Lucky us!

“You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

To continue our story from the previous post, we are anchored in Tongue Bay having had a good sail down from Butterfly Bay. Lunch is finished and I am enjoying my cup of tea. Suddenly we hear what sounded like a rifle shot. At first, I thought someone had rammed the boat in a tinny. I raced up on deck asking Warren what had happened. He said "I don't know but the rig is slack." He went and checked the forestay and discovered this.

The forestay turnbuckle had exploded! For the non sailers reading this, the forestay is one of 3 main wires needed to keep the mast standing upright. We quickly stabilised the rig with the spinnaker halyard, lowered the boom to take the weight off the mast and took down the genoa and used the jib halyard to further stabilise the rig. Luckily there was only about 5 knots of breeze in the anchorage. With no phone or internet coverage, we decided to head off early back to Airlie in hopefully light winds and get in contact with Seawind and Tempo Spars.

Roland from Tempo advised that there had been a recall of these turnbuckles by Ronstan and over 20 Seawinds had had them replaced. Somehow we had been missed off the list! 

Broken turnbuckle

As luck would have it, Spot, the Ronstan man who had replaced them all, was in Airlie Beach for Race Week. He came to the boat as soon as we got to the public pontoon, confirmed this was the issue and arranged to get a new turnbuckle from a local rigger which he installed. All fixed within a couple of hours of arriving. A good outcome as we had thought it might take days to fix.

Spot reassembling the furler

So there was some good luck to fix the bad luck. Of course the worse luck would have been if the fitting had given way when we were sailing which might have led to losing the whole rig. Even worse if this had happened half way to PNG! Print this post