The first week was quite tough. The wind was either very strong or very light. Overall the progress was not as we had hoped. On the eighth day at sea we started the generator as we do every day. This is routinely done by the engineer of the day, which keeps rotating every day.

When I got up, I tried to start the watermaker to refill our water tanks. As running out of water is a major concern we also run the watermaker every day to have full tanks at all times. When I tried to start the watermaker, the pressure stabilised initially, before it started to drop significantly and the watermaker stopped. Upon checking the supply voltage, I noted that the charger did not seem to run.

Generator issue

The further investigation showed the generator had shut itself down. The error code suggested that the fresh water cooling was not working as expected. Hence the generator stopped itself to prevent damaging itself. We checked the raw water intake, which looked fine, so the problem was suspected to be the pump in the generator.

While removing the generator panels to gain access to the pump, I already noticed a lot of debris, which I did not remember seeing the last time I opened the generator. Upon removing the final panel, I saw the belt connecting the engine with the pumps was too loose. One of the wheels it was running on had broken off its shaft and the debris I had seen was dust from it scraping over the shaft.

It looked quite bad and we were initially unsure how to repair it. The maintenance team was back in England and would not be available for another few hours due to the time of day and the time difference. So we started to take the generator apart to gain access to the broken part. When we removed the pump assembly I thought that it looked familiar. I went back to our spare parts stock and found the replacement pump I had put there in Portsmouth prior to race start.

Everything working again

From that time onwards it was relatively straight forward. We put the new pump back and started to reassemble the generator. After spending more than half of the morning watch in the engine room the generator was working fine again and I could finally start the watermaker. It was not how I had imagined that watch when getting up. But at least there was a happy end.

This shows how important it is to carry some spares. I am happy I went through everything before race start so I have an idea of what we carry. And there is a lot of experience in what spares we carry. I don’t think they had the very same issue before. Nevertheless, it was exactly the right spare we carried.

Given the temperatures outside, some might have liked to spend some time in the warmth of the engine room. I certainly warmed up and sweated a lot. But it could have been in warmer regions with even more sweating.