Dublin to Oban

Dun Laoghaire, the 3rd of June 2022

Yes, we are still here in Dun Laoghaire… waiting.

Dun Laoghaire Marina

If you think that sailing might be stressful, try waiting for the electrician to come and sort out any problem on your boat.

When the electrician came the first time five days ago, you could see that he was under a lot of pressure. As he was trying to see what was wrong with our navigation system, his mobile phone kept ringing. A lot of the time he spent on his phone while attending to our problem. He ordered a new transducer and disconnected our faulty wind indicator. He assured us that by doing so the problem with our auto-pilot would be solved.

The main issue is our auto-pilot. Because we are a short handed boat with only two people on board, we need the auto-pilot as the third 'crew member’, when you have to leave the wheel to do anything at all, to help the other with any task that needs two people, or just even to have a bite to eat. ‘Nigel' is what we call our auto-pilot. Don’t ask us why. Perhaps because the mascot on our boat is a small fluffy teddy dog, which our children bought on a British Airways flight at least 25 years ago. Nigel is indispensable.

So when the electrician assured us the first time that he had solved the problem, we just went along with it. In hindsight one should always go out for a sail and check. But  as it happens we didn’t…

We were all prepared to leave yesterday around midnight to catch the right tide in the North Channel at midday. We had a light dinner early, went to sleep for three hours before our departure. It started to rain and the prospect of sailing through the night in the pouring rain was not a very nice one. By 11:00pm the wind dropped and the rain stopped. It was time to get up and dress warmly for the short night ahead. The days are so long now that it starts to get light at around 4-5:00am. All full of anticipation we left the marina and set the sails still in the harbour. I could see Bailey light flashing every 15 seconds at the northern end of Dublin bay.

And then, the moment of truth came when we set our auto-pilot… as before, there was no rudder response!

All that was left for us to do was to turn back to our berth in the marina and do everything in reverse. We were terribly disappointed and sad. Now if we decided to get to the RCC Western Isles meet, we will need to go the whole way in one go, another 200M to Oban.

We have waited the whole day for the technician to come… We took everything out of our cockpit locker where the RAM for the auto-pilot is located. We hoped that it might be a simple disconnected wire or a blown fuse… that would be the best outcome. We did find a disconnected wire and reconnected it with our head down in the locker and the feet in the air to no avail. We can’t find where the fuse might be and we hope that the electrician will!

P.S. (4 June) Nigel is back! …or sort of… The electrician came at around 20:00, took us out to try the auto-pilot in the outer harbour. He also brought the wind indicator which he ordered for us and was supposed to send it to Oban. After all sorts of tests, he concluded that the rudder response unit was faulty. He disconnected it and reprogrammed our auto-pilot just to hold its course. That now seems to work. It is not a big deal for us, because all we really need is to ‘someone, e.g. Nigel’ to hold the course.

Unfortunately the weather has become very windy, too windy for us to leave tonight. It is NE F5-6 (7), unfortunately from our direction of travel for the first 12 hours. We might (or might not) be able to leave tomorrow night, when the wind eases a bit.