Well, the last day and a bit has been a roller coaster in more ways than one. It started beautifully. About 5 hours after I turned the engine off the other night a breeze sprung up out of the East. I took full advantage of it, set all sail and barreled South with all haste, as time is getting short now. It’s not necessarily that I have any reason to be there by a certain date but I told my family and friends that I expected to take between 8 and 9 days and at the moment it’s looking like 10 so they will begin to worry no doubt. This will be so so much easier once I have a satellite phone.

Anyway, barreling along that night and the following day, with the breeze building slightly and the sea state lagging behind a little so that the sea always seemed relatively calm compared to the wind. All was well until yet another gear failure hit at 3:30 in the afternoon. The welds supporting the auxiliary rudder on the brand new $4000 wind vane simply gave way at some point and the rudder disappeared into the depths of the Atlantic. That left me on my own, 250 miles from land with no means of self-steering. That’s a big problem for a sailor on his own. I hit a bit of an emotional low at that point. I’ve been working on Bob flat out for the last 8 years, pouring my heart and soul (not to mention every penny I’ve earned) into getting the boat ready for this trip. I can’t complain about the engine problems because that is the one area that I have neglected, but to suffer failure of such a vitally important brand new piece of expensive equipment really got to me. All the frustrations and loneliness of the last week came crashing down on me just before nightfall and I had a bit of a moment of self pity.

I couldn’t afford to wallow in self-pity for long though. The breeze was still building and heading me slightly. I took a reef in the main and rolled up some of the genoa, then another reef in the main and even more genoa. Heavy squalls set in with gusts well over 30 knots and heavy rain that reduced visibility such that I could barely see the bow of the boat. The seas built accordingly. In between the squalls the wind died away completely and left me wallowing in the cross sea which was just as uncomfortable as the squalls themselves.

I’d done some experimentation with using the sails to steer the boat and found that if I rolled in nearly all of the genoa and backed it to windward then I was able to get the boat to steer itself in the right direction, but with the second reef in the main this only put me along at a measly 3 knots, and by now I really, really want to get there! I needed a better solution and came up with a plan. By building a triangular wooden frame and lashing it to specific points on the cockpit coaming I was able to make a mount for the electric tiller autopilot which I had previously been using with the auxiliary rudder on the wind vane. I then set up the emergency tiller sticking out of the aft hatch and lashed a piece of wood to it with a bolt sticking out of it that was the right size to fit into the head of the tiller pilot. Miraculously it worked. I have self steering again, though for how long I’m not sure as the bit of wood is flexing and bending all over the place under the huge load from the tiller.

It’s now 11am and the wind has moderated a touch. It’s blowing about 20 knots and the squalls have abated for the most part, though I suspect they may come back this evening once the water has been heated all day by the sun. This weather is not unusual for this area and at this time of year. Squalls generally increase as one goes west in the trade wind belt across the North Atlantic, and around this time of year the trade winds strengthen. They call them the ‘Christmas Winds’ in the Caribbean. Personally I wish Christmas was a little later this year. I am struggling to make St. Maarten, though just about making it for now. If by tomorrow morning it looks like I won’t be able to lay St. Maarten then I will be forced to turn downwind and run for the British Virgin Islands as there’s no way I can beat into this wind and this sea. That would be a shame as I now have even more to get done in St. Maarten, not least of which is to have a stern conversation with Fleming, the makers of the wind vane, and based on whether they will accept any responsibility for the bad weld (they don’t have to – I actually bought the vane second hand so it’s a few years old, but it had never been installed on a boat and was still in all the original bubble wrap from the factory) either fix this one or, more likely, fork out another $4k that I can’t really afford getting a new one from a different manufacturer and then installing that one which based on my last experience will be no mean feat, especially with the boat in the water. Then there’s the engine……….. My concern is that the closer to the Caribbean I get the more influenced I will be by the North Equatorial Current, which will set me to the West at between half a knot and two knots and make it even harder to lay St. Maarten.

Oh well I guess it wouldn’t be the end of the world and it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve had to abandon St. Maarten and run to the BVIs either. At least they have cheap rum there. Anyone fancy Christmas in the Caribbean this year? ? I could really use the company!

Picture of the bit of wind vane that used to have a rudder hanging off it. You can clearly see that the weld has simply failed through having been done poorly in the first place.

Well, its day 6 at sea and all is much as it was yesterday. The engine is still doing a wonderful job of putting us along at just under 5 knots. The breeze built a little this morning to a force 2 from just South of East, so I set the genoa and decided to wait an hour to see if it was worth going to the trouble of setting the main. After that hour it appeared to have built a little more (I even saw two whitecaps!) so I set the main, at which point it immediately died out again to nothing so I took it all in again.

