28/11/2019
Here we are, back in Tenerife and back to Flo! After 2 weeks in London spent visiting family, friends, and our favourite haunts, we were more than ready to get back to Flo to see if she missed us. We were both hugely relieved to find her right where we left her, still on her stilts and still plugged into electricity. We both feared that someone or something might have tripped her power connection over the past couple weeks, which could be easily done and would have meant her batteries would be completely shot. The boatyard had also completed the commissioned work, and she looked great. Her hull and propellor were clean as a whistle, and her anti-foul paint job looked even and dry.
We had hired a marine engineer named John Eustace to fly out to Tenerife from the UK to spend a few days aboard Florence checking her rigging and systems to ensure everything was tickety-boo for the crossing. John knows the Discovery model of boats very well, having built them earlier in his career. He was scheduled to arrive the following afternoon, so we spent our first day back onboard doing as many odd jobs as we could before his arrival. We had checked into an Airbnb a short walk from the marina, as staying on the boat while it’s on the hard is not great - you can’t really use the plumbing, and getting up and down the rickety ladder can be a treacherous endeavor. We have a loooooong list of things to get done in the coming days while John is here, but the time away from the boat and from the stress of Atlantic prep has Team Flo feeling rejuvenated and ready to roll our sleeves up.
John arrived the following afternoon with an absolutely massive bag of kit for the boat, stuff we would have trouble sourcing in Tenerife. Ever efficient, he wasted no time getting to work, doing a full out-of-water inspection. Meanwhile, Stephen and I got to work polishing the hull. A professional boatyard really shouldn’t let you do work on your own boat while it’s in their boatyard, as it’s a massive safety violation and therefore legal liability for them, but hey, this is Tenerife. No one gave a shit, so we just got up on the wooden planks and started polishing, going Full Miyagi: Wax on, wax off.
Then came the moment I had been dreading - relaunch day. It was time for our baby to get back in the slings and back into the water. I’d like to say it was less nervey this time around having already survived the process a couple weeks prior, but that would be a lie. This time, instead of 4 boatyard crew assiting, we had only 2. The guy driving the lift looked just shy of his 14th birthday, so that was comforting. Again, I seemed to hold my breath throughout the entire process of the lift driving up behind Flo, securing the straps, lifting her from her stilts, and then driving her into the launch berth, before the lowering process began. It all seemed to be going OK, however. When the time came for Stephen and I to hop onboard, we didn't hesitate. If Flo is going down, we're going down with her! Eventually we could feel Flo regain her buoyancy, and then we were officially afloat again. Once the lines and slings were off, we drove swiftly out of the lift berth and back out into the marina. The marina had thankfully secured us a good spot right by the entrance next to big a catamaran. We parked her stern to, got her tied up, and then heaved a sigh of relief. Florence is back afloat where she belongs.
Next, John did a full systems check of the boat, which revealed everything to be in perfect working order. Meanwhile, Stephen and I got busy cleaning, as Florence had gotten absolutely filthy sitting on the hard for 2 weeks. She seemed to be covered with grease from the lift machine but also by a layer of soot, which John suspected might be exhaust debris from airplanes, as the boatyard lay right under the nearby airport's flight path. Whatever it was, it was thick, dark, and gross. By 6 PM, Florence was looking a lot better, and John had more than earned himself a drink or two at our newly discovered local - this little shithole bar we found by accident when lost the prior evening called the Pink Elephant. It looked like a pit from the outside - a shack lit up by pink fluorescent lights. But inside, the drinks were dirt cheap, the staff were lovely and absolutely hilarious, and they had free and super fast WiFi. What more do you need?
The three of us spent the next two days working HARD - up at 7 AM, on the boat by 8, trying to get as much as possible done before John’s departure. I’ve learned that full work days work on the boat leave you feeling both super satisfied and super thirsty. And by 6 PM each evening as the sun started to set, Stephen and John were absolutely gasping. I had a sneaking suspicion the Pink Elephant would be seeing a lot of our business this week. John has proven himself to be super efficient both on and off the pitch - I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone drink a pint faster. And that includes my husband, who likes to play a little game called "Don't let it touch the sides" on his first pint. It became clear quite early that I had no hope of keeping up and should just let the boys be boys.
