The Steering Committee

A Joint Post by Andy and Karen

(Karen) Hello friends! After a summer of hurricane-avoiding land-lubbing, Andy and I are preparing to return to the pirate life. Gratitude has been docked in Charleston for a few months now, and we’ve been busy fixing things. Like you do. We had our jib (foresail) taken down and repaired, got the barnacles cleaned off the hull, Andy repaired our ice maker, and did a lot of general maintenance, and he even went to a class in New Jersey for marine diesel engine owners so that he could improve his mechanical capabilities for our engines.

{Andy – this class was fantastic! The instructor, Jordan, would explain, in some detail, how a particular system worked, (e.g. the exhaust or the cooling system). Then he would pass around the key parts involved so you could touch/interact with them. Then he would demonstrate how to remove/service/troubleshoot/replace these parts, and finally you would go to your model engine to perform these actions under his auspices. This was exactly what I needed, and my confidence/competence grew like the Grinch’s heart at Christmas!}

(Karen) Perhaps the most important item on our repair list was our chart plotter – the navigational system that helps us pilot the boat. It’s a complicated interaction of instruments like the depth finder, wind indicator, autopilot, radar, front camera, and GPS receiver, all tied together by a Raymarine touchscreen display. Last summer our touchscreen started getting wonky – really wonky. It would, with no input from us, start zooming the display way in or way out, jumping around erratically, and generally making it impossible for us to see the location of our boat or chart our course through the water. We eventually figured out a temporary workaround using the manual control panel, but this summer we sent the unit back to Raymarine for repair. They couldn’t fix it, so we worked out a deal for a new and upgraded one.

Andy installed the new one a few weeks ago, but we could only test certain elements of the system at dock. To know if the system was truly reliable for our next long passage, we knew we’d need a trial run (called a “shakedown cruise” in the boating community). So we planned a trip from Charleston to Hilton Head, S.C. We budgeted two days of sailing, stopping overnight at Monkey (Morgan) Island, and just the right amount of cruising to help us see any problems that might still exist with the chart plotter. We booked a dock in Hilton Head, then invited our son Clint and his fiancée Sierra to join us for a few days at the beach.

As it turned out, our shakedown cruise revealed a very different problem than we anticipated!

We departed our dock in Charleston on Sunday, October 10 and spent our first night anchored off of Monkey Island. At the end of the second day of our journey, we motored through the channel markers and into the Harbor Town Yacht Basin in Hilton Head. Andy was at the helm, guiding Gratitude past the other docked vessels, maneuvering her into a slow 180-degree turn that would enable us to dock her to port. As he was turning the wheel, he felt resistance, then… 

{Andy} Something felt decidedly wrong. The wheel caught hard, and then it just went limp. Fortunately we were going slowly at this point. With boats like this, you usually dock using only the two engines. You lock the wheel off and use the thrust on either side of the boat to maneuver her gently into a tight space. When we first started, this was a very unnerving practice, but over time it has become second nature. In this instance, training took over, and I was able to dock the boat smoothly.

When we finally had a few quiet moments to start investigating that anomaly with the wheel, what we found was chilling.

The steering wheel on Gratitude is linked, through an intricate system of chains, cables, gears, and pulleys, to the rudder under the boat. Most of this system is well hidden from view, behind walls and bulkheads, and (it turns out) behind our very heavy refrigerator/freezer. Removing a wall panel in our bedroom gave us our first clue: a thick steel cable with shredded ends lying limply on the floor of a service closet. Uh-oh! Shredded cables are NEVER something you want to encounter. The cable was connected to a chain, but we could not find the other piece of broken cable. 

After much effort (and time, and cursing, and gnashing of teeth, and removal of more panels), we finally traced the path that our steering cables take from the wheel to the rudder. After tracing the cable’s path, Andy determined that the other half of the broken cable was stuck in one of the sheaths under the deck. He and Clint disconnected the other end and, with some effort, pulled it toward them, and finally the shredded end emerged from the sheath.

But we were not out of the woods yet. When we called the marine repair companies in Hilton Head, they were all booked out 90 days solid. That was a non-starter.

{Andy} Thankfully, there is an amazing product out there call Dyneema. It’s a rope that is 8X stronger than steel at the same diameter and as light as a feather. I suspect it is woven by the elves, and we were able to get our hands on enough of it to rig it where the steel cable had been. Big (big) kudos to Karen who got it rove through the sheath, despite my skepticism and negativity. Clint and I worked to get it secured properly, and voila! We had a temporary solution. Karen and I sailed back to Charleston and a few days later, the team at Charleston Yachting was able to permanently repair our Edson steering system so that it was as good as new! (They did pay us the supreme compliment that they had never heard of anyone rigging something themselves the way we did that actually worked, so that kinda made us feel like MacGyver-ninjas).

Here’s a pictorial guide through our problem-solving journey. It took us about a day and a half to trace the path of the entire steering system, so what you see below is the summary.

As annoying and inconvenient as this situation was, we were both very grateful that it happened on a short hop and not during our long passage back down to South Florida. A broken steering cable could have been very dangerous if it had happened offshore. It’s nice to feel confident in our steering system now that we’re actively taking steps to get the boat back to the islands. More on that in our next post!