So near, and yet so far…   Saturday, 25/11/2023

We got away last Saturday… Not easily – needed to fill up with fuel and the diesel pump at the fuel dock  had a technical fault. Which meant waiting four hours while a technician was summoned. Typical of the sorts of problems that lie in wait!

Nevertheless, I set off in good spirits and we were making good progress. Then suddenly at 10:30 on Sunday evening the autopilot failed. I tried to inspect it but it wasn’t easy in the dark. So I took down the sails and simply spent the night drifting. On Monday morning I had another go. Without success – it was pretty clear that there was nothing that I could do. So I had a big decision to make: did I try to press on without an autopilot, despite New Zealand still being over 900 nautical miles away – or did I turn back for repair? 

Turning back is not easy psychologically. But it did seem the best thing to do, and I was confident that I could get back in two days – the distance was only 165 miles. Whereas if I tried to carry on, it was very unclear how long it would take – it could be 14 days. 

That decision made, I set off back. Fortunately, I managed to rig the sails in such a way that I could make a roughly accurate course without standing at the wheel and hand steering. Simply put, with three reefs in the mainsail and with the foresail forcibly reversed to the starboard side, from where the wind was coming, Manuka made reasonable progress. She achieved almost 4 knots, in a direction that was roughly where I wanted to go. This sort of setup requires a lot of trial and error, and regular readjustments as wind direction changes a little or wind speed rises or falls. That gave me something to do – far better than sitting around cursing my luck!

(Given the problems that I’ve had with the autopilot, the big question is: why haven’t I replaced it? I have been wanting to get the ideas of an expert, rather than simply have someone stick in a new autopilot regardless of whether it’s right for the boat and the nature of my sailing. The generalist technicians you get in the Pacific islands are great at fixing a range of things, but they are not experts, and anything new you get will simply be what is available. So that’s the reasoning – and unfortunately it has been the source of pain. But it still seems to me to be the best thing to do, which means that I simply have to live with the consequences).

My jerry-rigged navigation system worked. We came through the passage in the reef, which is about 15 miles south of the marina, at about 02:30 on Wednesday morning. I would have preferred waiting until dawn to do this, floating around outside, but that wasn’t tenable – the wind was 20 knots and waves were regularly breaking over the boat. So I basically “flew blind”, relying on my Navionics electronic chart (on my phone) to navigate through the reef in the dark. It wasn’t that difficult because I had come through the same passage on Saturday afternoon, so knew that the reef extended quite a way from the island to starboard.

On getting back into the marina on Wednesday morning I immediately sought technical help. At first it all looked promising: the repair workshop was clearly very decent. There were hopes to have the repair done by midday Thursday. But then, as everything was reassembled, it became clear that there must also be a problem inside the drive unit of the autopilot, caused by stress placed on its components when it failed. And this was not good news. The owner of the business even became involved. They tried to think of an easy fix, but weren’t confident of it holding up more than a few hours. So a metal part, whose inside was stripped, has to be replaced – which means a custom new one being machined at a machine shop. 

This probably means that the work will not be completed until next Wednesday. I really felt despondent at this news. Even though I completely accept the logic of what they are doing, and the very obvious effort they have been making – these are good guys. So I simply have to accept the delay and make the most of it – in the belief that I will finally get to New Zealand one way or the other. And in the knowledge that once there, this whole episode will fade into insignificance.