Author: Scott
I am sure glad we sailed over 200 miles to the north to ensure that we would not miss Sydney with winds pushing us down South. We had fluky winds working against us most of the way north, not to be met by the northerlies, but by their ugly counterpart the south westerlies. Yep, you are reading this correctly, we were routed by our weather routing service to sail north against the prevailing wind, just to meet new wind on our nose for the remainder of the journey. No disrespect intended to the weather router, we do understand that the weather is unpredictable, but we may have gotten luckier referencing the Ouija Board, or giving a monkey some chalk and a nautical chart. Okay, maybe that is just a teensy bit sarcastic on my part, but we did just go 400 miles out of our way, with no one to blame but mother nature. In the end we did find the experience of using a weather router positive because we had more advance information on the gale we encountered than we may have researched ourselves. Our advice to other cruisers is to use all the weather tools available and sometimes that includes paying for weather routing.
There really is nothing significant about May 23 other than the frustrating sailing conditions and fighting the wind on our nose. We spent the day willing the wind to clock to the west and probably because we did not sacrifice a virgin to the wind gods we did not get our wish, again! But wait, later in the day came the "Spaghetti Engine Incident".
I was up in the cockpit cowering from the noise our newly refurbished water maker makes. First there was the thundering dinosaurs, then came the jackhammer, then came heavy metal, and next was our water maker that will probably hold the filling jarring, brain numbing deadly decibel award until the implosion of our sun. Pam was down below working on spaghetti with clam sauce when all of a sudden our engine changed pitch and I dove to shut it off.
You see one of the only projects we decided to postpone was working out a better way to monitor our fuel supply. Starship has had an engine replacement in her past and we have come to learn that whoever installed the new engine cut a corner and only put a fuel return line to tank 1 of Starship's two tanks plus bonus auxiliary tank. There is also only a sight tube (a tube used to view the level of fuel in tank, and somehow not a good choice for a visually impaired crew). All this means that the only tank you can monitor is tank 1 and you must feed the other tanks into tank 1 as you start to get low, the problem being that you never truly know when you are going to run out of fuel in the other tanks. Most boats would have a gauge (or at least a sight tube) for each tank and a method for cross feeding either tank. Therefore, our only solution for attempting to monitor fuel is through experience and mathematics:
Here is a fun mathematical word problem for the students who follow our Blog. How many engine hours do you get if your boat has two 40 gallon tanks and an auxiliary 10 gallon tank and your engine uses approximately ¾ of a gallon of fuel per hour? Next account for 35 gallons of fuel in jerry cans and you will have the goofy guess factor of Starship's fuel resources. This probably makes you long for recess.
Now the big dilemma in our equation is the experience part. Starship is a new boat for us and we have not had enough exposure to the variance in her fuel usage to correctly establish a true hourly usage estimate. The end result is with all the motoring that was required due to calms we were seriously stressed about running out of fuel due to the STUPID monitoring system onboard starship.
Back to the spaghetti situation. It turns out that despite our overly developed numerical prowess we missed some fraction somewhere, or maybe we forgot to carry the 2? Who knows what happened but we didn't quite get it right and that little engine noise I heard was our wonderfully dependable diesel "Big Red" as she was gasping for fuel and then she turned over and died a magnificent death. To pay us back for poor feeding "Big Red" would not allow us to sufficiently bleed the air out of her system until we reach Sydney. For our dedicated readers, do you see an engine pattern here? It is no wonder we like to sail because engines obviously don't like us.
We were both a little glum on Thursday knowing that we had the fuel, had the engine, but could not actually use the engine due to our paranoia of running out of fuel. For once our trusty engine was doing fine and we were responsible for making it all go pear shaped. We did give it a valiant effort to resuscitate the iron beast. We even dug down to the bottom of the lazarette and pulled out our tiny spare generator to recharge the engine battery. However, on our generator's debut use, it would only fire up and run for 5 to 10 minutes at a time. To think we dragged the littler bugger all the way from Maine. Good thing we aren't trying to motor ourselves around the world, or we would be in big trouble. Never fear though, we are a sailboat and sail is what we did. The winds were in our favor (for a change) 10 - 15 knots from the west. We finally found ourselves at the Sydney heads around 02:30 in the morning. Our friends at Sailability had prearranged for the Water Police to give us an escort in to the Customs buoy and they were promptly on the radio working out the details with us. Not only did they give us an escort, but they also provided us with a final tow to the buoy. After at least four attempts at grabbing the buoy in the dark, we were safe and secure in Watson's Bay at 04:00 with three hours to sleep before the Customs agents would be knocking on our boat to officially check us into Australia.
On final reflection of our voyage across the "Terrible Tasman" we definitely concede that this is no tame stretch of benign water. To sail the Tasman you must use weather systems to make way, meaning that you are as dependent on good weather as you are on rainy squally lows to find the wind. This was certainly not trade wind sailing. The currents are illusive and constantly shifting beneath you, with sea mounts lurking beneath the surface. The wind was fickle, ranging from calms to gale force with little warning. We are proud of ourselves for taking on this challenge while humbled by this desolate and unpredictable frontier. We know that we will be facing "the Weather Kitchen" again, but for today - Hooray we are in Sydney mate!
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