Beat Down
Josh Tucker gives us an update of Leg 3 on his shorthanded adventure – The Round
North Island Two Handed Race. Brutal.
After
a rather large unplanned drinking session in Wellington we set off for
the leg to Napier. The forecast was SE 25-35 easing. This meant a beat
out to cape Palliser followed by a tight gennaker reach to Napier. It
sounded like it could be a good leg for Waka. (Little did we know what
we were in store for…)
As we hoisted the jib before the start the tack clip came undone and the
jib shot up past the feeder and jammed so we couldn’t get the sail back
down. After about 5 minutes with us both on the foredeck we had un bolted
the feeder and got the sail sorted.
We were just getting going again when we noticed the low battery alarm
on the instruments. After a quick check we discovered to our horror that
the batteries were dead flat. With no way of charging the batteries at
sea this was a major issues for us. We didn’t want to risk taking on the
east coast with no power and only emergency nav lights. It seems that
the batteries hadn’t accept any charge in Wellington and were ‘cooked’,
lucky we had a spare. We decided that seamanship was going to be better
than gung-ho so we headed back to chaffers marina to pick up the spare
battery. Luckily Jeff (reliable as always) had the chase boat deliver
the battery to us as we sat off chaffers marina. We ended up crossing
the line 39 minutes late.
