A Day of Rest

A Day of Rest   …   Thursday 11th April 2013

Today was a much needed quiet day. We took Bob ashore in the "Dumb Dog" just before 10am to meet his taxi for the airport. We will always be very grateful for the help he gave us crewing back to Florida. Back on "Cotinga" we started to get to grips with some jobs - writing up the blog, cleaning out the fridge and freezer and taking a look at the auto-pilot. Whilst navigating the long approach into the St Marys Inlet our auto-pilot started cutting out repeatedly. This is something that has happened to us occasionally before under rough or “squirelly” conditions, but it also seemed to me that the wheel felt different and I was worried we had a more fundamental steering issue. Some problems are tricky to diagnose - this one not so. When we opened the inspection hatch we were shocked to see that that the drive bar of the hydraulic ram was no longer connected to rudder, but had become unscrewed. We were very lucky that this didn’t happen in the middle of the trip. Re-connecting the piston was trivial and should restore the system to it's previous state. I think the loss of the dampening effect of the hydraulic ram explains why the wheel felt strange, but I still suspect there may be other problems with the autopilot that lead to the "current overload" warnings. After lunch we got to have a wonderful conversation with our daughter Natasha using Skype. We struggled to maintain decent communications with her in South Africa and us in the Bahamas. It's great to have good internet connectivity again. We were thinking of heading into town for dinner but it's blowing like crazy just at the minute so I'm not sure we'll bother.

Mike

30 40.34 N, 81 28.14 W

The connection between the auto-pilot hydraulic piston and rudder assembly - the black linkage had become unscrewed from the silver piston, only possible through rotation of the piston