December 5, 2005 - EMERGENCY REPAIRS
by Michel & Jane DeRidder

Just the other day we saw a DVD of Irving Johnson's 1929 film of rounding Cape Horn as a nineteen-year-old lad on Peking, the enormous pure sail cargo-cum-training-vessel. This digitally re-mastered Mystic Seaport version of young Johnson's remarkable amateur film for which he did the commentary 50 years after the event was a mind-boggling half hour. The storm footage is by far the most graphic and seas the most gigantic we have ever seen. Two crew members were swept overboard in one particular storm off the Horn. The square-rigged vessel's daily routine was shown in detail. The men and boys endured hardships we cruisers can't imagine. With no engine and no power winches, they were forced to rely on skill, wits and manpower. When there was no wind they were at a standstill, or drifting with the currents. When there were storms, they endured. They had to be completely self-sufficient in every way. Obliged to make repairs as they traveled, they had to do their own sail repair (and sail making) on board, and had on hand an onboard blacksmith, as well as poultry, barrels of salt beef, and great bins of spuds that the cadets sorted regularly. Voyages lasted several months before reaching their destination, and they made no stops en route.

Those adventurous enough to choose to go to sea in their own yachts inherited some of the early principles of self-sufficiency. Even in the sixties, many of us had no radios. Most of us had no insurance. "Our insurance is the fact that we have no insurance", we said. This meant trying to ensure that we were unlikely to have gear failure, carrying spares for most everything, making do with what was aboard the vessel. If we were foolhardy enough to set forth in a small boat, we were responsible for ourselves, we reckoned. In all these many years we have never been put to the test - never suffered structural damage at sea, never been seriously hurt, never been rolled or dismasted. Our bluff has never been called. However, a few of the most enduring sea books were written by those who survived near catastrophic damage at sea.

When Tzu Hang somersaulted off the Horn in mountainous seas, "we knew it was up to us and nobody else to get ourselves out of these difficulties," wrote Miles Smeeton in his classic adventure tale Once Is Enough. "The tiller, the cockpit coaming, and every scrap of the doghouse had taken off level with the deck, the dinghies had gone, and the cabin had broken in two. The rail stanchions were bent all over the place, and the wire was broken. A tangle of wire shrouds lay across the deck, and in the water to leeward floated the masts and booms - the masts broken in several places. The compass had gone, and so had the anchor which had been lashed to the foredeck." The hull was "low lying, waterlogged and helpless". To make matters still worse, the rudder sheered off. Miles and Beryl were tough, determined sailors, and their companion on that voyage was John Guzzwell, shipwright and ocean voyager. "Fortunately" says the author, "Beryl had always been a determined hoarder...her store of bits of wood ...in Tzu Hang's canoe stern...brought to light and made use of." Using Beryl's hoard, as well as floor boards, locker doors and sails, John managed to enclose the 6'x6' hole where the doghouse had been, as well as broken skylights, while Miles and Bee (who had been thrown overboard and managed to swim and pull herself on rigging close enough to be hauled aboard) persevered for hours bailing with buckets, then sorting out the interior. Twelve hours later they were more or less watertight and emptied of seawater. Even their charts had gone except for a few scraps, but sextant and navigation books wedged into their shelf were there to be used. They sailed that patched-up jury-rigged vessel with an improvised steering oar to Chile and safety, where they made the necessary repairs, helped by the Chilean navy.

When ocean voyagers Val and Ernie Haigh lost one of the pontoons from their Hedly Nicols trimaran, some 450 miles from Hawaii, leaving a gaping hole after fourteen years, 100,000 miles and two and a half circumnavigations (the first with four of their five daughters) they too improvised and labored. They kept at it until what was left of the patched-up dismasted vessel was back under sail toward their British Columbia home. "We had chosen this irresponsible way of life, and in an emergency must rely first and foremost on ourselves," Val wrote in her book Chasing the Dream: Tryste Around the World (Horsdale and Schubart, Victoria BC, 1998). The once ketch-rigged tri, now a schooner-rigged cat, sailed homeward for two weeks, surviving an eventual ocean tow to Alaska behind a US Navy tanker at 15-16 knots. Tryste then took them safely home to Salt Spring Island under her own auxiliary power and jury rig, a distance of 1300 miles, mainly to weather, partly in open ocean. There the Haighs brought her ashore into their garden. Tryste, their shore habitat, sports an addition - a room - where the missing pontoon once was. Their monohull Truce, which they built themselves, swings on a mooring nearby.

None of our emergency repairs have been anything of the same magnitude. Perhaps the most challenging was twice having to lower the bent wind vane auxiliary rudder in monster seas. While surfing, Magic Dragon had been going too fast for the 1.5-inch pipe auxiliary rudder shaft to take the loads. The first time, after a wild ride in Cook Strait, we replaced it with our spare schedule 40 shaft. But when it happened again, sailing down the coast of California, we replaced it with schedule 80 steam steel pipe within its PVC deck-to-hull casing the next time we were hauled out. Our latest steel spade rudders have 3-inch steam pipe shafts, and they don't object to surfing speed.

The most frightening episode was losing the mains'l sheeting system from the boom's end in a gale. In preparation for a voyage, we'd replaced the worn swivel pin at the end of the boom but neglected to lock the nut. Fortunately we were well reefed and hard on the wind with wind vane steering when it happened. Michel managed to rope the boom well forward and secure it to a midships cleat. He searched in vain for a 5/8-inch nut in his treasure hoard of fastenings. Realizing that the keel bolts, all 28, had the needed nut, he removed one of them. Then came the terrifying part. He hung over the side of the aft end of the boat to reattach the sheeting system and to get the nut started on the thread, refusing to put on a safety harness. He said it was unsafe to do so. If he fell overboard he did not want to be dragged alongside at 6 or 7 knots. I was not amused, nor was I convinced.

