Jury-rig Steering Repair While at Sea
I woke up in the pitch dark with the sails beating themselves up and the boom banging around. Sticking my head out of the cabin I heard Jon engaged in a review of his vocabulary with the words ’broken rudder’ and ’no steering’ occuring frequently. I started loosening sheets (to quiet our motion) as he went below to look for the emergency tiller. Moments later he had installed the emergency tiller and we found the helm responded - the rudder clearly wasn’t broken but the steering wheel was not working. It was too dark to do anything except see that the steering cables appeared to be fine. Of course - we had spares for them! I hand steered and tied the tiller when I could for the rest of the night. We were 600 miles west of San Francisco.
Here Jon is drinking coffee the next morning and reading the Pardeys for inspiration. He has just determined that the problem cannot be fixed at sea - access is just too difficult. Two bolts had held the wheel shaft to the steering cable system. One of these bolts has sheared off, the other is backed out and nothing can be reached without climbing into the lazerette.
Later that morning Jon rerigged the self-steering to drive the tiller rather than the steering wheel. Here is his ingenious system for attaching the windvane lines to the tiller. The two taut lines go to blocks on either side of the cockpit, then back to the windvane. They are attached to the tiller by a vise grip which is clamped to the side of the tiller with cable clamps. The upper handle of the vise grips are free to move, allowing us to undo the lines or to reattach them at will.
The two loose lines, called snaffle lines, are used to adjust the windvane. A click on the left line (with the bar sinister stripes) turns the boat left 6 degrees, the right line to the right.
This shows a more complete diagram of the system Jon came up with. The steering is done by the taut lines (diamond pattern) and steering changes are done by using the snaffle lines to adjust the wind vane itself. Notice that the snaffle lines are led through a lead on top of the binnacle and then looped around the head of the tiller. This is so that they don't get tangled in anything else and are easy to find even in the dark.
The one disadvantage of this system is that the entire cockpit is taken up by these moving lines, making it impossible to stretch out in the cockpit. The most we can do for the remaining 1600 miles of the trip to Hawaii is perch in the corners of the cockpit or sit on the winches (very uncomfortable) as I am doing in this picture. However Zeke (aka the Prophet Ezekiel, our windvane) steers very competently with this system so we decide to continue on to Hawaii rather than aborting to California for repairs.
And then finally, this is Jon fixing the steering once we got to Hilo. Notice the bright yellow flashlight in his mouth. Looks cozy - eh?
