Tuesday 30 April 2013

A Thump in the Night

It was around 2am waning gibbous moonlit night, and we were about to have our first gear failure of the trip.  

Katie was asleep down below, and I was up on deck taking in an episode of Game of Thrones (thanks Abe).  The boat was performing fairly well, however the conditions left something to be desired. We were near Smokey Cape (around 60km north of Port Macquarie), an area where the southbound east australian coastal current picks up speed to a frustrating 3 knots.  That means with the boat doing approximately 6 knots through the water we were in effect only going forward at 3kts, add to that the nasty habit of sailing boats not sailing directly into the wind, and we had progress towards the Clarence River entrance slowed a meagre 1.5 knots.

As we came around the cape there was a marked increase in the seas, with a few 3m waves seemingly appearing out of nowhere, that was the final nail in the coffin of my will to sail for the evening, so we started up the "iron spinaker" (the engine) and I furled up the staysail that we had been using on the foredeck.  Now all that we had left to do was listen to the sound of the engine and pound our way through the oncoming waves.

It was then that an apparent oversight from our rigger decided to rear it's ugly head.  Although we can't be sure, my guess is that the tensioner at the base of our inner forestay had not been correctly refitted by our rigger after some work was done on the boat in Sydney, the end result, a big metal thing dangling from the mast banging on the deck as the boat pitched.  And subsequently, a very wet Hughbie scrambling around with a head torch, harness and tether (piece of rope that keeps you attached to the boat no matter how hard you try to fall off).  It wasn't too difficult to get the thing under control and lash it back to where it should have been and the worst of it was probably over within 20 minutes.

I didn't want to go too much further without the option of putting up a staysail, so we evaluated our possible destinations. Port Macquarie was now about 80 km behind us, and Coffs Harbour was 100 km ahead.  Coffs Harbour is renown for being a very easy anchorage to enter and my rough calculations had us arriving at 9am, plus the thought of retracing such hard-won sailing steps was not appealing.  So 8 hours of motoring later we pulled into Coffs Harbour where the words of one of my cruiser friends in Woolwich echoed in my ears:  "Cruising. Otherwise known as sailing to exotic locations and fixing things".

30/4/2013

2 comments:

  1. Hi Katie & Hugh,

    Sorry my words echoed in your ears :( Hope you can get the rig fixed asap, thinking of you back here in Woolwich. 23 days to go.

    Glenn & Jen

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  2. Bummer guys. And here was me thinking the first thing to go would be Hugh's iron belly. At least you're on safe shores.

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