We woke this morning to rain and poor visibility. Despite the unfavourable weather we were hopeful it would soon lift. We didn’t have the luxury of waiting where we were as the passage between Tresco and Bryher, which was our calmest way out, is only navigable at high water. And tide had already started to go out. We therefore decided to slip our mooring where we’d spent the night and head across the channel, anchoring on the other side until the mist lifted.
Just as we’d released the lines from the mooring buoy and Joe was reversing backwards he suddenly said he’d become stuck on something. Looking at our stern the dinghy was side on against the back, but we couldn’t see anything trapped there. My first thought was we’d got seaweed somehow trapped around our propeller stopping it from working. We’ve seen a number of large rafts of these floating past and have had a few narrow escapes of this in the dinghy. But we could see the starboard prop was working fine as Joe added then removed engine revs (the port was blocked from view by the dinghy trailing out the back so we were unable to immediately confirm this). Looking forward we could see the mooring buoy we’d just left well clear of the bow. So again we hadn’t somehow gotten tangled there.
By this time the tide had now got us, dragging us back towards the 5 other sailboats downstream of us. Quickly grabbing fenders Joe was able to narrowly escape squashing our tender between us and our first neighbour. They were up on deck questioning our strange behaviour as we struggled to remain clear. Rushing forward to try drop the anchor we forgot the handle as Stew rushed back to grab this and Jeremy prepared to fender off the next rapidly approaching vessel. Luckily when we were in Eastbourne, Joe had serviced the windlass so it was able to flow quickly and freely out. It took hold and we narrowly escaped being swept up on the rocks by the tide.
While we were avoiding a morning of bumper boats, the first yacht that we had narrowly missed, Wind Song, had helpfully called the harbour master. He headed out in his full foul weather gear, because these things never happen in beautiful sunshine. By this time we were safely anchored in 4.1 meters of water, except it was high tide and we were in an area which dries. We therefore thankfully accepted the harbour master’s offer to tow us back to a mooring buoy.
Safely secured to a buoy well away from anyone else, we had a chance to investigate what had gone wrong. While waiting for the harbour master to arrive we’d realised that our starboard engine appeared to be working fine (and this matched what we’d seen while we were adrift). But our port engine was stuck in reverse. Some poking around in the engine room we found a snapped a morse cable. The snapped one was the one used to change gears so although we were throttling forward the engine was still in reverse.
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Mentor has two engines, a criteria we knew we needed when choosing boats for the trip. This is exactly in case we lose one when we have kites up so we can still safely get them back on board and head in on one engine.
All of our hearts were racing this morning with Joe’s hands visible shaking afterwards, and Stew using that “don’t question just do” tone I only ever hear when things have gone wrong on the boat.
A morse cable is a relatively standard part so we’re hopeful the mechanic on Scilly’s main island St Mary’s will have one. If not, it may be possible to send one across from Penzance on the ferry. Unfortunately it being a Sunday today we’ve been unable to get a hold of anyone to organise a replacement. So lots of phone calls tomorrow morning. Fingers crossed for getting things sorted then!
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