Morning
Tim Wright left the boat after the 09:00 skipper briefing and went to work in his dinghy with all of the camera gear aboard. Soon afterward, Meredith and I weighed anchor and set our sails once we were out of the shallow waters in the anchorage.
We chose to sail in the sheltered waters behind Cades Reef and tacked back and forth for the upwind stretch in the channel.
Aground
This went well, until we were about the tack again at the entrance to Urlings fishing port. I was watching the chartplotter and we were well within the marked 7 fathoms depth area (a fathom is 6 feet) and suddenly the depth started dropping very rapidly and I immediately swung the wheel around, but just as we were pointing in the correct direction away from land, Zanshin slowed from about 4 knots to 0 knots…
Luckily, we landed on soft sand or mud bottom and not on any rocks or coral. The engine power wasn’t sufficient to get us forward or back, and I was worried that I’d need a tow out and we’d miss the deadline for getting Meredith to English Harbour so that she could work. But after a bit, Zanshin got pointed across the wind and the power of the genoa and added heel angle, plus a bit of Wellie from the engine, got us off the bottom and sailing again!
At Sea
The wind was constantly over 15 knots, and we worked our way upwind on one very long tack (after clearing Cades Reef without further incidents). I’d had an issue with my alternator the day before, so we were running rather low on the main 24V house bank and didn’t want to run the autopilot due to those power concerns. This let us hand-steer until just off the Pillars of Hercules, where we furled our sails in preparation for motoring into English Harbour.
More Trouble
Meredith was at the wheel and asked for a bit of power so that she could have steerage. I pushed the throttle lever forward, but nothing happened. I looked down to see, somewhat to my dismay, that the engine RPMs were at 0. And when I pressed the start button, I heard a strange beeping and clicking from below – a sure sign that the starter battery didn’t have enough power.
This wasn’t good. I knew we could sail into Falmouth Harbour in a pinch (it is much bigger than English Harbour) and drop the hook under sail there – but again, Meredith is working the event and needed to get ashore ASAP. The two of us put out some mainsail so that we could have steerage, and she helmed while I went below to sort things out. I checked the diesel gauge to make sure that the engine hadn’t stopped due to fuel starvation, to see if we still had a quarter tank. I got the floorboards up around the auxiliary batteries and found my starter cable forward.
After hooking up the starter cable to the house bank, I started the engine, but it died again after a couple of seconds. I still have no idea why, because a minute later, I fired up the diesel, and it ran smoothly. We chose to prepare the anchor for quick deployment as a “handbrake” and kept our heavily reefed mainsail up to provide steerage should something untoward happen inside the narrow confines of English Harbour.
Once inside, we contacted the dock guys, who assigned us an alongside berth at the superyacht dock. While I got the lines flaked and fenders out, Meredith steered us on a small tour of the dockyard. Despite the wind blowing us off the dock the first time around, our second attempt at docking was successful with the help of the 3 dockhands.
I must admit that, after the trials and tribulations of today’s sailing, my first beer tasted very good indeed and didn’t last very long! I’m sure that Meredith breathed a sigh of relief as well, once we were umbilically attached to terra firma.
Prizegiving
I was tired (and had a bit of a headache from when I’d tripped and knocked my head), so I retired right after the final prizegiving and missed the big party.