Pacific voyage aborted!   Friday, 19/05/2023

Last Sunday morning, the chain that operates the boat’s autopilot snapped. That meant that it was impossible to continue across the Pacific – sailing solo it just isn’t possible to put in sufficient hours hand steering the boat. Certainly not when you have more than 3,500 nautical miles ahead of you. 

It was a pity – in 6 hours short of 3 days we had managed 365 miles, much better than I had feared. Manuka was sailing well, helped by a strong positive current. Even in light wind of 6-7 knots, we were making 5 knots: an excellent result. 

I was in the cockpit just before 7am on Sunday, and a sudden squall hit, the wind rising and rain lashing down. But it was nothing extraordinary. The wind was perhaps 15-17 knots and the sea state was moderately rough. Nothing out of the ordinary at all, simply conditions that you would expect to encounter on any longish voyage. And yet the autopilot broke. 

I must confess that I was gutted. I simply took two hours off in order to give vent to my despair! And then that was it – now it was time to make new plans. I unscrewed the housing behind the wheel and confirmed that the problem was indeed mechanical: I was confronted with a broken chain. Nothing much I could do about it.

So on Monday morning I began a slow five day voyage back to Panama, heading for the very western coast of the country because it was significantly closer. Hand steering gets exhausting – I can manage 9 or 10 hours in a day, but beyond that you get cross-eyed (particularly at night). So we spent a lot of time simply drifting, helped by a north-setting current (this was another reason not to return to Panama City, where we would have been battling a southerly current). One positive was that there were no ships at all – this part of the north eastern Pacific is not a shipping route.

Surprisingly, after my initial disappointment, I have felt very upbeat. Partly because nothing can be changed – I just have to make the most of the situation – but also because it’s very clear that the autopilot was waiting to fail. Far better that it happened within easy range (5 days and 282 miles) of the Panamanian coast, than in the middle of the Pacific, where the ongoing journey would have been interminable. 

I had a few small consolations on the journey. On numerous occasions dolphins leapt out of the water and raced alongside, in one case a pod of at least 25 of them – I’ve never seen so many together. The odd bird visited. One large brown seabird hitched a ride twice. It was funny seeing him land on the anchor protruding from the bow – he had to abort his first attempt to land, but got it right the second time, and then the next time he came – not only were we moving forward at 5.5 knots, but the bow was rising and falling as we cut through the waves. 

So although I shouldn’t have been feeling quite happy, I have been. If there’s been a change in me, it is certainly that I have become a lot more accepting of circumstances – things that would really have got me down back in London now seem to just wash over me. Perhaps it’s something to do with the enormity of the ocean making everything else seem trivial. Or maybe it’s just that you adapt very quickly to the rhythm of the sea and that rhythm is naturally calming.

On the plus side, the coastline here is simply stunning. Numerous small rocky islands forming small inlets and bays. Actually I’m quite close to Corcovado National Park where I went in Costa Rica back in February – it’s less than 150 miles further west. I was hoping to go into a marina here, but I called by satellite phone this morning and queried whether I could actually get in – the charts didn’t look promising – and the guy confirmed that a 7-foot draft was too deep for their water at low tide. So I’m simply anchored a 20 minute dinghy ride away, just to the east of the small town of Boca Chica, about 25 miles as the crow flies southeast of the city of David. Coming in here could have been hairy, but by immense good luck my arrival coincided with high tide (I was able to consult tide tables once I got mobile phone signal about 15 miles off). High tide made it very easy, because today’s tidal range was 3.2 metres (10 foot 8 inches). So charted depths that looked pretty shallow (because they’re based on low tide) were no problem at all. It’s strange to have significant tides again – the Caribbean is almost non-tidal.

I will go and see the chap at the marina in the morning. Hopefully someone here can make a repair. If not, I even have a plan B: to sail 80 miles westwards into the bay of Golfito in Costa Rica. There are 3 or 4 marinas there, two of them offering repair services.

So, all-in-all, everything is fine. There’s nothing strange about something breaking on a boat – it’s simply a question of when and how it breaks and the consequences of the breaking. Although the last few days have been tiring, this is nothing – at no time have I or the boat been at any risk. So in the grand scheme of things, all is very well.

I shall report developments.