Chagos to Seychelles - Day 3

Date: Thursday 6th August 2020
Local time: 15:00
Time Since Departure: 54 hours
Actual Speed: 6.8 knots
Average Speed for trip: 6.4 knots
Max Speed for trip: 11.5 knots
Distance Traveled so far: 347.3 miles
Distance to Destination: 732.6 miles
Time to destination: 115 hours
ETA: Tuesday 11th August, 4 am

When you’re bobbing around on the Indian Ocean, being smashed by 3-4 metre waves and winds of up to 36 knots, a 50 foot boat can feel pretty small.

But the truth is, it’s more than big enough for just 2 people. Technically Steel Sapphire sleeps 8, although I can’t say I’d want to share our two tiny bathrooms with 7 other people, nor they with me!

But with so many beds, why is it that I couldn’t find a single one to sleep in last night, and ended up sleeping on the floor in a corridor, wedged between the freezer and the generator?

A fair question, And one I found myself wondering in the approximately three and half seconds it took me to fall asleep.

Since my last update, our “fast start” had turned into an overly boisterous experience, with howling winds and massive waves smashing into, and breaking over, the boat.

It wasn’t dangerous, but it was certainly deeply uncomfortable, and the boat was rocking back and forth violently, leaning over and having the starboard side deck totally awash every 3 to 4 minutes, while waves smashed into the port side and crashed over the boat. Oh, and the rain was falling in torrents.

We were sailing fast, too fast really, and took some sails down to reduce our speed, but it didn’t make any difference – the waves were too big. And if we slowed down to much then we were totally at their mercy – we needed to keep some speed up to have control.

We were nice and snug in our awesome cockpit enclosure, but it was impossible to stand up, walk around, or get any sleep. Jen was feeling very seasick (she suffers from time to time, but rarely as badly as this). And I was beginning to get pretty queasy myself, which almost never happens.

And then, after 24 hours of this, a new problem emerged – our autopilot started to disengage any time we were hit by a particularly large wave…which was often. And when it disengaged, the boat would spin around, crash tack, and the sails would shake uncontrollably as they had the wind on the wrong side.

Not good.

No matter, that’s why we have a spare autopilot, ready to go at the push of a button.

I pushed the button.

It wasn’t ready to go!

We’d encountered exactly these two problems on route from Maldives to Sri Lanka. We never got to the bottom of the issue with the main autopilot, but it was intermittent, and we had not been able to replicate the fault. The only solution was to freight it back to Sydney and then hope to get it back again repaired or replaced, before we left the Maldives. With Covid-19 that wasn’t going to happen, so it was time for some percussive maintenance. Yup, I hit it with a large block of wood and it started working again. Truly. That was going to have to do until we got to civilisation.

Solving the problem with the spare was easier, thankfully – we’d arrived in Maldives just a few days before they shut the place down due to Covid, but that was time enough for our awesome Electrician/friend James to swing into action and courier me a replacement part, which I’d duly fitted.

Now not only had the main autopilot predictably suffered a recurrence at the worst possible time, but the replacement part on the spare pilot was on the blink too.

I smugly pulled out the spare for the spare (I wrote about this here on my Predictwind microblog when it happened in March, and said I’d have to get a spare for the spare…and so I did – I got James to send me two).

I installed it, which was not the easiest thing to do in the bouncing waves…and it didn’t work.

Turns out the problem on the spare autopilot was more deep seated than the part we’d replaced.

Hmmm.

Suffice it to say that I’ve managed to get the autopilots (both of them) working again, for the time being. But the jury’s out on whether they’ll last until Seychelles. At least the worst of the heavy weather is behind us – we are now back in similar conditions to Day 1, and it should only get lighter from here.

Hand steering for up to 1,000 miles would be exceptionally challenging – probably the hardest thing either of us would ever have done, so let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

But in the meantime, how did all of this affect our sleeping arrangements?

Well, of our 8 berths, only 3 of them are really suitable for sleeping at sea – our bunk, the Pullman cabin near the mast, and the settee in the main saloon. All 3 offer one critical advantage over the other 5 – you can wedge yourself in to a small space in comfort. This is exceptionally important when the boat is being pitched and tossed around in the waves. It’s hard enough to get to sleep with the all the regular boat noises, plus the wind, rain and waves respectively howling, lashing and smashing the boat. But when you add in your body being flung around like a rag doll, well forget it.

And getting sleep in these circumstances is a safety issue. With Jen already compromised by her seasickness, it had been almost 24 hours by this point since I’d had any sleep at all.

We now had the backup autopilot working thankfully, but it is located directly under our bunk, and makes a whining noise constantly (but randomly without pattern) just 6 inches from your ear. I knew our cabin was out.

My fall-back was the Pullman cabin – we always have that set up as a sea berth, partly for this very reason. Unfortunately, the hatch above the bed was failing to stem the floods of water desperately trying to get into the boat.

And exactly the same problem had befallen the settee in the main saloon – there was a steady drip drip from the hatch above it too.

I tried sleeping in the Pullman cabin despite the drips, but it was just one distraction too many, and I gave up.

And then we remembered a conversation we’d had with a previous owner of the boat back in January. He was the last of the 5 previous owners of Steely we had found (well technically, he found us by tracking us down via this website) – and we’ve learned loads from speaking to each of them.

One of his gifts to us was to mention this particular passageway, between the freezer and the generator, was the perfect size to wedge yourself in when the seas were really rough, and I remembered the conversation just at the right moment.

And while he is correct, I can categorically assure you that, although I’ve never met him, he must be at least 2 inches shorter than me.