The Hatch

Weighing up timeframes

19 March 2008

Well, some parts of the rigging problem are being resolved. We discovered that there were no spare parts available in stock anywhere in the world so have ordered new ones from Germany, which gave the speediest delivery date. Currently the supplier expects to complete the order on the 28 March. This has come forward from their original completion date, and is way sooner than anyone else.

Nevertheless, it must be assumed that by the time these new parts arrive in Hawaii and are fitted, we could be looking at an eight to nine day delay to the race restart. Obviously we are doing everything we can to minimise the length of the delay as this lost time will need to be recovered as quickly as possible. This will mean reducing the stopover times in Santa Cruz and Jamaica, with the aim of being back on schedule by the time the fleet visits New York in early June.

For those of an engineering bent, the Squinty Bridge in Glasgow appears to have suffered a very similar failure in a stainless steel fitting and is currently closed as a result. Two new mast sections are under construction in the UK and will be flown out to Hawaii within ten days for westernaustralia2011.com and Durban 2010 and Beyond. There may be a slight delay getting all the fittings together, but we are doing our best to avoid that.

The spanner in the works is the line that went overside and caught around westernaustralia2011.com’s propeller yesterday, ruining the engine gearbox. We have a spare gearbox one of two race support containers, but there are no containers in Hawaii as it is scheduled as a short pitstop, but we are on the case. This perhaps demonstrates why we keep a lot of spares in our containers. Supply of spares takes much longer than you would expect as people don’t keep much stock on their shelves these days. 

It is quite difficult to get items out to Midway Island, where westernaustralia2011.com is now heading, and this may cause further delays. There is no point in trying to guess how long all this will take. We hope we can get the gearbox to westernaustralia2011.com quickly and installed as soon as possible, so that she and Durban 2010 and Beyond can sail together from Hawaii, but we will have to see whether this can be achieved. We will formulate a plan for these two boats when we have a clearer idea of how their re-rigging is progressing.

In the meantime, westernaustralia2011.com is making her way back towards Midway Island under jury rig. The moral is: Don’t allow lines to flop overside when motoring as Murphy’s Law says they will catch around the propeller and modern man-made fibre lines don’t break easily, so something has to give.