Not great news for us. Four hours after I had been in the bow checking for any signs of damage from slamming, we had the big bang. The bulkhead back from the water tight bulkhead, cracked in three places.
The cracks went from the hull through to the inside of the bulkhead and in all but one, through the capping. The bulkhead has also parted from the hull skin join and local areas around the cracks. Also the longitudinals coming off the bulkhead had come away from the hull.
We headed back to a safe anchorage to affect repairs, arriving early that night. During our trip to port I had sent photos to the engineer and spoken to him on the ‘phone and discussed how best to make a repair with the materials we had onboard. We had a great team of blokes rotating to help myself and Neal McDonald.
Starting with removing the damaged secondary bonding (carbon taping to hold bulkheads to hull), then keying-up all areas that needed gluing or laminating. Keying up is sanding the area so the new carbon and resin can stick. We also needed to trim up carbon plates to fit the areas we wanted to support.
The carbon plates would be glued and bolted to either side of the bulkhead where it had cracked through. We had some carbon plate on board, but also needed to cut up the media desk for some extra.
Next was to measure out lengths of carbon cloth needed for each individual area. We needed to be very fast once we started laminating, as we have limited resin and time to do the job and would all be done in one hit.
All the carbon plates had been dry fitted, so next was to laminate and glue.
It all ran surprisingly well, Guo (Guo Chuan – MCM) kept the cameras rolling as well as lots of coffee, which was much-needed as we were all pretty tired.
We finished some time mid morning, all very pleased with our effort, and were very grateful to Anthony Merrington, who had started a big cook up of baked beans and sausages when he woke up.
The job had a bit of time to cure, maybe not text book stuff for sure, but was hard when we left.
Neal and I took the opportunity to get rid of the carbon itch on our skin, and had a good swim and inspection of the foils. I swam over to the Delta Lloyd boys to say hi and a bit of a sticky beak. Phil Harmer and the lads got onto repairing the sails, plenty to do there. And we left later in the afternoon.
Unfortunately, after all the hard work, the frame just broke again above all the repair work. So now we are sailing along, nursing the boat yet again, with storm trysail and storm jib, just trying to get to the finish line.
We are all very disappointed, but have changed our focus on the challenge of just getting the boat there and facing the freezing condition expected. There are a few of us blokes who grew up in the southern latitudes, who do not like the cold. Shore crew report -10... YOU ARE KIDDING.
Tom Braidwood – pitman/trimmer
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