With a beautiful forecast of around 15-20kt South Easterlies, we set sail late afternoon for the Adolphus Islands. With 2 nights in a row of sailing ahead of us we were happy that the conditions were favourable and we had what looked to be a couple of days of smooth sailing ahead of us. Or so we thought…….

Around midnight while my new A team(A for Adventure) settled in hoping for a little less adventure that night, we started to hear a high pitched squealing sound coming from the engine room. Uh oh……

In my experience most skippers will sleep with one ear open so they know as soon as the conditions have changed or something might be going wrong. Phil was no exception to this and was loaded like a coiled spring, leaping out of bed to check out this new unfamiliar sound. Unfortunately with this new sound came a new smell……a smell of something burning.

This burning smell was coming from the seal on our prop shaft. Because we don’t have a fixed prop shaft it is constantly spinning while we are underway. We are not exactly sure on what initially went wrong but it seems that the water cooling system to the prop shaft seal had some how failed causing this area to overheat. The seal was starting to melt! We hastily rounded the boat up into the wind to slow down and check out the problem. With nowhere to easily anchor up we carried on slowly towards a safe anchorage while Phil and Baz went to check out the problem. As they poured water over the burning seal to cool it down the damage was unclear at this stage but we began slowly taking on water. This was easily managed with the bilge pump and we carried on slowly sailing till 6am to an anchorage. With Silver Fern aware of our problems they were ready to tie up to us in the morning and offer a helping hand.

After some deliberation between skippers the decision was to try and fix the problem while at sea and carry on if we could. Luckily for us Sharon had experienced a similar problem while sailing on Maiden and knew exactly what we needed to do! After some contorting of bodies into the engine room we changed out the old seal, chucked on another hose clamp for good measure and the problem seemed to have been fixed! With earlier thoughts of having to potentially end our circumnavigation early we were all relieved to be able to carry on.

We left our anchorage around 10am on Monday morning fairly sleep deprived after a big night and morning of scratching our heads and working our way through the fix. Huge thanks to Silver Fern crew for helping out and sticking close to us as we continued on to our next stop. We had a beautiful day ahead and finally got to experience that smooth sailing we had anticipated the day before.

Till next time!

Jess :)