Emergency Stay Repairs – Galapagos Islands
Shopping Product ReviewsBack aboard our little boat, the captain decides it’s time to climb the mast and unscrew the VHF antenna, misaligned by the baby booby’s attempted but aborted landing. The boatswain’s chair comes out and he climbs onto the main winch. Anglo’s crew, who have by far the broadest shoulders, are the winchmen – their captain likes to share the chores! He always enjoys the view from that vantage point on the mast, and is fascinated by the different perspective the height gives. The simple act of humans walking across the deck or dock, viewed vertically, is remarkable. Suddenly, the legs shoot out of the tubular body and, like a runaway puppet, propel it forward on its journey.
The captain looks up at the crooked antenna and straightens it until it looks reasonably like the original; transmission has not been affected. Looking around the truck, casually checking out the other accessories, his heart suddenly sinks to deck level. There, right in front of his eyes is a sight that for a moment he just can’t believe. As reality sinks in and his blood runs cold, he curses his fate. Our little boat is rod rigged everywhere except for the furling forestay, which is the normal nineteen strand stainless steel cable. Eighteen of these threads are fine, but number nineteen is out of its pattern.
They are about to start on one of the longest ocean passages, to the Marquesas Islands. [3200nm], and starting with a failed thread is not an option. How has this happened? You would expect to see this at the end of the deck level as all the moisture, fresh and salt, due to gravity, runs down and lodges in the pattern there, eventually creating a problem. Whatever the cause, and this will be discussed at length later, the fact is that this is a major problem and needs to be fixed. He wonders how long this is going to hold them; They don’t know, she’s made for sailing and she’s already getting tired of the constant surveillance in this narrow anchorage.
Flying a new stay from Miami is a horrendous cost and could take up to three months to arrive. The other option is to find an engineer who can stamp a replacement buckle. There are many of these highway engineers throughout Ecuador and they are all called ‘Miguel’. Our team set off in search of a ‘Miguel’ and at the fifth stop found a wonderful, calm-spoken man (real name Miguel!) who instantly recognizes and understands the problem and finds a solution. We cut off the old buckle, he welds on a longer piece of sleeve, and then reattaches the whole assembly to the forestay shroud; he has the heavy hydraulic press equipment to get the job done.
The next part of the project is to deliver the forestay to Miguel. With no dock, the problem is uppermost in his mind. Fortunately, Santa Cruz has an honorary British consul. This gentleman arrived twenty-five years ago on his seventy-five-foot sailboat and never left. As luck would have it, his yacht (very little used nowadays) is moored not far away and he very generously offers the use of its deck. This length is necessary because some of the foil sections have corroded together and our team will need to pull the cable out without breaking even one of these sections.
The next morning, your captain nervously prepares for breakfast cereal and checks out the surf. He has gone down a bit this morning, but still he guesses that anchored next to the BC ship there could be a combined three to four meter difference in rise and fall between her decks. Ughhh! He doesn’t want to think about the consequences of a wrong move! He crawls up to her position and anchors alongside within six feet and many fenders along the sides of both ships. The surge is terrifying.
By this time, your friend’s crew from Galapagos passage have joined the fray and line up on the BC’s yacht deck to receive the complete furling forestay assembly, drum included, as it is lowered. Should she go down fairly smoothly, albeit with a great curve that does nothing for her captain’s blood pressure! Laying almost the entire length of the deck and after a celebratory beer, the next task of slipping the cable and coiling it into large loops on the aft deck is tackled. Since the drum must be completely disassembled, without losing a single ball bearing, this becomes a major undertaking. If you want pressure, try this on a constantly moving and lifting rig when you know there are no spare parts within a thousand miles. The cable is painstakingly worked on, accompanied by many sweaty stops for drinks. Finally, lying tamed, rolled up and tied in the stern it seems harmless enough. He wonders why his crew looks so worn and beat up.
The sleeve of the inflatable is 1.3 meters and the strapped coil has a diameter of two meters. It’s pretty heavy and lowering it into the tender produces a few more heart-stopping moments. Balanced between the sponsons, the sister crew is given the job of not letting it slide during the short but bumpy ride to shore. On pain of death, she sits in the center of the circle on the premise that if she falls overboard, she goes with him!
Returning to Miguel’s house, Anglo’s captain and crew had carried the coil back and forth over a mile or two of dusty road, willingly accepting cold local beer from Miguel. While his apprehensive crew would like to stay and watch this marvel of engineering evolve, Miguel, in the manner of true engineers, politely assures them that all will be well and;
‘Please come back tomorrow’.
They come back tomorrow and it’s not ready. With increasing doubts and many tens of thousands of sugars later, after spending on libations and dining with Beneteau’s crew, they are greeted on the third day by a smiling Miguel. He produces the complete forestay with a shiny new but greatly extended buckle, beautifully polished so that the weld seam is invisible and stamped into the cable. The total length is exactly the same with an accuracy of one millimeter! Just a small job, he tells them he produces an equally small bill and happily accepts payment of eighty US dollars in cash. The captain, who hasn’t kissed anyone for a while, nearly succumbs to temptation: Miguel’s long drooping mustache, however, now dripping with beer foam, stops him! Saying a happy goodbye to Miguel, taking the assembly back to the gloomy one was a decidedly light undertaking compared to the trip out.
Laying it back on the BC deck, the next task is to pass the cable through the twenty meters of sheet again. Meanwhile, the cable at the end of the drum has jumped slightly and, resisting all sweaty efforts, refuses to go back down its aluminum tunnel. Many tries later, weaving the bitter end into a wrapped cone shape thin enough to travel, it is once again arduously grafted and coaxed along its entire length until it finally appears accompanied by the whoops of joy from our crew. The relief of the captains is palpable as this means they can now embark on the next leg of their journey with impunity. Once again, with the help of the BC deck and Beneteau crew, the refitting of our modified forestay goes off without a hitch.