Steve: Day 22 – landfall

0nm to go. But what a day!!!!

I was woken by John at 5am for my morning watch. This was ships time. Local time it was 1:30am. A quick scan of the distance to go revealed we must have had a very slow 6 hours. Talking to Helen later I learned she’d even had 30 mins with no wind whatsoever.

We now needed to average nearly 5 knots to make landfall by an hour before sunset and we weren’t making that. As mentioned in my last blog I started off giving the boat a push with the power stored in the drive batteries. We had been cross charging the house bank from the drive bank for the last couple of days without replenishment so after a couple of hours I needed to turn on the genset. I put it in ‘mode 4’ which sends most of the power from the genset to the house and a smaller amount to the drive. This was fine as I wanted to give the house batteries a really good charge.

This all happened as I battled my way through a number of squalls with wind shifting from all angles necessitating quite a few changes to the sails. Sometimes the wind would blow strong enough to keep us well above our desired 5 knots and sometimes not.

After about an hour of charging Helen awoke. Having washed almost everything we still had a few towels to wash and as the seas were still flat, despite the squalls, we could wash these while we had the house power.

The wash went on and I turned on the water maker. This was to be our first problem of the day. The water maker made no water coming up with an error message instead. I power cycled it a few times but with the same results. It appeared that the high pressure pump was not running in automatic mode. There is a manual mode which I’ve never used before. I tried this. The high pressure pump ran in this mode but fresh water was not being produced.

I compiled a long email for Spectra support putting in all the information that I thought may help them in troubleshooting including all the settings I could read. We powered down the genset and the motors so I could email this and our blogs off during the small morning window that we have for sending out emails. Once done I powered up the genset again.

Here we ran into the next problem of the day. The battery charger detected the power being back on but refused to charge the batteries. Not good. John had already been woken by my rummaging around in his room looking at the water maker problem. Now I needed to get under his bunk to examine the charger.

By now we’d sighted land but the thrill of doing so evaded me as I was wrapped up with the gloom of multiple issues.

The troubleshooting guide in the manual I had for the charger did not cover the symptoms I had nor did it cover the particular set of lights I had showing. I wondered if some sort of reset was required. With John at the helm to hand steer I isolated the house batteries for a short while then reconnected them. Checking everything was ok I ran into a third problem. The solar panel controller, which had been charging the house bank (by now it was day time), was no longer registering any charging. I’m glad I’d installed the remote display back in the Caribbean as I would not have seen this. You can imagine my spirits were sinking fast.

To get to the solar controller I had to get inside the starboard transom which also contains some stores and our bicycles (which we’ve hardly ever used). This requires moving the stores and squeezing oneself into a tight space. Looking at the controller it was obvious it had done a factory reset. I had forgotten the password required to go through the initial set up so I had to go and look that up before initializing the unit. Thankfully this worked and we were gaining power from the sunlight.

Around then I had a second thought about the manual mode for the water maker. We put it back into manual mode then instructed the front panel to make water automatically. Hey presto we were making water. Not ideal but having a work around would see us through to a proper fix. My spirits were lifting.

Back to the charger. I verified it still worked as an inverter but try as I might I could find no way to make it charge. One of the indicators suggested there may be a battery voltage issue which was certainly not the case as I was able to measure this independently. Thinking it may be a thermal cut off (despite the thermal cut off light not being lit) I ran a fan over the unit and kept it aired for a couple of hours. No improvement. My current hypothesis is that the voltage sensor in the unit has failed making it think there is a problem. This doesn’t stop the inverting to give us mains power but it perhaps fatally impacts the charging.

After about an hour of making water we suddenly heard a screaming noise coming from the high pressure pump. We quickly had the unit switched off. All further attempts to start the water maker came to no success. Follow up emails were compiled and sent to Spectra.

By now I was exhausted. We’d been on and off motoring, mostly on batteries, but after the many squalls had passed we were left with pretty good winds. As we approached Fatu Hiva the waters became short and choppy putting strain on the boat as it tossed around. I tried to catch up some sleep but that was barely successful.

As we rounded the southern end of the island we established VHF contact with Kamaya. They wanted us to relay a message to the SSB net which was not contactable from the bay. We shut everything down and got onto the net breaking in out of turn before we also lost contact. We got the message through and got back to heading in.

With the problems of the day parked in my mind the rounding of Fatu Hiva was finally enjoyable. The place is so rugged and barren. The volcanic origin has created so many interesting angles and features on the landscape. It almost felt like arriving at the island of King Kong.

The bay of Hanavave (Bay of Virgins) is tucked away and not visible until we were close. Tightly packed into the bay were 23 other sail boats, a few of whom we recognized. The waters were now calm and flat. The folks from Merlin were out in their dinghy and came over to say Hello and let us know a boat had left during the day leaving a spot behind them. That was useful info. We found that spot and anchored in 50 to 60 feet taking 3 attempts to do so.

We saw Tim and Ruth from Kamaya just next to us and were able to shout at each other agreeing to meet up and perhaps go to the waterfall here together.

Then it was down to tidying up the boat, making sure things were sound, retesting the charger (still no good – thermal cut off hypothesis now very weak) getting another email off (about the charger) before finally up a beer to celebrate our arrival. We’ve covered approximately 3,050nm in 21 days and change. Comparing notes with others on the passage we’ve not had the best of it. Our first two days were a struggle to get south. We had some great sailing for nearly 2 weeks (at least John and I thought so) but the last two weeks killed us without the Code Zero in the light weather. Also, boats like Kamaya, stayed further north for a long time staying in the favourable current and getting a better angle on the wind at the end. Having said that, 3,000 odd miles in 21 days is better than planned and fairly respectable. Apart from the Code Zero and until the last morning the only other fault on the trip was a broken cleavis pin. Then came the water maker and the charger out of nowhere in quick succession. Why these happened then with an interval between failures I have no idea.

Relaxing in the bay, drinking our beer and wind with ribs and chicken on the BBQ we were able to enjoy sunset in the most beautiful anchorage we have been in to date. It’s simply stunning. The only downside is sharing the place with so many other boats. Today we’ll go ashore and see the place up close before getting on and cleaning up the boat. Very much looking forward to getting our feet on the ground.

Final words are to wish my father a Happy 80th Birthday. Keep getting better. Hope to Skype soon.

(Now I can go and read all the blogs written by Helen and John during the trip)

PS. It’s now the morning. We’ve had a great nights sleep. I’ve retested the charger. It works !!!!! Maybe it was a thermal overload all the time. I’ve retested the water maker. It doesn’t 🙁