Location 27° 55S, 150° 09W
Friday 12:00, 07.27.2007

At noon on July 27th, the Schooner Maggie B was at 27° 55S, 150° 09W. We are now on GMT -11. Tahiti is GMT -10, which we will switch to tomorrow. We are continuing to make good time to Raivavae, making 6.9 knots on a heading of 030 with the wind at 150 degrees at 12 knots. Our life on a broad reach! Hard to imagine why so many people consider this to be “the wrong way around.”

We have come 1998 NM from Opua and have 275 to go to Raivavae and 620 to Papeete. We should be at Raivavae about midnight tomorrow, and will stand off until dawn to enter the rather complicated pass.

Our main engine is purring along fine now, after Theresa did a third oil change to remove all the water from the crankcase.

My story yesterday brought out the following email from my friend, John Steele, owner of Covey Island Boatworks, which built the Maggie B, and former master of Marguerite, a Bristol Pilot Cutter:

“Years ago I offered to take Tom, a sailing friend - who needed it - out for a sail. I rowed him out to Marguerite and when I tried to start the engine …. damn, water locked ! I apologized and offered to take him back ashore and out for a sail another day. He said he’d rather stay and help get the motor going… a day out on a boat was as good as a sail, he needed to get out of the house.

So we did what you did last night. When the injectors were out and it was time to roll her over I put a towel over the block and turned the key….. whap !! A hot, wet towel was instantly slapped around Tom’s face as he had been above looking down. Without a second’s pause he peeled it off and proclaimed : ” Oh Yes … Yachting ! Just like I remember it ! “

John, and all at Covey have been a great support for us, all around the world. I suppose that boats a yard builds are like children: you mostly just hear from them when something is wrong.

We have a hymnal in our library. It was published in 1893 and belonged to my Great Grandmother. I was looking in it for possible tunes to be adapted for a Maggie B song. What struck me was two hymns for “Travellers by Sea”, one written in 1845 and one in 1887. One, “While o’er the deep Thy servants sail” says “Send Thou, O Lord, the prosp’rous gale.” The other “Safe upon the billowy deep” has “Mid the dark, send fav’rin gales.” We have just had a favoring gale, if not a prosperous one, which has marvelously blow us from New Zealand to the Islands. But I expect that no modern congregations raise their voices and pray for a gale. Probably not many sailors today either.

At night we are happy to see the return of well known constellations, including Orion, the Swan, the Dolphin and the Pleiades. It is a function of being a bit further north, and the time of the year. For the Maori, the first view of the Pleiades was the signal for the winter celebration. It was one of their central “sailing stars.”

All is well.

Location 29° 48S, 152° 00W
Thursday 12:00, 07.26.2007

The Schooner Maggie B was at 29° 48S, 152° 00W at noon on July 26th. We have 8-15 knot breeze from the SE to move us along on our course of about 030 to Raivavae at six or seven knots. The seas have calmed down nicely and, as of this writing, the 2/3 moon is guiding us along. We have about 440 NM to go to Raivavae.

Much of the day, however, was spent mostly stopped or going the wrong way due to systems problems. We hooked a fish at about ten o’clock this morning and went to Fishing Stations. When we tried to start the engine to be ready to maneuver, it wouldn’t start. It wouldn’t even turn over. The fish spat out the hook and we got to diagnosing our problem. Hmmm — plenty of battery power, and it’s trying to turn her over and it’s not going anywhere? OMG - waterlock!

Waterlock is when water gets in the engine, all the way to the cylinders. A diesel can compress air, but not water and if a cylinder is full of water, it isn’t going anywhere, unless the starter is strong enough to break things. How does water get in? Through the exhaust. Why don’t you have something to stop it? We do, a nice Vetus Air/water separator. But it must have been overwhelmed by six days of going hull speed (the primary wave when you are going fast “climbs up” the stern, submerging the engine exhaust) and we also had big following waves pushing the water in. Isn’t there anything you can do? Yes, run the engine every day to keep up the back pressure to help the air/water separator keep the South Pacific out. I forgot to do it.

So, how do you recover? First thing is to stop the water coming in. When I pulled off one of the injectors, lots of water came gurgling out. Lots, like an open tap to the sea. So we tacked over to port tack (the engine exhaust is on the port side) and slowed the boat down. The I cracked the low point in the exhaust system and let out perhaps 10 gallons into the bilge. Then off come the four fuel injectors (shaped sort of like spark plugs, but more complicated to remove). That opened up the cylinders. We turned over the engine a few revolutions with the starter which blew out the water from the cylinders. Then reinstalled the injectors. Then changed the oil (water in the oil not good). Then prayed that nothing was bent or broken. Then started it! Yea! after a splutter or two, she (?) started right up. We ran it for a few minutes and shut down to change the oil again and tighten up the injectors. Now it is running fine. We will change the oil a third time tomorrow morning.

This took about six hours.

Happily, we were able to call the Service Manager at Yanmar in Nelson, NZ and John Steele at Covey Island in Nova Scotia for advice, which was hugely important. And we had all the maintenance manuals.

In the midst of things, Ben was able to cook a tasty lunch, which was perhaps underappreciated in the stress, Hannah kept the boat in control and safe, and Theresa became expert at extracting and re-filling the oil system, which requires both strength and flexibility (read: contortionist).

But the weather is good, we all learned lots of lessons and Raivavae is only a few days away. Maybe we’ll land that fish tomorrow.

All is well.