Friday 13th January 2017
The graveyard shift watch crew had an entertaining start to the day when at just after 2:00am one of the other crew members suddenly appeared on deck and wanted to know what time supper would be served. He was advised that he had already had his supper quite a few hours ago and hearing this he toddled back off to his bunk, not to be seen again for several more hours.
Less than an hour later Grant and Rory shot out of their aft cabin, awoken by what sounded like the propshaft wobbling off as it made a loud grinding noise that reverberated through the cabin rather than the comforting purr that it should have been making. Asking Max and Nick on watch to furl the genoa and immediately put the boat into irons to stop her as quickly as possible. Disappearing into the engine bay to investigate the problem the noise suddenly stopped. The propshaft coupling to the gearbox had become completely detached, the bolts having worked themselves loose form their nuts which were lying under the engine and having retreated into the gland the propshaft was piddling water into the engine bay. Fortunately, there had been no damage and specifically none of the threads on the bolts was stripped. We very quickly re-attached the propshaft, torqueing up the nuts thoroughly and checking that the gland was no longer leaking. Our worst fear on initially hearing the sound was that the propshaft was about to fall out of the boat and the nearby presence of the Leia B catamaran was very reassuring under the circumstances. We would need to keep an eye on the coupling over the next few days. A quick calculation by reckoning that travelling at say 5 knots under the engine which would be turning at about 2000 revs per minute the propshaft was probably geared to turn at about 15 revs per second and under free rotation from travelling through the water may be going at about 10 revs per second for our average speed of 6 knots for the tri thus far had us coming up with a figure of 1.6 million times that the prop must have turned since our start 18 days ago.
Earlier in the evening we had passed Leia B, having been quicker than her with our spinnaker up and also being able to change our sails while we had other sails up, allowing us to continue making way while hoisting new sails, unlike the catamaran crew who seemed to need to drop all their sails when changing them, a process that took them at least 15 minutes each time. We called them up on the VHF radio as we passed them and enquired after whether they had their Labrador on board, which they said they didn’t. However, we were to be overtaken by her again in the early morning as the wind dropped and she could make better headway than us, not being a displacement-type boat with a big keel that needed a fair amount of wind to get going nicely.
The next morning we saw another yacht about 4 miles off our starboard beam that we assumed was the UCT entry Scatterling, judging by the race position report from the day before and the speed at which she passed us. We were still about 20 miles behind Bolero which we were very keen to gain some ground on. It wasn’t long before we heard that the Peruvian racing yacht Runaway had achieved line honours, finishing in Rio already.
We had been taking bets on how much further we had to sail to get to Rio with the person the furthest out needing to buy us all beers in Rio. The lowest was Nick with 900 miles and the highest Mathew at 1400 miles ith everyone else somewhere in between. Looking at our chartplotter we saw that as we were currently at 24.50 west and needed to get to Rio at 430 west, an angular distance of 27.50 when subtracting the one from the other, having it appear that we needed to travel 1050 miles to get there since each minute of longitude represented one nautical mile. This ratio was only true at the equator though and the earth being a sphere meant we would have a shorter distance to travel along the great circle, a slice through the earth that represented the shortest distance between two points on the globe. Our chartplotter also does a great circle calculation, as does Google Earth of course, and the figure it gave us for the distance was 980 miles. We looked forward to finding out who was right and were practicing saying oito cerveja por favor in Brazilian for the eight beers that we would be ordering at someone’s expense when we got there.