Steer Crazy - a harbinger of things to come
Day 21 : Ascension to Azores - Part 1 of 2
Thursday April 7th 2022
We have a tradition on board Steel Sapphire that we’ve been trying to shake for some time now. We’re not doing so well.
Every major passage, without fail, we end up having to tear our bed apart to inspect, and fix, some problem connected with either our steering or our autopilots. Usually minor, occasionally major. But always.
It wouldn’t be so bad, but accessing that area is no fun at all. Our fabulous island bed in our aft cabin is fabulous for the very reasons that make it such a pain to access underneath it. It’s huge, it has two giant mattresses, some lovely, padded headboards in three huge pieces that are both heavy, and curved and thus awkward, and then there are three giant boards under the bed that need to be removed to access all the technical steering gear underneath.
All of this stuff has to be removed (along with the bedding, of course), and space found for it in the same cabin, so that we can get to work. We could move everything to another part of the boat, but that in itself would be laborious in the extreme. So when we DO have to work on the steering or autopilot, it will involve clambering over all of the removed mattresses etc over and over again. Not fun.
This all started on our first offshore passage – 500 miles directly off shore from Sydney to Lord Howe Island. It was our first time so far away from land, and was essentially our shake down “can we do this” passage to make sure we knew what we were getting ourselves into.
We took along Peter and Donna, friends from our yacht club, for company, moral support, and just to make watchkeeping and/or dealing with any problems that cropped up that much easier.
And boy did we get a good problem to deal with.
We were 3 days into the passage (but still only 80 miles offshore, as we were following the NSW coast northwards before turning east for Lord Howe), when suddenly we lost steering.
Jen was on watch, and came and woke me up to share the bad news. It was weird – when we turned the wheel in one direction, nothing would happen. If we turned it the other way, we could steer, but the boat turned the WRONG way compared to the way we turned the wheel.
Very odd.
We went down to our cabin to perform the “pull apart the bed while out at sea” ritual for the very first time.
Once we’d exposed the steering, it did look like something was wrong. But we had no idea what.
Our boat uses a Whitlock Mamaba Steering system, which is meant to be among the best, and most robust, steering systems a boat can have. The wheel is connected to the rudder via a series of solid rods, mated via universal joints to allow the system to go around corners, and then via a reduction gearbox and a ram, it is connected to a short 9 inch tiller arm coming off the rudder stock.
It is solid, and beefy, and looks indestructible. But on this occasion, it also looked just a bit “wrong”.
We’d only had Steely for 18 months at that point, and so were still getting familiar with her. I’d never had cause to stare at this particular part of the steering system before, but the longer we looked at it, the more it seemed like the ram that went from the gearbox to the tiller arm was somehow at an awkward angle.
After a lot of thinking, and a second opinion from the other Peter on board, we decided that somehow this arm had got to the end of it’s natural movement range and then jumped up and “reversed” itself – that accounted for why it was at an awkward angle, and would explain why steering in one direction moved the rudder the wrong way. And steering the other way resulted in no movement at all.
So here we were, 80 miles offshore, on our first big passage. And essentially no steering. We had been looking forward to sailing to Lord Howe since we’d first mooted the possibility with Peter and Donna, some 12 months earlier. And now it looked like we might never get there.
Unless we could find a way to solve the problem, that is.
The fix looked simple – undo one nut, remove the ram arm, untwist it, and place it back on.
With Peter by my side for moral support, I undid the nut. Not surprisingly, the ram in question was under compression, so wouldn’t just pop off. I grabbed a hammer to help “persuade” it, but just before I delivered the telling blow, I stopped.
I’d had a bad thought.
If I was correct, and a simple tap with the hammer would remove the ram, we flipped it, and reinstalled it, then I’d be a hero. We’d have found, diagnosed and fixed the problem, all in less than an hour, and we could be on our merry way again.
On the other hand, what would happen if I couldn’t get this ram back on again after we’d flipped it? It was under compression, after all. And, let’s be honest, I didn’t really have a clue what I was doing.
We did have some steering right now, albeit only in one direction. The wrong way. But probably enough for us to limp back to shore if we had to. But if we pulled it apart and couldn’t put it back together again, then what? We’d be fully stranded, bobbing around 80 miles offshore. In big trouble.
With hammer poised in the air, I shared my misgivings with Peter. He was, after all the Head of Risk for Westpac Bank in Australia, and an experienced sailor himself. If anyone was well placed to form an opinion on the wisdom of our course of action it was him.
“Put the hammer down, mate” he said, in his usual understated way.
After a bit of discussion with all on board, we decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and that we would try and motor back to Port Macquarie, which was the nearest town, and where we knew there were good facilities.
10 hours later, and after a lot of comedy 350 degree turns when we’d forgotten to steer the wrong way, gone slightly off course, and had to keep going to complete a circle since we couldn’t steer in the other direction, we made it to Port Macquarie, just as light was failing.
Like many towns on the east coast of Australia, Port Macquarie has a fearsome bar across the river entrance, making navigation through there tricky at the best of times. With broken steering we were very worried that the in-rushing current could carry us towards the rocks and we’d have no way to steer to safety, so I’d called Marine Rescue in advance, and they came out to give us a tow. Once they understood the size of Steely, they decided that a tow might also be dangerous, and so they said they’d lead us in on a path designed to minimise the worst of the bar. With white knuckles I gripped the wheel and we headed in through the entrance. We made it, and tied up to a buoy for the night
The next morning we motored one mile to the marina, and somehow managed to dock without mishap.
The shipwright came to inspect the problem. 30 seconds later, and with one tap of his trusty hammer, the problem was fixed! And the next day we resumed our trip. (But not before having a stop guard fabricated and attached to the gearbox so the ram could never jump over itself again).
There were many lessons learned from that particular incident. We were yet to learn to trust ourselves, and in truth, that was probably appropriate given the lack of experience we had at that time with mechanical systems.
But it was an early sign that we had the intelligence to be able to figure this stuff out if we had to. And it was also a salutary lesson in risk management, and even though in the end the shipwright did exactly what we had thought to do ourselves, we all felt we’d made exactly the right call in the circumstances and did not regret the loss of two days at all.
What we didn’t know at the time of course was how frequent an occurrence ripping apart that bloody bed while we are out at sea was to become.
Now, 23,000 miles and 5 years later, we must have done so at least another 15 times.
We’ve heard ticking sounds under there, ominous rubbing sounds, we’ve heard the autopilot making strange sounds, or just stop working and need investigation. There’s always something, and every time, we roll our eyes and shake our heads at what can only be a curse laid upon us for some ancient wrongdoing.
And then we get to work ripping apart the bed.
Fortunately, all the rest of the issues have been relatively minor. There’s never been anything as significant as that first problem.
Until yesterday.
