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Aretha - Major gear failure causes setback on Aretha



High drama onboard Team Aretha today.

Sailing downwind this morning in 15-18 knots of true wind. Alan the autopilot (our eighth crew member) throws up an error message - MOT Error. We’ve had this before and its not a welcome sight. Within seconds the sails are starting to flog as Aretha rounds up towards the wind. Alan has stopped working and we have to hand steer.

It’s important to convey just how key the autopilot is. When I raced before in the BT Challenge with 18 crew, we had no autopilot - we had 18 crew all eager to take a turn at the helm. When you are short handed as we are, its critical and i estimate that Alan the autopilot is steering Aretha some 80-90% of the time. If we had to hand steer for an ocean passage, there wouldn’t be much time for anything else.

Nichola and I are on watch together. Jani and Paul are sleeping. The children are studying in the saloon.

We need to slow the boat down so we can investigate.

As so often happens on a boat, when one things happens, it compounds itself with other problems.

Whilst I’m hand steering, Nichola is single handedly reefing the mainsail. She drops the main but the reefing lines tangle making it impossible to reset the sail. We have to rehoist and untangle the lines. This is physical work and Nichola is working hard. She is calm and taking it all in her stride. Normally, we’d switch on the autopilot and we’d do the reef together while Alan steered. Now Nichola has to work the controls in both the cockpit and at the mast.

We rehoist and it doesn’t work. We need to drop the main completely and to come up to wind. To do that, we have to furl in the headsail. Thankfully this is easier and we slow down the boat quickly.

Paul is on deck by now and hand steers whilst we work quickly to drop the main untangle it and put the reef.

Jani appears and within minutes he has emptied the Lazarrette (the large locker at the stern which holds the spare sails, gangplank and underneath all of this the autopilot systems).

Visual inspection immedaitely confirms the problem. There are 2 rams (port and starboard) which control the autopilot. One of the rams is hanging loose as the bolt fixing the port ram to the steering has sheared off. These are big bolts and it would have taken 4-5 tonnes of load to shear this off. These are powerful forces.

We are without autopilot and we are down to hand steering. To put into context that would be 6 hours steering a day for each adult.

We start to work with the autopilot. The mechanical system on the port ram still works. We know this as we switch Alan on to test it. The ram extends. This is encouraging.

The bolt on the starboard side is still good. We detach the starboard ram and take the bolt from starboard and transfer it over to port.

One broken ram, one good ram.

One good bolt, one sheared bolt.

We make an operational system by connecting the good ram and good bolt. With over 550 miles to go, this is a big relief and we can breath again when we press the Auto button and Alan starts to make re-assuring whirring sounds and the helm responds.

Alan is back in business - albeit only half working but that is good enough.

We put the boat back together and debrief in the cockpit.

The good news is that the children sensed we have important stuff to fix and stayed below and were calm and quiet. We worked extremely well as a team - there was calm and quiet focus and we worked the problem.

We have learnt from this and already have our shore based team at Oyster, Raymarine and Vortec working to diagnose why this happened.

It’s been a busy day.

Over and out from Team Aretha.



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