What a day!…..
14 November 2012 (Eastern Hemisphere)
Dear F&F,
Yesterday – we ran out of wind in the late afternoon and motored on our one operable starboard engine until 3:00 a.m. when the wind came back up from 13-18 knots. Prior to the arrival of the wind, it was calmest night at sea I can recall. It was so calm, if we\’d dropped the sails and drifted, we would have thought we were tied to the dock!
We had a lovely evenings sail and around 10:30 a.m., the wind slowly shifted from SSE to the E and then to the NE and essentially quit. We again motored for much of the day. We attacked the port engine fuel starvation problem with earnest. VERY FRUSTRATINGLY, we got it to start on 4 occassions, but it would never stay on for more than 10 minutes under load. We had all manner of issues. The pre-filter was leaking air, the new priming pump wouldn\’t prime, one of the old ones did, but leaked. We had great fuel flow and finally, without either the prefilter or the priming pump in the system, I could not get fuel to flow to the secondary fuel filter EVEN when using the manual priming lever. I think we may be beat on this? I\’ll try again tomorrow, but I think that the engines \”lift pump\” must be bad (as I cannot even get the manual pump part of it to prime) and that we were just running on what was in the engines secondary filter for awhile an running out of fuel…?
If anyone out there has any ideas, please email us!
The other trauma of the day was that the clew of our mainsail ripped out. Fortunately, it happened during the day and when the wind was only 7 knots. I had to go out to the end of the boom in the bosun\’s chair and guide the sail around the boom mandrel while Nikki rolled it up from the furling system at the base of the mast. We now can only use the main up to the first reef for the duration of this trip. Shades of the Galapagos to Marquesas voyage.
Also, until mid day today from mid day yesterday, we had a 1.5 knot current AGAINST us. This was making our slow speed dismal. Around noon, we finally either got north or west of the counter current \”gyre\” out here and are now enjoying a .5 to .75 knot push. Dave from \”Sunflower\” and Paul of Peri-Peri Radio emailed me with the latest \”real time\” current chart of the Mozambique Channel from buoyweather.com. This aided us on where to sail to escape the current.
The wind came up around 4:30 p.m. and we\’ve currently 15 knots from the SSE, close reaching to the SW. We\’ve still a long way to go, but we are getting there.
Yes, we feel we\’ve been snake bit, where\’s the snake bit kit?… The seas are comfortable, the wind is in from Africa and night three begins.
KIT, Scott and Offwatch Nikki