Passage to Paradise

With a distance of about 280 NM from Gan to Chagos, we’d factored on an easy three days for the passage. With it being the kids first blue-water passage we weren’t going to be shy using the donkey (engine) when wind direction and strength weren’t conducive to a quick voyage.

As Murphy would have it, the engine coughed and died about twelve hours out of Gan, just before midnight. We brainstormed the symptoms and thought the most likely culprit was the rubber boot which surrounds the sail drive, dropping off and fouling the propeller. There was a bit of history attached to this. The Bavaria agent in Dubai attempted to attach a replacement boot to Aroha’s bottom a couple of years ago, with an adhesive which appeared to be made from flour and water – or at least it proved to have similar adhesive properties. It was subsequently attached with a waterproof adhesive, but it’s one of those things that sticks in your head as a ‘problem not quite solved’. No problem. Aroha’s a sailing boat, so we sailed through the night and I looked forward to a break-of-dawn scuba dive to fix the offending part.

The sun rose, I donned my scuba gear and plunged into the 3000m deep water. I stayed on the top meter or two, but I think that has to count as my deepest dive ever. The water in the open ocean is the most amazing deep blue colour and looking down I could see funky looking ‘bubbles’ appearing to travel horizontally. I don’t know what they were, but my imagination of deep-sea creatures was limited only by the vastness of the ocean. There was also a small element of adrenalin. Aroha, when hove-to, travels diagonally through the water at somewhere between one and two knots. All of our man overboard drills involve the use of the engine, so I tied on with a secure rope.

Anyway, the rubber boot was not the problem and over the next day or so, the engine worked intermittently. Each time we convinced ourselves that the latest remedy (changed fuel pre-filter, bleed the fuel lines, changed the air filter, crossing one’s fingers whilst starting…) was the solution. I lose track of the days, but I think it was on day three that we had to make a decision – go on to Chagos (which would involve a tricky entry into the atoll with an unreliable engine), or return to Gan (with no guarantee of a decent engineer). Remember also that the main engine is our only source of charging the batteries which run navigation, communication, fridge, and perhaps most importantly, multiple play stations. We put a second call into our friend Johnny S on the sat phone. He pretty much immediately diagnosed a problem with the fuel system and recommended a systematic step by step, pipe by pipe blockage clearing effort. An hour later, the fuel lined was cleared, and a day later we arrived in Chagos.