Once under sail, it was a great feeling. Everything worked flawlessly and we felt we'd achieved our goal of giving Robin a better boat with which to depart Fremantle than he had when the race began back in Bilbao, Spain.
Then disaster struck. Someone (thank God it wasn't me) lost control of a sheet (the line tied to the sail by which it is controlled from the cockpit) as we were refurling a headsail and enough of it dropped over the side to get caught in the engine's prop, which we'd just started as we were preparing to return to the dock.
We brought the boat back under sail, headed out to a place where we could anchor to dive underneath the boat to see what we could do to untangle the mess.
In the process of trying to do so, the skeg holding the Z-drive broke.
The photo above was taken just before the race start in Bilbao when Robin's boat was tipped on it's side to test it's stability and self-righting properties. A tall crane is lifting the keel's bulb by a tether.
Any boat involved in an open ocean race must undergo such certification as it is far more likely that not these boats will be pushed to the level that will have them broached (laid flat sideways) more than once or twice in the duration of the race. Robin's boat has, in fact, been completely rolled 360 degrees twice so far.
The illustration inset in the upper right (click on it for a full screen version if you want to see the details clearly) shows how the Z-drive (dark blue) leaves the engine horizontally, drops through the boat's hull (light blue) through the skeg (orange) before turning horizontally again and ending in the prop (which folds into a streamlined shape when not under power). The skeg is designed for stress only in one direction; the prop pushing to the rear to propel the boat forward.
As the two on our team dove below the boat with a mask to try to untangle the prop, one breath at a time, by pulling on the line sideways, the skeg was overstressed and snapped, held only by the freely rotating vertical section of the (hopefully) still intact Z-drive.
As one of the divers came back up to the surface and reported the break, the full ramifications of this was instantly evident to all of us. Repairing the skeg would
require that the boat be lifted out of the water. Because of Robin's unique rigging that uses a single boom on either side of the mast (photo) instead of the usual array of spreaders and shrouds, he would not fit on most boat hoists. To fit, we would have to drop and remove the entire combination of mast and booms. That alone was, in the best scenario, an intense 24 hour job that would invite numerous other problems to crop up through the intricate disassembly and reassembly required. Then there was the question of just how extensive the damage would be found to be. Was it limited to the skeg or was the Z-drive affected, and did it even affect the engine bearings...or worse.At best, this looked like a minimum of an exhausting 72 hour repair job. The potential for it being worse was clear. Race start was less than 24 hours away, and we had already allocated much of that time for other final preparations.
As the devastation of our apparent reality set in amongst the crew, Robin (after a few choice words into the wind) was amazingly upbeat. I think everyone on board knew who'd been responsible for controlling the line that had slipped out of control and had started the entire ordeal but as it was a supposedly highly experienced guest and not one of us (thank God), he preempted any fingerpointing by stating right away, "What's done is done. Let's get on with solving it." His cheerful and upbeat attitude almost made it even harder to bear; it was his boat...his race...and now someone else had thrown a wrench into the works.
A British television production company, APP Broadcast, had been hired to manage the production of all television content for the race. On board that day were two cameramen and a producer, recording our preparations for the next days race. Up until that point, they had been primarily interested in photographing Robin in heroic postures but they suddenly leapt into action recording our utterly dejected expressions when the extent of the damage became known. For the first time in my life I had the urge to shove a hand in the lens of the camera brought within a foot of my face as I stood with another team member on the bow of the boat away from everyone else, staring heartbroken into the distance and reeling with disappointment.
A boat was radioed to tow us in and all phones on the boat were in use trying to find a marina nearby with a boat hoist large enough to lift Robin's boat without removing any of the rigging. A nearby submarine base did, in fact, have such a rig, but a classified submarine was in port so we were not granted permission to use it.
Back on land, as options ran out, it was decided that if we tipped the boat with a crane in the marina in the same manner as done for the Bilbao stability test depicted in the picture above, we could get the Z-drive out of the water enough to at least have a good look at the problem and possibly even repair it. A crane was called in and, just as it was growing dark, the hook up was made. As the crane operator started reeling in the strop attached to the base of the keel however, the boat leaned only a little bit to the side before the rear wheels of the crane lifted off the dock and the entire crane began to lean toward the boat.
Obviously we needed a bigger crane. More phone calls. An hour later, one was found. The only problem was that, as this was a Saturday night, the company couldn't find a sober operator to match it.
Another hour of phone calls finally found one and it was not until near midnight the that the photo below was taken as Robin, our crew chief, and our carbon fiber repairman paddled up to the damage in a small raft to decide what could be done. You can see the skeg of the Z-drive hanging vertically when it should have been horizontal and in line with the keel fin.
The good news was that we didn't have to take the mast and all the rigging off. The better news was that the repairman said it was fixable that night.
The Godsend was that, upon inspection, the skeg attachment was discovered to be in an already weakened state by various forms of corrosion. The repairman estimated that Robin had about 100 miles of running under power before it would have snapped like this on it's own.
The engines in these boats are used primarily to run generators to recharge the batteries that run vital systems such as the navigation computers, radar and, most importantly the autohelm; sailing equivalent of cruise control. Additionally, they are used to motor a few miles out of port to set the sails and a few miles back into port when the sails are dropped. In an emergency, there is enough fuel on board to motor perhaps 1000 miles but as these boats are often two or three thousand miles away from the nearest land, that's a small comfort. Perhaps the most important use of these motors would be to maneuver around another disabled boat in the event of a rescue at sea, as had happened only weeks before with Mike Golding and Alex Thomson (as I've earlier described in great detail here).
This devastating event, it turns out, was the best thing that could have happened. Here, in port (even if it was only 24 hours to race start), we had the facilities and the professionals to deal with it. At sea, Robin would have been at a decided disadvantage had he needed to rely on his ability to motor extensively to either rescue someone else or even himself.
Even with this both comforting and disconcerting realization, the shock (and both mental and physical exhaustion) of the previous six hours was still quite hard to get over. At midnight, as the repairs were under way, I and a few others who had nothing to contribute to the process were sent home to get some sleep to be fresh for the rush of activities required once the boat was upright again. I woke up at 5:30 a.m. and was back at the boat at 6:00 a.m., so happy to find it upright, floating, and empty of any activity. The crew, I later learned, had finished at 4:20 a.m. I began the process of repacking various items taken off when the boat was to be tipped over and, in a few minutes, Huw materialized out of the dawn to join in the reloading effort.
At 8:00 a.m., Robin appeared; happy, confident, thankful, and still in much better mental shape than any of us. We all had been taken through one hell of an emotional ringer but you'd have never known it by looking at Robin.
Clearly he is from a different cut than the rest of us. At 67, he's only 16 years older than I am yet I feel quite the child by comparison in experience, depth, and other fundamental aspects of life.
It would be nice to think we all have these kinds of abilities within us and it's up to us to bring them to the surface...to evolve into what we can be. That's my outlook. I'll be patient.
