Well, it didn’t work out quite as we’d hoped! We woke up early on Sunday, May 12th to prepare Sol Purpose for the crossing to the Azores. That done, we headed over to the Customs Dock to clear out of the country. All the formalities were taken care of, and we headed back to the boat to start our journey. I jumped back on board and caught my foot on a chainplate. I knew that it hurt but we had to get away from the dock, so I headed back to the cockpit. Moray realized that there was a lot of blood, and we discovered that I had a huge cut under my big toe. Moray called Talaria and we headed over to raft up against her. Mel is medically trained, so she took great care of my toe, cleaning it, putting steristrips, liquid bandage, gauze, sticky bandage. (Two weeks later, my toe looks good. It’s healing up nicely, although it’s a little numb. Lesson learned – SHOES!)
Emergency taken care of, we headed on out of St. George’s Harbour and started on our journey. The weather was perfect and we were excited. It soon became apparent that the wind vane was not doing its job. We couldn’t hold a course with it. This was a huge blow, because we were relying on using it as much as possible to limit our need to use our autopilot, which is an electricity hog. Not deterred though, we turned on the autopilot, as our duo-gen hydro generator was doing an amazing job of keeping up with the electricity needs.
As the day progressed, disillusionment with the autopilot started to kick in as it was making an excessive juddering noise when correcting for the following seas. We didn’t know what the issue was and how much, if any, damage was being done. We continued on, but at about 1am, we realized that the hydro-generator was no longer producing electricity. At this point, we had to make the heartbreaking decision to turn around. If we were to continue on, we would probably have had to hand steer for two weeks, we would have had to run the motor to generate electricity (we only carry 8 days of fuel). On the other hand, we were only one day out, and we could turn back and work on the repairs.
Of course, the perfect weather for heading east does not work so well for heading west! It was a very long hard slog back to Bermuda, and we arrived after dark. There was already a boat clearing through Customs, so we had to wait until they were done, but the Customs officials were amazing. As we hadn’t been gone for long, they pulled out our previous paperwork, and cleared us back in in about 10 minutes. Then, of course, my least favourite thing, anchoring in the dark. Convict Bay was pretty full, so we headed over to Powder Hole. It’s deeper there, but there was a lot of space to move around and we finally got settled and got some much needed sleep.
Several days after we arrived back in Bermuda the ARC boats headed for the Azores. This included our friends on Talaria. It was a mess of 28 boats vying for a place on the start line inside the harbour. We waved them of and watched their progress for a while on AIS.
Talaria middle of the pack
They are now approximately 4 days outside of Horta in the Azores after eleven ays.
Now it was time to start working on the repairs. We think the problem with the generator has fixed itself – maybe overheating – so we will just give it some breaks during the day!
After a lot of time of the phone and online with Garmin, we think we have a solution for the autopilot. It seems to be much happier now, with less juddering, so fingers crossed for that.
The main issue was the wind vane. If we could get that fixed, the other two issues wouldn’t be quite so important. After corresponding with the manufacturer, it turned out that we needed to make some adjustments which are usually done in the factory, but appear to have been overlooked. Annoying, but possible. We made the adjustments and picked a calm day to head out to test it. We decided to sail for a while to test the vane, and then head back to Castle Harbour, where we had stayed the week before. The wind vane worked much better, although we knew we would have to make at least one more adjustment, but we were happy and dropped anchor in Castle Harbour to relax and enjoy the lovely day. We had plenty of power, so decided to watch a couple of episodes of This is Us before heading to bed. Moray went out to do his usual final check on the boat, and yelled down to me that the dinghy was gone. With hindsight, we believe that the dinghy had hit the windvane, which punctured one of the tubes. That tube filled with water and the weight snapped our tether. Of course, it is now midnight, and we are in a harbour, surrounded by reefs! We pulled up anchor and looked around inside the harbour with our searchlight in the direction we knew the dinghy would have gone based on the tide. We couldn’t find it, so next (terrible for my stress levels!) we headed out through the reef, following the track we had stored on our chartplotter when we came in, and started motoring up and down the coast past the cut where we thought it would have exited the harbour. Eventually, we spotted it! We had to keep motoring around until it came far enough out to sea that we could retrieve it without putting Sol Purpose on the reefs, but by 3am, we and the dinghy were back in Castle Harbour, safely anchored and secured. As one of the two tubes had been punctured, the dinghy was hanging upright in the water and the outboard had been underwater for over 5 hours by the time we got back to the anchorage
The next morning we headed back to St. Georges Harbour, pulled the dinghy up on to the deck, where Moray worked on patching the 2 inch gash in the tube. Next he worked on cleaning and repairing the outboard. It took a couple of attempts, but he did a fantastic job, and both are now fully functional again!
OK, no more disasters, please! I think we have had our fair share for this trip!
On a much happier note, the extra time here has given us an opportunity to meet a great group of people – the Ocean Cruising Club. We had seen their Facebook page when we arrived in Bermuda and joined the page as it had quite a few boats that were crossing to the Azores around the time we were. Although we had not repaired our dinghy at the time, the OCC boats in St. Georges harbour had agreed to do a dinghy raft up and Eve, on Auntie agreed to pick us up in her dinghy so we could met some of the other crews. We had a great evening with them on the dinghies and then on Hen Island just south of ou anchorage.
The requirement to join the actual club itself is to have made an ocean passage of at least 1,000 miles. We haven’t done that yet, so we have joined as Associate members, and when we arrive in the Azores, we will become full members. We have had a lot of fun with them over the last couple of weeks, and there will be a group of us making the crossing together, which is great.
On Friday we went ashore to watch the dunking of the town gossip and nag. This is a reenactment of what happened in Bermuda when men felt that their women got out of line back in the day. It was fun to watch and I assured Moray that he need not get any ideas 🙂
So, now it’s time to try this again! Tomorrow morning (Monday 27th), we will be setting off for the Azores. And this time, we are going to get there! Stay tuned for small blog updates every other day that we can get a connection on the way.
Sol Purpose 