Drilling the mast.
Fixing mast wiring.

The fix from the most careless and needless damage was repairing, in the middle of nowhere, both the prop and the rudder. On one of the exploratory forays we do so enjoy, we'd run aground, this above Magdalena Bay in Mexico on our way up through Devils Bend to grey whale nursery and breeding territory. In backing off - full power reverse - without any close reference point, we did not notice in time that Magic Dragon had come free and was starting to speed away backward. The tiller got away from us. The propeller chewed into the rudder, digging a deep hole and nicking a corner of our precious Hundested variable pitch prop. Fortunately the tides were ample so that we could beach the beast. Twin keels do come in handy. We were happy to be adventuring in company with California yacht Chautauqua. Dick and Cris kept our spirits buoyant with country bluegrass and sushi. It took patience, time, and effort to bodge and reglass the rudder. The propeller repair consisted of sawing off the other two tips of the three-bladed prop to match. There are rudder stops now to prevent such an accident from happening again.

Perhaps the most ingenious fix was Michel's solving of an electrical fault after, one by one, all mast lights gave out on a moonless ocean crossing. Most of all, we missed the spreader lights when reefing. We made do with a miner's light mounted on a hard hat for deck work, thinking back to the days when square riggers were sailed by seamen clambering on spars to furl sails in a blow with no lights whatsoever other than the moon - when it was there. Once we arrived in Noumea and investigated, it was to discover that the mast, which is supposed to serve as a buoyancy tank in case of roll over, had partly filled with water on that rain-drenched passage because the drain at the base of the mast was plugged. When we inserted an ice pick, water pissed out in an arc for a long time. Rather than having to lift the mast with all the complexities involved, Michel chose to use a hole saw to cut a 1.5-inch diameter hole in the mast a few inches above deck level. Then he fashioned a wire hook to fish out the various corroded wire plugs. First we had to trace, label and check, then resolder new plugs for the four circuits. When all tested ok, he made an aluminum plate to screw on as an inspection cover over the hole. Lastly, he climbed the mast to discover and plug the source of the rainwater leak.

Other repairs made necessary by accident, wear and tear, oversight or carelessness have been dealt with over the years. A bent spreader, caused by an inadvertent jibe while running in a gale with a preventer, was taken care of by getting a line around the bent spreader, then pulling it straight with the anchor winch. In the Canary Islands we were pranged up forward by a large schooner, temporarily engineless, sailing out of the crowded Las Palmas anchorage for the Caribbean. We suffered superficial damage to the teak toe rail, but worse - the aluminum spinnaker pole had collapsed and folded on impact. Michel cut out the wounded section, then sawed off a piece to use as an inside splice, sawing a strip out of it longitudinally so that it could be compressed to fit inside the two sections that he joined by pop riveting. The pole had been over-long to start with, so we were not much upset, just inconvenienced. That repaired pole got plenty of use on our mainly spinnaker run to the Lesser Antilles and countless times ever since. When we got to Antigua, we looked up the captain of the attacker yacht as bidden. He offered to make amends, but by this time, having repaired both toe rail and spinnaker pole, we thanked him but said it wasn't necessary, whereupon the Penthouse "bunny runner" or whatever his position was with that organisation took us for a dinner we could not have afforded. We heard a host of fascinating stories.

A halliard retrieval we dealt with in Nauru in the relative calm of their deep roadstead port where there is no anchorage. Michel had attempted to deal with our problem at sea by climbing the mast but had nearly been shaken off the gyrating spar, and was happy to arrive back on deck bruised, sick and shaken - but alive. Seeing us arrive, the children of Nauru marched along the shore calling in unison "Come heah, come heah!" A couple of white-clad officials, shorts, knee socks and all, came out to offer us the use of their big ships' mooring. We dared not hang on to the monstrous battering ram, there for the use of ships that come to collect guano nitrates. Not much later a yacht was sunk when a swell dashed it to pieces on that very mooring buoy.

The only time I remember waking to find a full bilge sloshing up the sides of the hull, we were able to fix what turned out to be a sheered cockpit drain by plugging the hole with one of the wooden plugs we carry for just such emergencies.

Most every cruiser can tell stories about tracing down and repairing problems by sometimes desperate means simply because something had to be done and there was nowhere to go and no one to help. We've heard of some ingenious solutions to lost rudders using buckets, tires, improvised steering oars. One chap tried backing up under power to persuade the disabled yacht to go about. It worked and they made port unassisted. A Kiwi friend dismantled his Volvo to replace valve springs and head gaskets many times, at least once in mid-Atlantic, by which time he could do it in record time. One couple had a persistent overhead leak that they simply couldn't trace. They squirted resin into the source of the dripping water, keeping at it for the longest time, until they noticed the resin coming out on the cabin top a surprising distance away. Source discovered, it was a simple matter to plug the offending hole. It helps to be a resourceful lateral thinker.

	Laptop challenge.

One thing about the dragon man - he'll tackle most anything, including complete evisceration and reassembly of laptops and radios. It helps to realize they are antiquated and not worth a repair bill. He knows he can't make matters any worse. I've seen him time and time again transform Dead-O into Alive-Alive-O, often with success and usually with no parts left over.