I broke all the rules today and went up to the foredeck without my harness on to lie on top of the inverted dinghy (it is kept inverted on the foredeck when at sea), smoke a cigar and stare out at the water. Perhaps it’s just that it has been so calm, so I’ve been able to see the ripples, but I have seen an unusually large number of fish for this part of the ocean, which in my experience has always been a bit bare. Two days ago I witnessed a mahi mahi (also known as a dolphin fish, or a dorado depending on where you are in the world) chasing after some flying fish which was quite spectacular, and today there was something fairly large hanging around and occasionally breaking the surface, but every time I caught a glimpse of it it disappeared again before I could make a reasonable identification. Not a shark though, or a cetacean. It has been most pleasant. I’ve finished reading ‘Eleven Minutes’ by Paulo Coelho and am now re-reading Bernard Moitessier’s ‘Cape Horn: The Logical Route’.

The cumulus clouds are more numerous and are loosely organised in bands such as those that one tends to see in the Western North Atlantic in the trade wind belt, and which are often associated with rain and wind squalls. However, these are arranged East to West rather than North to South, they are less vertically-developed and there’s no rain or wind to be seen.

It’s 1450 in the afternoon and my latitude is 23 degrees and 59 minutes North, so according to the (now very very old) weather charts I should see some wind shortly. At any rate I will stick to my plan of shutting down the engine at midnight or maybe a little sooner and wait for wind to appear as surely it must! I could continue to motor for a little longer but I’d like to keep something in reserve, the engine needs a rest and my ears (and sanity, or what’s left of it!) too. If I have a quiet night of no wind and make no progress it won’t be a bad thing provided I can get some sleep with the boat rolling back and forth in the swells that are still around.

I finished the milk yesterday (so no more tea or coffee) as well as the last of the stew, which I was glad to see finished as it was made nearly two weeks ago and although it was frozen for about 5 days I was starting to become wary of it. My last tomato went with breakfast this morning and I’m down to my last two rashers of bacon. I’m in no danger of running out of food (I could go for about another month before things got sparse, but I’d be eating almost entirely Campbell’s chunky soup and noodles, and those I’d like to ration for later!) but these ‘fresh’ things are things that I’m rather fond of. Fortunately the staples are still in good supply; I’ve still got about 12 cans of beer left and at least 30 bottles of rum and other spirits. On that note, I think I’ll have a beer ?

Update at 7pm:

It’s very, very lonely out here. I’m about 350 miles from St. Maarten and I have turned off the engine, in part because I couldn’t stand to listen to it any longer but also because I thought the usual knocking sound had become a touch louder. I checked the oil as I do every time I stop the engine and was dismayed to find that it didn’t even register on the dipstick. It took nearly a gallon of oil to bring it back up to the full line which means it was basically running on no oil…….. for who knows how many hours. I only hope it’s not permanently destroyed. At any rate it looks like there’s a serious leak (there’s oil in the bilge under the engine) so that will have to be seen to at the very least in St. Martin.

So, I’m drifting at about 0.5 knots in a Southerly direction, which is somewhat comforting. That means there must be a current since the wind, when detectable, is from the East. It’s a dark night and the boat is rocking back and forth very uncomfortably in a swell that has built over the last couple of hours coming from the South East. There’s wind somewhere over there! I could do something about the rocking by setting my mainsail and sheeting it hard on the centreline, but doing that is really terrible for the sail and I think I’d rather endure the rocking than cringe at the sound of my good mainsail banging itself to pieces.

There has been one good point to all this. About 20 minutes ago I was on deck keeping an eye out for ships and heard whales blowing off the port side. There were perhaps 2 of them (hard to tell in the dark) travelling together and they came within 20 feet or so of the boat before carrying on in a Northerly direction. There may have been others further afield because I could hear a very eerie sound permeating the water and even into the air above it. At first I thought it was the wind as it kind of sounded like a low whistling like the sound of a fog horn, but I suspect that it was indeed the whales. Humpbacks perhaps on their migration route?

Ok I’m going to try to get some sleep now despite this incessant rolling. I’m exhausted. I doubt sleep will find me though.

Still quite calm seas but a beautiful sunrise. The saying about shepherds, ‘red sky at night, shepherds delight. Red sky in morning, shepherds take warning’ is just as true for sailors. Shortly after the breeze set in and started to build and build.