Not long after clearing Mayor Island there was a bang and the autopilot came up on the screen with 'no pilot'. After looking into the back locker I could see the arm that connects the hydraulic ram to the rudder shaft had sheared off at the weld so we were down to hand steering. I was rummaging around the boat trying to find anything I could make a repair with. I managed to find a piece of aluminium approx 80mm wide and 3-4mm thick which i bent up and bolted to the broken bracket which worked for a couple of hours until that sheared itself at the bend I made, back to hand steering. Not long after that the dodger ripped and needed an emergency repair with duct tape, then the dodger frame came apart at a joint (more duct tape for a temp fix), then...as if it could not get any worse we had the genoa halyard chaife through and the genoa drop into the water so we were in rush mode to get that back in. What a bloody drama!! no way to hoise the genoa back up as the halyard dropped back down the mast. Luckily we have a storm jib and a spinnaker halyard so we finally got that hoisted and kept sailing. It was getting later now and darkness was upon us as we were passing White Island. Our only option was to keep on sailing through the night by hand as there was nowhere to stop in the middle of the Bay of Plenty. So we trucked on and did 1.5hr watches through the night which was sooooo hard! no autopilot so we had to keep a constant bearing, staring at that compass all night was so hard, it got to the stage where I was so tired I was going crosseyed and in the end couldn't even read the numbers and was taking 15 second power naps at the wheel to try keep going. I would force myself to open my eyes and try see if we were on the same course. It was also freezing cold, I was wearing pants with foulies over them, thermal shirt with icebreaker, fleece and foulie jacket, neck warmer, beanie, fleece gloves and a fleece blanket wrapped around me and I was frozen! so believe me I was so glad to see the sun start coming up in the morning. As soon as the sun rose the wind dropped and the engine had to go on, it was then we had more troubles, the engine would not rev at all and was blowing heaps of smoke...could the trip get any worse? after farting round in the engine we found it was starved of fuel so pumped the fuel through and it working a bit better we carried on (for a bit), it then decided to die and dad scrambled to try find the problem, he eventually changed the fuel filter and it is working sweet as a nut now. However there was one more problem, the voltage on the engine battery was constantly dropping and was getting down to mid 11V, the alternator was not working and only outputting 8-10V, I wired the engine battery to the house batteries to keep us going for the rest of the day (and thankfully the solar panels were helping keep it topped up). We motored the rest of the day until we got to Taloga Bay in the pitch black, found a spot in 25ft of water and dropped anchor (in a terrible spot), the rollers were coming straight off the south pacific into where we were anchored and the boat rolled around all night. Thankfully we were sooooo tired after last night and went straight to sleep when we hit the sack.
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