Day 3 of John’s visit was time for the test sail. It was the first time Florence had been out on the open water since our arrival in San Miguel 3 weeks prior, and it felt great to have her back out there, with the wind in our ears. Stephen and I were both a bit apprehensive, as we would have to deploy the bloody mainsail that had given us so much trouble all summer in front of John. When John tried the furling motor, the sail just woudn’t budge, as stubborn as we’d ever seen it. John said this was not right at all and that he doubted the sail was at fault and thought it more likely a problem with the furling motor. We would have to dismantle the furling unit it to see what was what once we were back in the marina. Stephen and I both felt slightly vindicated that our mainsail problems had not just been user error and were more likely due to a mechanical problem. But at the same time, we were both hesitant to discover what that problem was, fearing it might entail a costly and lengthy fix. The rest of the test sail went smoothly, with the headsails working well. John also made some adjustments to our downwind rig set up that made using the pole for downwind sailing much more stable and straightforward.
Once back in the marina, John took his tools to the mast and began disassembling the furling unit, which is a fairly clunky hunk of metal attached to the mast. Once off, he took one look inside and told us the whole unit looked completely fried - not just the motor, which was shot to shit, but all the bearings had worn almost completely through. He was shocked we’d been able to get the furling motor turning at all in this condition! The unit would have to be repaired. The furling unit is unfortunately a very specific piece of kit, custom-made by a Swedish company called Selden who only had outposts in the UK and in Sweden. John would have to fly it back to the UK the following day, get it to Selden’s UK outfit ASAP and have them diagnose the fix. If it didn’t require new parts, they could likely do it in-house and turn it around more quickly. If it did, as John suspected, need a new motor, the parts would have to be shipped from Sweden before being fitted, which he estimated would be at least a 3-week process. Shit. This was potentially a huge problem and could derail our planned departure of December 1st, which was only 10 days away. John said if Selden were able to repair the motor in the UK without needing new parts, it could be done within a week, and he could then fly back to Tenerfie the following Monday to help refit the repaired motor, thus delaying our departure by only a few days. While slightly inconvenient for our soon-arriving crew, this wouldn't be the end of the world and should still give us enough time to get to Barbados before Christmas if we had a fast crossing. It would be cutting it close though… We broke the news to our 3 crew members. While they were all disappointed to learn about the setback, they seemed to take in in stride, knowing that with anything boat-related, so much is ultimately out of your control and scheduling is only ever a rough process. Our crew for the crossing consists of my stepdad Brad, who was scheduled to fly into Tenerife from Boston the following day, and our friends Alice and Will, who were currently on the neighbouring island of Gran Canaria and would likely wait to come over until they knew the fate of our furling motor and hence expected departure date (if any). At this point, all we could do was pray that the unit would get back to Selden in time to be repaired and back again with John the following Monday. There were a lot of things that would have to go right in order for this to transpire, but we put all our stock in the power of positive thinking.
In the meantime, we continued our work under the assumption that we would indeed slip the lines on Dec 3rd or 4th to cross the ocean. There is a certain amount of blind optimism required in boating life, as if you played the odds, you may never leave the dock. So we pushed forwards, removing everything from the boat, cleaning her from tip to toe including underneath all the floorboards (yuck), making several trips to the local supermarket to tackle our provisioning, stock-piling bottled water in case our water maker broke, organising and labelling our extensive medical kit, doing an inventory of all safety kit, including lifejackets, flares, fire extinguishers, grab bag, safety harnesses, etc., and emptying out all the storage lockers to take a full inventory of Florence's gear and reorganising by priority in terms of what we would most and least likely need. It was a lot of work. I also spent time taking advantage of the kitchen in our Airbnb to do meal prep without having to sully our own galley. I spent hours making meals that could be frozen in bulk for the crossing, including massive amounts of chilli, bolognese and curry. Prep also included too many trips to the bloody chandlery (AKA swindelery) and the hardware store, trying to think of every piece of kit we might need in every eventually, no matter how unlikely. You never know what might happen in the middle of the world’s second largest ocean. Throughout our toils, we just prayed that all was not in vain and that we would have a working furling motor this time next week.
