Day 22
6:30pm 00:30 UTC
Pos 10deg08S, 136deg55W
Distance 126miles to Atuona
The autopilot spat the dummy at 1am and for a while all was quiet on shimmi as we contemplated life in the south pacific. As Chonny mentioned in yesterday's report i worked the whole night on stripping and re-assembling the thing, when i finally got down to pulling out the corkscrew type gear unit about 40 tiny silver ball bearings fell on the saloon floor, scittering and scattering in all directions. It was a Jesus Christ moment. The saloon by this time looked like a bomb had exploded in an Indo tool shop. But i got most of them back in, re-assembled the unit and re-installed it by 6am. I knew that the only way i was going to get sleep was if the autopilot could steer the boat as Andy had by then been hand steering the whole night in driving rain. But no. This little fable does not have an happy ending. The autopilot briefly sorta worked and then the corkscrew gear just stripped out inside.
We hand steered most of yesterday, by midnight last night we were all so tired and me with my eczema just barely coping so we decided to park shimmi in one of the many empty parking spaces around us, turn off all the instruments and ALL GO TO SLEEP. GLORIOUS. We floated on a gentle ocean until 6am this morning when i was woken up by a light tail wind. Its now 630pm and we have been sailing slowly with the spinnaker the whole day, slowly getting closer.
My eczema is much better, i am still on the steroid cocktail and i have deflated. I am now in the next phase of eczema which is the thin skin under repair, raw, dry/dead flaky skin but not swollen anymore phase. Chantal found an old forgotten bottle of moisturizer floating in the bilge which has saved my life!
Andy seems to enjoy hand steering shimmi. After years of driving pangas in Panama he now has his blue water licence as well hahaha.
The kids are great, seriously. Chantal made pancakes out of our last 3 eggs this morning, then followed by a great soup out of plantains, pumpkin and noodles, we call it LSD: The LAST SOUP DAY. Eaten over white rice. This evening is bacon bits, pasta, pepper pesto alla Calabrese + pumpkin on the side.
At this pace we will arrive tomorrow night, so we are taking it easy, if the wind dies we will simply park shimmi again and all go sleep. There is no way we are hand steering and burning diesel at the same time. What's the rush anyway when you have already been 22 days at sea?
We have 42 fuel hours still available to us which is more than what we need to get there. But we are now sailing about as fast as we motor so there is no point in burning fuel.
I've got Nic Breytenbach in Fort Lauderdale finding out about the the Autopilot, hold thumbs for a quick solution!
Bonjour
G
extra from Chonny:
forgot to mention....Golla stopped the boat yesterday and asked me to dive in with flippers and mask and check out the rudders to make sure nothing obvious was wrong (he's skin cannot handle salt water). "Sure," I said. I have never been so freaked out. Imagine the ocean being 3000m deep and the only sign of life the Shimmi crew has seen in 22 days, besides birds, is a freaken huge Shark swimming right past the boat.
Right now Josh and Indie are standing on the couch playing "air guitar" to Cat Stevens each with their own spatula.
