Sleepless nights and damaged electronics
The last post was the first one written and sent from the sea with our Thrane & Thrane satellite unit. And this is another one. I hope that the quality of these posts are OK despite the fact that I cannot connect properly to the blog interface and also I had to lower the quality of the pictures a bit so it goes faster to send them over - because as you might know; connecting to the Internet through a satellite connection is still ridiculously expensive. Also I would like to inform you that it might be hard for us to answer comments and emails from the sea, we'll catch up on it all once we're on land again.
The second night on our passage from Rabat was a bit of a painful one. Alex felt sick from something he had eaten so I had to stay on watch for the most of the night. I'm sure he could have taken one watch if he absolutely had to, but I wanted to save him from his pain with a long nights sleep. The wind was a steady 20-23 knots all night long and we literally flew over the ocean towards our destination with an average speed of 6.5 knots. Unfortunately we had some problem to get the windpilot working correctly that day so we needed to depend on the electronic autopilot. The wind increased in the morning to above 25 knots and shortly after we got also our autopilot dysfunctional due to huge impact from the larger waves (the link between the rudder and the autopilot got teared apart). These little steering problems forced us to stand by the helm most of the day yesterday. It was a slightly uncomfortable ride in 26-28 knots of wind and 2-3 meter rollers smashing against our beam. Later on we noticed a change in the forecast and apparently the wind were due to kick up even further in the evening from force 5-6 to 6-7 so we made the grown up decision of ducking into the port of Essaouira for the night. Safer like that. With one man sick and the other one who didn't have a proper sleep for around 30 hours we wouldn't have made much of a comfortable passage. And on top of that having to stay by the helm for 50 more hours. No thanks. C'est la vie, nothing beautiful in life comes without a little bit of pain, right. And how boring wouldn't a painless life be when I think about it.
After a 12 hour ultra comfortable sleep in the bustling and very interesting fishing harbor of Essaouira, we left with a bit better mindset and little bit more energy and we are now underway towards Agadir where we'll stay until we get the autopilot working again. At least we have solved the windvane issue for now.
So these last days we have got five electronic things damaged so far. The autopilot, the SPOT tracker, the 220 W power supply for the fridge, the Mac charger AND the Camera charger (all those three last ones due to power surge in the Rabat Marina. ((Is it called surge? I have no possibilities to check it from here so forgive me if it has another word. What I mean is that there was a huge electricity failure on our pontoon and all our things got over-charged)).) Thank god we still have some equipment left!
Luckily I still have the other camera working, although there is no video function on it. Hopefully we're able to find a charger for the new camera in the Canaries. In Rabat they had the charger for Mac luckily, but not for the large camera. And when talking of electronics, if anyone know of anyone who works at the Garmin International, please do let me know - I have something I would like to discuss with them and I can't seem to find my way through to the correct people on their website.
Over and out. /Taru