Brad, our first crew member, arrived a couple days later. Though in the later half of his 60s, Brad could not have been more keen to join the crossing. A lifelong sailor, he brought by far the most experience to our crew. His biggest challenge by far was convincing my mom, who he had married exactly a year prior, to let him go on this crazy journey, leaving her and their dog Nicky alone for a grand total of 4 weeks. I love my mom, but she’s not exactly what we would call a "lone wolf". She needs her Brad. I’m still not sure how he managed to get that permission slip, but get it he did, and he was all smiles (and a ton of gear) when we picked him up at the Tenerife airport. The excitement was unfortunately a bit tempered by the lingering uncertainty over whether we’d ultimately be able to go. Still, we were excited to show Brad around Florence for the first time. He loves boats and was like a kid in a candy shop looking around her for the first time. Not only a lifelong sailor, Brad is also incredibly handy and a wiz at carpentry, and he quickly pointed out a few odd jobs on the boat he could tackle if we showed him to the tools - exactly the type of guy you want on the boat. We learned that afternoon while at lunch that he is also apparently the kind of guy you want around the house: before we'd even seen menus, he’d already fielded several calls from my mom asking how to work various items at home, including the heating, the coffee maker (this one required a FaceTime tutorial), and how to tie her shoes properly. Poor Brad - the guy's just trying to have a beer and a sandwich and instead has to be Mister Fix It on two continents simultaneously.
The following day was Monday, the day our motor got to Selden to be taken apart and diagnosed. I had a pit in my stomach all day, just waiting for John’s call with the verdict. He called in the afternoon with some bad news: according to Selden, the furling unit was completely shot and would need all new parts. To add insult to injury, Selden do not make the unit anymore, so it would not be a plug and play replacement exercise. Instead, they would have to send the motor back to Sweden to be rebuilt from scratch, and it would take at least 6 weeks. Stephen and I were crushed. We saw all our plans and hard work slipping down the proverbial drain. How to break this to Brad? This crossing had been a lifelong dream of his. And how to break it to Will and Alice: they had to be in Antigua by January 1st and had both been eagerly awaiting the crossing. Waiting 6 weeks was not an option for any of them. Even putting our own crushing disappointment aside, letting other people down was to me far worse. This was the lowest I had felt on the trip thus far. I was just overwhelmed with this sinking feeling. Sometimes you don't realise how much you want or need something until it's being taken away from you. That's exactly how I felt at this moment, realising just how much I wanted to tackle this crossing. Wasn't this the ultimate challenge we had been building towards all along? What had it all been for?
John came back to us a couple dark hours later with a potential other solution, albeit a bit of a Hail Mary. There were two other Discovery 55’ yachts made around the same time as ours that were on the market at Berthon in the UK. John proposed he could contact the owners, explain our dilemma, and hope that one of them would kindly allow us to borrow their furling unit for the crossing. To me it seemed like a big ask, approaching some guy who doesn’t know you from Adam and saying, “Hey, buddy! Is it OK if I just take a big chunk out of the mast of the boat you are trying to sell, fly it to Tenerife so I can smash it into my mast, then sail it almost 3,000 nautical miles away across the Atlantic Ocean?” I couldn’t know precisely what the answer would be, but I imagined it would have something to do with where I could stick my own broken furling motor… So here we were, our Atlantic dreams solely at the mercy of another boat owner’s generosity. All we could do was wait for the verdict from John. We were gonna need some drinks. This blind positivity thing was getting ever harder to maintain. We gave Brad the update and then tried to get him sufficiently drunk at the Pink Elephant to ease the likely impending blow.
The following morning, we got a call from John as we organised tools and spares in the faint hope that we would still be crossing. We collectively held our breaths as Stephen answered the phone. John told us he'd spoken to both owners and that the first had said while he’d love to help, his wife would kill him if he did anything to jeopardise the sale of their boat, so he regrettably had to decline. Ouch. BUT John said the other owner had come back shortly after and said to go for it, no hesitation. WHAT??? That owner had sailed his boat around the world and said he knew all too well how things can go wrong at the exact wrong moment and was happy to help. His boat was on the hard anyways, so he had no problem with us borrowing it, and he wished us luck. What a mench!!! This guy is getting a magnum of champagne for Christmas from Team Flo. We were potentially back in business. Now all we had to do was hope that this furling unit fit our boat and would function when attached. Given the unit would be coming from the boat directly before Flo in the Discovery production line, the chances of it being a very similar if not identical model were high. Though we wouldn’t know for sure until John arrived back in Tenerife with the motor in 3 days’ time. We may get to cross this bloody ocean after all! Fingers and toes and arms and legs and everything else crossed...
