Pico Sailing

A Sailor's Dream

Sailing across the Atlantic

There is the context for this story of adventure

This is a true story of a boat named Iemanja who sailed the Caribbean as a crewed yacht. The yacht was about sixty-five feet along the arc congestion of the lifeboat davits. It was a ketch-rigged boat with a roller reefing on jib, main and mizzen sails and all electric winches. He controlled the helm Car GPS, weather fax, SSB radio, diesel engines and diesel generators operated etc.. The boat was built in the boat in Florida, but right now I do not remember the age of the boat, but it was not very old and in perfect condition. The Iemanja was owned by a French national who has lived in Paris, who knew the aristocracy of France, who were his hosts Charter Elementary. To better accommodate its guests that he had cut the boat in two and extended to ten feet to provide housing for its more spacious cabin French hosts. My daughter was the leader on the boat, as it has been on many other charter boats, so I am familiar with the captain and crew of the boat and then the areas of the Caribbean that he sailed. I received a phone call from my daughter that the boat needed another crew member to act as a doctor and engineer on the boat, and as I was a sailor and an engineer and a Navy medic and Marine Corps, they thought I would be good for their needs additional crew member. This should be a temporary assignment as the boat was crossing the Atlantic Ocean to France. Like any reasonable (and some would have said no) Marine would have an opportunity to cross the ocean, I immediately accepted.

This is where this adventure began. The boat had to leave Charlotte Amalie in the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean on the tenth of May, as she had a charter to finish first. On my birthday, April 25th I got another call from my daughter asking me if I could get to the islands immediately as they had a problem with the boat. While the boat was on the charter of the rudder broken, but enough remained at the helm when they were able to limp back to port. I flew the next day for the U.S. Virgin Islands to find that when I arrived that the vessel was in drydock in Roadtown British Virgin Islands. So my first boat on this trip was not a virgin, start a small engine that delivered me to the British Virgin Islands. After passing through immigration and customs I was picked up by another crew member and presented the site where the boat was dry docked. The first thing I did was to check the damage to the rudder of the boat, the pin broke. The pin is a U-shaped structure, heavy steel that held the rudder in place and functioned as the hinge of the rudder to turn around. When the pin broke the rudder left without any support. The rudder, which weighed about three hundred pounds was built with a foam core and a steel plate embedded in the foam, the rudder was covered with fiberglass. The steel plate was welded directly to the rudder post. Approximately half of the rudder was broken. In discussing the problem with the crew, I discovered that the pin broken once. We were not able to confirm a positive, but the consensus was that the first stud broke it cracked the fiberglass covering allowing water to seep into the heart of the rudder, which weakens it, causing it to break. It is not known if the rudder was first put undue pressure on the bolt and break it or vice versa.

So the only solution was to replace the rudder with a rudder and a completely new all new

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stud constructed. The problem we were in Roadtown in the British Virgin Islands and the rudder was £ 300 in Florida, to manufacturers.