We arrived in St George Harbour at 1840 local (Bermuda is on daylight saving) this afternoon after a 6 day 6 hour passage. It's great to be here. We're now all cleared in and looking forward to exploring.
Talk of nadirs and "bad karma" appear to be haunting us. On arrival outside the harbour we were instructed to wait until a ship entered the harbour. We motored into the wind at low revs for about 20 minutes holding station. When given clearance to follow him in we increased revs and within a few minutes the engine alarm went off. We shut down the engine and investigated but the cause wasn't obvious.
sv Aura towing us towards Town Cut
Happily a German yacht Aura was by then only 20 minutes away and Port Control asked them if they were willing to give us a tow. They were, and did an excellent job at it too. The harbour entrance "Town Cut" is one of those iconic places in the yachting world. The Town Cut is scenic but very narrow. We were sad to have to be towed through it but very happy to get in! We met the Aura crew ashore while clearing in and hope to buy them lunch in a day or two.
The alarm which went off was for raw water outlet temperature which is measured at the water/exhaust mixer. I suspect the sender/sensor has failed since we had good raw water flow and the fresh water temperature gauge (which measures at the thermostat housing) showed normal temperature. I certainly wasn't going to rely on that assessment to get through the narrow cut which of course was directly into wind.
While talking to the Aura and also Vulcan Spirit crews we learned that they saw 72 knots and 50 knots on their instruments during yesterday's squall. We were somewhere between them so perhaps my wind estimate was on the low side. I don't have much experience of estimating winds of over 45 knots (thankfully)!
I'll post a passage summary in the next day or two.
All's well here. Trust all's well where you are.
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