When he did this, he found that the special pin that holds the rudder to the mechanism was missing. This is a very specialized pin, but Mark replaced it with a bolt. We thought everything was working again, so I went back to sleep. It was not long before he needed my help again. This time he found that a fitting that links the wind paddle to the rudder was broken. He tried to jury rig this with a hose clamp, but that didn’t work. So he gave up and started hand steering. I went back to sleep and when it was time for me to go on watch, Mark went to the back to get the wind vane steering rudder out of the water and tie it up. Too late. Evidently the broken piece linking the wind paddle to the rudder allowed the rudder to move sideways and the force of the waves actually bent it. He tied it up, but knew it would need considerable repair. I then went on watch. I heard a strange metal clanking noise at some point, but couldn’t identify where it came from. At dawn, however, I noticed that the rudder seemed to be missing. I woke Mark to ask him how he had tied it and he assured me that it was fine, just out of my sight. When he got up, however, he checked this and found the rudder had broken loose and was missing. When we arrived here, we found more broken parts, so we have had to give up any hopes of having the wind vane steering on the way to New Zealand.
Tomorrow morning we will call New Zealand and see if we can have a new auto pilot sent here, along with a replacement motor for the old unit. In the meantime, we will explore Nuku’alofa and learn more about this chain of islands in southern Tonga. Right now we are going heat up some left-overs from last night and watch a DVD. This is something we have done only twice in the last year and this time it is truly for diversion. We are both totally exhausted after hand steering for one day. We know we couldn’t do this all the way to New Zealand. This gave us a new appreciation for sailors of old who always steered by hand. This was us only six years ago.
So it is a good night for a movie. We need to think about something other than boats! Especially broken boats!
