Fair Isle to Kirkwall

The long straight line makes this look very straightforward, but if you could Zoom in on the first hour or so, you would see this:

This is what is called a 'bad start'. As I left North Haven in Fair Isle the autohelm actuator suddenly jumped off the tiller - I thought at first that I must have knocked it off, but then I realised that the little pin on the tiller that it engaged with had disappeared. I didn't stop to take a picture, but here is what it looked like after my jury-rigged repair:

There wasn't a lot of wind, but there was an awkward complex wave pattern that made the boat roll heavily and pitch a lot. I was sure that the original pin must have fallen somewhere I could find it, so I spent half an hour in those conditions getting everything off the floor of the cockpit so that I could lift the grating and look under it. It wasn't there. I'm also not sure now whether I could have re-used it if I had found it, but ...

I thought about taking the boat back into North Haven, but decided instead to attempt a repair where I was. I couldn't keep the boat on a course, so let it meander round in circles with the engine at low revs. I had to dig out some potential bolts from a deep repository of spares in the fo'c'sle, but then discovered that the hole had a sharp edge - possibly the remains of a thread (whose failure explained the loss of the pin?) and I had to open it up a bit before I could reuse it. Finding tools and doing this was nasty, in the conditions.

Unpleasant motion can be tiring, and while there is more risk of injury or exhaustion (or perhaps sea-sickness), the motion itself is not intrinsically dangerous. It can be hard to convince your amygdala of this, however ..

The final arrangement worked, but it took me an hour or more to arrive at it. I'll have to refashion it properly while I'm in Kirkwall. The rest of the trip went fairly well.

The early part was less windy than I'd hoped, and the wind moved up to a beam reach part way through. I'd hoped to run down to Kirkwall, or at least to Bay of Holland (on Stronsay) under the headsail. Once the wind moved forward, though, I had to raise the main. Then the wind rose a bit, sometimes to 16-18 knots, which made the sailing a bit more aggressive but also speeded me up a lot. The extra speed put Kirkwall within reach, and the prospect of showers, laundry, and shopping drew me on.

Overall, I did about 60 miles in almost exactly twelve hours, including the messing around off Fair Isle, which is fairly creditable. Much of it was reaching, and then close-reaching, at five and a half to six and a half knots, which translated to more than seven over the ground (with the help of the tide).

I was glad to get here, though.