First attempt at Gisborne delivery: Friday 21 Jan 2011
After an enormous amount of time and effort preparing... making sure that we had carefully stowed, checked and double checked (1) all the gear we needed to 'cruise' the boat to Gisborne, (2) all the things we would possibly need for the RNI race, (3) enough fuel, gas, water etc and (4) nothing else -- we threw off lines and headed out of the harbour in light winds on Friday at 12.30ish. Near Steeple Rock at the harbour entrance the engine, still running, stopped pushing the boat forward, so we switched it off and turned back to investigate (there was a bit of very tricky sailing up the narrow channel to the slipway at Chaffers Marina in a gusty southerly). By 5pm with the help of quite a few people at the marina including lifting the boat out of the water to check we had a propeller still attached, we worked out that a linkage between the engine and gearbox had failed.
Which means that instead of staying on schedule and having CV in Gisborne to sail to Auckland the next weekend it was still tied up in Wellington. :-(
The engine was then in bits and the Volvo guys were working with a diesel mechanic trying to track down a part, over which there was some confusion re the correct part number... or even if the part was original. We still had a couple of weekends available, but Vesna and I still had to tick off our remaining race entry requirement of 250nm 2-handed offshore sailing, so couldn't really make use of the option to hire a delivery skipper and crew to take the boat to Auckland for us, at least not all the way.
Most frustrating, after more than a year of planning, new sails and equipment etc, and having had the engine serviced a month ago so as to avoid exactly this sort of problem
Second attempt: Thursday 27 Jan 2011
Thanks very much to all who helped out with supporting our second attempt at getting the boat to Gisborne, ranging from helping with food for the crew, on-call cover, managing clinics to feeding cats etc.
We didn't make it.
We motor-sailed (with freshly rejuvenated engine and gearbox and delivery crew: Tony, Vesna, Mark Ansell, Mark Holmes, and MVP -see below- Paul Porter-Howland) away at 5pm on Thursday into a lovely evening, light wind from the southeast. This was of course on our nose but there were no waves to speak of, the sky was brilliantly clear with stunning stars and we got around Cape Palliser to head northeast escorted by dolphins and an albatross or two before midnight. Before dawn we passed honeycomb rocks and by 9am were about 8 nm east of Castlepoint, ahead of schedule and really enjoying the trip.
We had been maintaining 6-hourly scheds with maritime radio, and on the Friday 10am sched we received a message from the mechanic who had worked on the gearbox in Welly to check that he'd done up the bolts on the gearchange linkage, and for us to tighten them if necessary. He hadn't. We had an engine bay full of gearbox oil but still some left in the sump. So I tightened the bolts which were *very* loose and the linkage must have been misaligned by then because that jammed the gearbox completely, and the engine that was pushing us along in the right direction in the light-but-building headwind stopped.
Thankfully Paul knows a few things about engines and stuff, and started getting on to fixing it. Unfortunately the wind and a light swell had started to build more from the northeast (right on our nose, again) and Paul started getting seasick while head-down and tinkering with engine parts etc. So we were now sailing (slowly, and moving at ~45° to our intended direction), and Paul was doing a few minutes of work on the linkage at a time before coming up for, er, air. Meantime the forecast 10-15 knots NE had 'eased' gently in the traditional NZ manner 'down' to 25 knots and the seas were getting bigger. After several attempts Paul wasn't winning on either front and so we decided we'd just have to sail north, just as fast as motoring in a straight line, but always well off the right direction since sailing directly upwind doesn't work.
The weather forecasts at this point were for the winds to stay at about 20 knots from the northeast until Sat morning, although they were actually in the mid-20s up to 30 and there was now a most unpleasant 4m swell emanating from where we wanted to go thanks to cyclone Wilma, which you'll remember we were racing to Gisborne. Moderate wind and large, steep swell were having an impact -- 3 of us were unwell with varying degrees of seasickness. It was very slow and unpleasant going, with lots of falling off big waves and crashing into the troughs. We didn't have an engine to fall back on if we had rig/sail breakages (or, perish the thought, a man overboard). So we were were seriously considering bailing out on Gisborne and heading to Napier, although Cape Kidnappers still nearly 8 hours away. It was 2am, rain bucketing down and all of us and lots of the cabin were very wet. None of this was in the brochure.
I was getting a little tense... Many of the reports of rescues at sea stories start with a gear failure, a few unwell crew, and then things generally progress from there with the help of some big weather. With the big southerly forecast and nowhere to shelter further south, it only made sense to continue north.
Then we heard the forecast for sea area Portland (Gisborne and East Cape region) change from a Gale Warning to a Storm Warning with winds up to 50 knots and seas to match. Wilma had beaten us: destination Napier.
At Cape Kidnappers, there was a lull in the wind and the seas were better, so Paul had another go at the engine with an idea he'd thought of which worked, except for a quiet but disturbing grinding metal noise. Another visit to the engine bay and all seemed fine, working with no nasty noises. We turned in towards Napier harbour and the wind turned with us, to be right on our nose, again (!) We had travelled about 400km, about a third done tacking across 45° to the rhumb line, and not once did the wind swing to a direction that was slightly favourable. Our maximum speed was about 7.5 knots, in a boat that will comfortably do speeds twice that downwind. We arrived in Napier marina at 10am Saturday.
Fist move at Napier was a mechanic, who pulled up the gearbox dipstick and showed us lots of small metal shards, like glitter, in the oil. Not good. So the boat is now out of the water again in Napier, getting the gearbox cleaned out and fixed up, including a planned visit from the Wellington mechanic who is traveling to Napier to put things right himself. We *should* be ready for Friday for Vesna and I to do the planned 2-handed sail to Auckland, our qualifying miles, with another 100 nm added to the trip. So we're looking to get a flight to Napier about lunchtime on Friday, and we had already cleared my appointments at CES on Monday, so hopefully we have enough time.
[Photos Mark Holmes -- thanks Mark!]
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