Ship Shape

     No trans Atlantic Crossing would be complete without a few breakages and damages along the way and Argo was no exception. This shouldn't come as any surprise, 'BOAT' does stand for 'Bring On Another Thousand'… 

     We enjoyed our big beautiful mail sail for about 5 minutes before it ripped in a jibe. Without a main sail it is basically impossible to tack in our style of boat. This left controlled jibes as our only option. Jibing requires much more work, preparation and is more dangerous than tacking.

Our main sail 

    We found out a week into the trip that the alternator that charges our batteries was not working. We have 2 solar panels on the boat but they don’t produce enough energy to power everything on the boat. Luckily we have a small generator on the board. We were able to power the batteries with the generator but we had to be very conservative with our power. 

Some nights we would conserve the boat's battery power by using these portable lamps instead of our masthead lights. We mostly did this in the middle of the Atlantic when we rarely saw another boat.  

     About mid way through the crossing we had to use the motor a lot because there was very little wind. We were all sitting in the cockpit when all of the sudden the engine just stopped. Right away our stomachs dropped. Dad went down below and opened up the engine hatch and smoke began to billow out. After a few minutes the smoke disappeared enough that we could begin to investigate what had happened. The fan belt had fallen off and the engine over heated. When the engine cooled enough to work on it Darvil and dad rolled up their sleeves and got to work. Even after we fixed the engine we were still uncertain if the motor would work as it may have seized. Dad turned the key as we all held our breath …It turned on! Disaster narrowly avoided. 

Grease Monkey savin' the day 

     After a week without wind we were all relived when we finally got some 15 knots. We were under full Genoa sail. Sitting in the cockpit just before supper we all heard a loud noise. We all jumped up immediately to see what had caused the noise. What we saw was our fore stay and Genoa sail ripped out of our boat and blowing up into the air. This was very bad news. The rolling furling system that brings in the sail had blown to pieces. And our forestay which helps hold up the mast was ripped out of the deck. After about an hour Dad and Darvil were able to jury-rig the sail to the bowsprit of the boat using ropes. But now we were faced with having to be under full Genoa sail power with no way to reef. This can be very dangerous when strong winds come that can overpower your boat. We checked the makeshift repair daily, replacing ropes if they had chafed through.

The jury- rig 

Darv's masterpiece 

This thing wasn't going anywhere 

     We also hit a giant ball of tar in the middle of the ocean! We’re not sure if it was related to an oil spill or if it occurred naturally.  It didn’t do any damage to the boat but it did leave a big old tar stain on the bow of our boat! Dad was able to scrub it off with a lot of elbow grease when we landed on shore.

Most of the tar stain was on port side but you can still see some black stain on the starboard bow of the boat 

      Even with a lot of adversary thrown our way I was always amazed at how well my parents and Darvil dealt with our mishaps. It was good to have such optimistic and levelheaded crewmembers aboard. They might have been terrified on the inside but they all put up the bravest front. Argo had a courageous crew! 

Hard to be sad when Darv play's the happiest instrument in the world! We got some free concerts 

Dad chatting on the SSB