Broken dreams we live with, a broken boat we cannot! After the night we got a thrashing from, things were not working as expected.
It began when Wouter discovered the AIS wasn’t working on the navigation laptop. As mentioned in a previous blog the spare/performance laptop took a swim and is no longer with us. The sea state was still rather rough so we started from the bottom up, problem solving.
All the base units appear to work fine. The only possible answer and it was still a little speculative, “has the aerial fallen off?” Well, Tom was sent up the rig as soon as conditions allowed. It was a confirmed “YES” – the aerial was gone. Chris “imagine how far it got sent, its probably speared someone in Spain.” Trae said “I definitely wouldn’t want to be an aerial last night, or a windex” as he smiled looking up at the top of the mast.
Then the issues continued, the hydraulics for the canting keel were not pushing to its maximum angle of 40 degrees. Chris had emails and phone calls all day long to rectify the issue, which I believe we have got to the bottom of. We also had a number of serious leaks, the major one on the pedestal buttons that killed Wouter's laptop. Nicolai spent several hours with a tube of Sikaflex sealing late yesterday.
Brian Carlin, OBR
Team Vestas Wind
Leg 1 – ALICANTE – CAPE TOWN
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