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Defyr - Day Six, Seven and Eight: Crash, Bang, Bang



These days blend into a period, which felt like FOREVER of heavy rain, strong headwind and things breaking down.

WEATHER
Started with "lighter" 10-13m/s headwind with gusts of 15m/s, it continued to go up and was about 15m/s headwind with gusts of 20-22m/s. The rain was quite heavy and felt like it rained the whole time! We did not see the sun or the stars. We saw some thunder and lightning behind us, but gladly that didn't hit us.

BOAT
I think that first thing that stopped working was the septitank meter, then plotter and auto pilot, then one of our reserve GPS. (We have around 10 devices that have GPS, so no worries about not knowing where we are.) One of the 12V inputs burned and the fuse went out. The doorway design of our boat was not great with big waves sweeping on top and it let too much water inside. Not so badly that we would have needed to pump it out, but enough to have to cover the iridium phone and other electronics with plastic.

CREW
Juha's quote sums it up pretty well:
"Siis totaalisen perseestä!"
Tuomas was quite high spirited the whole time, excluding the complaints about only having wet clothes. Juha figured out all his clothes were just wetsuits. I was pretty ok until the autopilot broke, since my hand is still pretty much out the picture and I weren't able to hand steer. I wasn't able to fall asleep in the bad conditions so I started to feel super bad in the end. Fredrik had some seasickness, but it was all gone after he had to hand steer in 20m/s wind. Afu the captain was very confident that the weather would calm down soon and that probably kept him going. Soon just came way too slowly and times when the wind calmed down to 10m/s it felt so easy!

FIXING
MacGyver Afu and Juha as an electronic helper, they were manage to fix the autopilot for couple of hours in the bad conditions and later when the weather calmed down they were able to fix it for good.

FIXING MY HAND
Fredrik, who is our boat doctor took the stitches out of my hand on Sunday. It is still swollen due to too much use, but it's quite hard to hold on to things with just one hand with weather conditions as described above.

-Kaija "The One-Handed Sailor"




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