Well we thought we were sitting pretty good until 0600 this morning.

We were cruising along with great speed directly towards our Hawaiian way point, 7-8 knots over ground and the trades truly pushing us along and then one of the worst (not THE worst of course) things happens, our autopilot stops working.
We were about 1200 nautical miles from the coast of Oahu when we got things settled down and figured out the autopilot wasn’t working. It was making a grinding noise and wasn’t moving the wheel. I crawled into the back and after some choice words managed to get the autopilot ram out.

After taking the ram apart I found that one of the delrin cogs inside was completely stripped. We had been sailing pretty hard for the last 24 hours, but I wouldn’t consider it the hardest we had ever sailed Asunto with the autopilot so I would have to assume that the wear was a built up over time as I assume the ram was installed when the boat was commissioned.

In hind sight I should have rebuilt or had a spare ram on board but it had worked so well for us over the years previously and up to this point in this trip I had thought very little about it, in fact I even passed up the opportunity to purchase a used ram for half the price of new on eBay that would have been an exact swap out for our existing ram.

We will now need to hand steer the last 1200 miles to Hawaii and hopefully there will be some wind to keep us moving.

Position update at 1200 local time April 5, 2016:
18 28.300 N
136 50.621 W
174 nautical mile noon to noon run
1185 nautical miles to destination
6.8 Kt. SOG
281 COG

Two exciting things happened today. (I know, big day out here)

#1 at 1400 on April 3 we hit the halfway point of the trip. It took us 11 days to cover 1520 miles and we are on track to  cover the next 1520 in 9-10 days based on our latest averages. We are heading directly to our waypoint of Honolulu now so it feels really good to see those miles reel off instead of playing cat and most with the wind.

#2 the boom vang went BOOM and the 8 bolts holding the rigid vang to the mast sheered completely off. We tried to drill out the SS bolts left in the mast but that didn’t work so we had to drill and tap 8 new holes. We managed to get the vang fixed in a little over two hours which is great, unfortunately we didn’t notice the broken vang right away because it was hidden behind the life raft and there was a little damage to the fibreglass, nothing major but just one more thing to fix down the road.

We are almost out of fresh fruit and veggies at this point and Jean has started a loaf of bread as we ran out of bread two days ago. Don’t fear as we have enough canned goods, rice, pasta and dried food to last us all the way to Hawaii.

Position update at 1200 local time April 4, 2016:
18 05.818 N
133 48.491 W
161 nautical mile noon to noon run
1368 nautical miles to destination
6.8 Kt. SOG
281 COG

We’ve covered more miles in the last 24 hours that Asunto has ever done since she was trailered across the country on a flat bed truck!
Although I know this record (169 nautical mile straight line run) will be broken in the future, and hopefully even on this trip, it was nice to accomplish since it is essentially a 7 Kt average from noon to noon.

The boat did really well and the key was the steady 19-21 Kt breeze that just kept the wheels turning. We still had a lull from about 12-3 am, but were able to,keep our average up with some prolonged 8 Kt runs.

I’m hoping we will see a 175 mile day as we have some stronger winds coming up, plus we made the turn for a direct rhumb line approach to Hawaii today at noon so if the wind direction holds we won’t have too much messing around to keep the boat on route.

We are only 16 miles short of our half way point so we’ll be enjoying some halfway point celebrations later tonight!

Position update at 1200 local time April 3, 2016:
17 38.301 N
131 01.478 W
169 nautical mile noon to noon run
1536 nautical miles to destination
7.3 Kt. SOG
281 COG