On the second day of the sail we caught a big mahi mahi, about 20 kg. Fantastic as that is our favourite fish. Took some time to sort it out.
The following three days the wind picked up and the waives got bigger. Not scary just out of practice. The kids were feeling a little yucky but not to bad. Then it started……
First the iridium wouldn’t give us weather, then the generator sounded funny. After investigating it Chris said it wasn’t pulling in water. Bloody great….
The next day everything got fixed. Got weather and had bacon and eggs for breakfast. All looking good, little did we know what was coming….
In the night the autohelm sounded funny again. So we helmed all night. Chris checked it over the following day and casually said that he can’t fix it. It took me a few minutes to realise what that meant….WE GOT TO HELM IT ALL THE WAY TO EASTER ISLAND……no way. I can’t do that. It’s over 1000 nm. But we had no choice. What other option was there? No way we are turning back, after 6 days at sea we already done nearly 1000nm. And you can’t just not helm it….so that was the start of our manual helming, changing shifts every 2 h for the next 10 days.
It was exhausting. The nights were so long and more and more often we would fall asleep, holding on to the helm and jerk awake when either your head fell to the side or your knees buckled under. A new rhythm appeared, sleep and helm, sleep and helm. Throw in the cooking and we had no more energy to even attempt school. The kids watched a lot of planet earth kind of movies and national geographic dvds which was given to me by Paula last summer in U.K. Could not have done without them!A better day. Sunny.
Or more often it looked like this.
The days emerged in to a fog. Days being very similar. Keep on helming. Looking back on my diary I wrote that I was so tired that my eyes were rolling in my head like a ping pong game.
Finally after 14 days we saw land! What a feeling! WE MADE IT!
We came in to Hanga Roa and saw that there was about 8 boats there. Wow.
We were so excited that when we came to anchor we couldn’t understand why the boat wasn’t behaving like she should be….James tried to say something to me and I hushed him. I’m concentrating. Finally I looked up and saw that we still had our mainsail up! Talk about feeling like an idiot! That was what James tried to tell me. Bless him.
We had to reanchor as we were to close to another boat and as Chris was pulling the anchor up the stripper finger got caught in the chain. That took some hammering to free the chain and finally we were in, anchored and sorted.
What a feeling. Easter island,
moodyfinn 