Further update

The morning of the 21st we lost our hydraulic steering!  Max was on watch and got us all up to sort out why the rudder was stuck in position and the boat going all over the place. We attached the emergency tiller and for 5 hours Peter fault found, talked to the service guys in Palma and googled factory websites. It turned out that the brushes were worn out – they had been overlooked at the last steering service in June, this year it seems. The Palma guys were great and dropped everything to do group video Whatsapp calls. Finally, Peter managed to clean up the commutator and packed out the particularly worn brush and we had a temporary fix. Poor Max had been hand helming for all this time. Which, by the way, is very heavy going with one rudder on a large catamaran. These boats are impossible at the best of times with even just only one motor. We mirrored one of the monitors to the ipad and set that up in front of him so he had some idea where he was going!

Max making hand helming look easier than is was!

We did try to steer using the motors and the throttles but this turned out to be impossible – the boat immediately veered off to starboard at the slightest increase in speed from idle no matter what we did with the throttles. We have happily manoeuvred around anchorages and marinas on throttle only but that is at about 3 knots in calm water. It just wasn’t working in even a slight sea at any speed. It may be a conversation we need to have with Lagoon one day – perhaps if you’re reading this, Fred,  you could  email any ideas? We did put the underwater camera over the side to check that the rudders were not fouled and moving freely.

Our track when it all went wrong!

Getting the steering options sorted out.

This is the best we managed!

Just to add to the stress levels, the starboard bilge pump went off loudly every 10 minutes from the sea getting into the emergency tiller opening where Max was standing.

Shaunagh spent the whole time running messages from Peter in the port engine bay to me on the flybridge helm and to Max on tiller on the back step of the starboard engine bay. Our headsets or phones couldn’t cope with the engine bay noise to be any use. She ferried sandwiches to our various positions for lunch as we all missed breakfast. At the end of it all managing to produce a wonderful medley of stuffed aubergine and capsicum for dinner!

We were quite seriously thinking of having to be taken off the boat as the option to hand helm for 6 days was not manageable at all. In fact it would have been nearer to 11 days given the reduction in speed to 5 knots. Turning back was not an option either as we would have had a head wind and really there is not much help to be had in Cape Verde. Peter advised the insurance company of our position and situation.

After a nervous night with the steering working well, Peter inspected the fix and decided that his instinct was to leave it alone. It was holding and working, the whole area was cool and no sparks.   He did however have to re screw the top of the pump down as it was moving back and forth with the steering. We had decided to head to Barbados but upon doing some research on the place decided that the extra 90 nm to St Lucia was worth the risk. We know that island well from our time in the Caribbean before and are confident in being able to get parts and can ship in a spare pump for future back up.

The result of all this is – no WINGit flying will be happening, it’s fairly safe to say! We may get some winds off St Lucia that we can practice in.

Saturday 23nd. The fix is holding and we’re travelling well.

Transferring the fuel from the 4 extra bladders on deck was easy and went smoothly – just used gravity. We set our own local boat time and disabled the auto update on all our phones – it was too confusing for watches. We’ve been altering it manually every 4 days – St Lucia is about three hours different to Cape Verde.

There is quite a bit of floating weed in the ocean, some biggish mats and others trailing streams of quite a few metres. Another inspection of the steering fix on day 7 convinced us to leave it alone for the timebeing.

We took this rainbow to be a good sign.

28 November we arrived in ST Lucia.