The wind filled in. The waves became undulating mountain ranges of white capped peaks towering over valleys of blue water. Up we climb, down we slide, rocking and rolling side to side. In morning radio net we learned that Lunatix couldn’t get their engine started. Not a fun project to tackle in these enormous seas. Freddie said he was going to wait until the waves die down to address it. Meanwhile they are hand steering to conserve power. Then at 11:30 our autopilot quit. We were discussing safaris and I think ol Pi just couldn’t wait. Just took off on a safari without us, and left us in a bit of a lurch. Hand steering two up is a tedious job. Captain began investigating possible causes and found that our step that we use on the side had slid out of its storage position and wedged against the autopilot tab on the rudder post. When he moved it, I coaxed Pi back to work. Yay! Nothing beats hand steering for three hours to make you appreciate your autopilot! Unfortunately our joy was short lived...Pi let go again and again until he just quit working altogether. By this time it was radionet hour, and we heard the shocking news that Babsea had been dismasted! Lars was the net controller for today, but our position so far south of the fleet made clear transmission difficult, so he turned the coordinating over to Benz on Niobe. Fortunately Babsea is still able to motor, have radio contact, and everyone on board was ok. But oh, I shed some tears for dear Sweet a Babsea and feel so bad for Helmut and Herman. What an awful rub! The fleet began efforts to coordinate sharing fuel with them, and ideas on how to create a jury rig to motor sail with. Benz set up extra ssb nets to check on both Lunatix and Babsea. We felt so terrible for Babsea’s loss that we did not even mention our auto pilot dying. We enjoyed a comforting supper of chicken, mashed taters and gravy, the last bunch of broccolini, and sweet carrots. It’s a good thing we did, as the next 12 hours were very intense, and all those happy calories fuelled our steering arms. We kept to our three hours on, three hours off schedule, so as not to disrupt our sleep rhythm, and each of us hand steered throughput our entire shifts all night long, bracing against squall after squall after squall with biblical proportion rain and up to 34 knots of wind. The boat handled beautifully on a port tack with just a double reefed main and double reefed Genoa. We managed to sleep in our off watches despite the wind howling in the rigging and the rain pounding the cabin top, but it was not the best day for the WARC fleet here in the Indian Ocean.
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