Thursday 07 Jul 2011

Thursday 07 Jul 2011
0600 PDT Position:: 31 58 N, 122 07 W

After a not so great start, we started making good progress now sailing on the rhumb line to Hawai’i. The rest of the fleet continued sailing North, to hit the trade winds sooner or on a hotter angle to the finish. We're sailing at 5.5-7.3 kts while trying to stay close to the rhumb line.

We got increasingly worried about the water maker not working since we don’t think we’d have enough water in our tanks to complete the race. The water maker was getting air in the system which caused it to fail. Curt had been working on it since before the race but it was still unable to produce fresh water. Although I’ve never seen a water maker before, I do like diagnosing mechanical things and offered to help during my watch break. Curt walked me through the basic components and describe how they worked. He then showed me the symptom (air in the intake hoses) and described what he had done. We then decided to locate the source of the air leak by removing components one at a time starting from the intake line to the compressor and moving upstream to the thru-hull valve. The source of the air leak turned out to be from a faulty valve in front of the pre-filter. The faulty valve was for purging the system which we wouldn’t need for the trip. We bypassed the pre-filter and the faulty valve and had to cannibalize some fittings to make the plumbing work. It seemed to do the trick because the water maker produced fresh water for several hours and filled our tanks!

Randy is taking great care of us with the food. He made a meal of rice and beans and it tasted great! Unfortunately, the diesel generator is still not working and we have to run the diesel engine for several hours each day to keep the batteries sufficiently charged.

Randy, Graham, and I had the 7:00-10:00 PM watch and sailed 5.5-7.5 knots on a heading of between 240-270 degrees.