Crossing again

July 19, 2007
Departing for Australia
The old sailing superstitions states that you never want to leave for a crossing on a Friday, bad luck. So we figured maybe we could double our luck by departing for Thursday Island on a Thursday. We shall see. An 11 day crossing to reach Torres Straight and then another 4 days to reach Darwin. Much can happen in that time. The weather reports look like good strong steady winds for the duration so under grey skies and many water drops we are on our way. The best luck of all may be that we inadvertently
found the answer to our engine trouble. Bruce knew all along in his gut that it was a fuel delivery issue, we just couldn't seem to find it. The prospect of how many hours and how much money it was going to take to find the problem in Australia was secretly getting us down. Well happy day and good news. We think the kill switch cable somehow had a kink in it that was not allowing it to fully disengage, thereby not allowing the flow of fuel needed to throttle up as necessary. Hopefully the fix
is true and will hold for good. If that is the case we bought ourselves a little more time for sightseeing along the way and relieved a lot of pressure off the captain. It seemed like such a quick and easy fix until we realized we had been battling this issue for an entire year. All in good time.

If Bruce doesn't have his projects to keep him busy he would go stir crazy I believe, so our girl Ohana Kai is much obliged to keep him going. He spent the morning harnessed up and strapped to the bow amid wind and waves while he did some maintenance repair stitches in the head sail. By night fall we had lost our auto pilot due to a sheered off bold on the arm of it. Thank goodness for dork lights and spare parts on a boat. The prospect of hand steering for the next 9 days was a bit daunting.
Never fear though, our captain can fix anything even if it is in the dark and upside down with 25 knot winds scooting us along.
until next time
your faithful Ohana Kai crew

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