EXPECT THE UNEX PECTED

It was neither the time nor the place to get

TEXT BY CECILE GAUERT

Captain Billy Lockhart began his yachting career two decades ago, after working as a dive instructor and on cruise ships. He has plenty of experience. When he tells the story of how the 50-metre Heesen known as Project Aura got disabled in the middle of the Atlantic on her way home to Fort Lauderdale, he uses no hyperbole. There is no need.

The yacht was somewhere over the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, in deep water and 1,200 nautical miles from land. There was a hurricane in the offing, not too close but already causing five-metre swells. Lockhart was on watch with the chief stew at three in the morning when the port engine stopped abruptly, all alarms blaring. He calmly pulled the throttles back and asked the stew to raise the engineer. Down below, in the belly of what Lockhart admiringly calls "the beast", all appeared normal.

A displacement yacht with a steel hull and a 2.75-metre draught is solid and capable, but bobbing in the middle of the Atlantic with only one engine, and the prospect of worsening weather, is no fun. After a first assessment, Lockhart decided to re-engage the starboard engine to activate the stabilisers. Better for the nine people on board, and to preserve the interior.

But what had gone wrong? He asked his crewmates to check if the portside propeller was turning. It wasn’t, and soon they knew why. Part of a line, roughly 18 centimetres in diameter, was trailing behind them. They secured the loose end, but it was all they could do in the dark and in those waves. When morning came, the sea was still rough.

“Clearly, no one was getting into the water, so we rigged up an endoscope to a deck brush pole and stopped just long enough to throw the endoscope in and take video and pictures of the underside of the boat.” It was a horror show. “Fifty feet of a nylon ship hawser was tied in a giant bow around the strut and the prop, twisted about six times, and wrapped around the port rudder.”

Lockhart decided to wait a few hours for better weather. But even as it improved, he knew no one was coming for them in the middle of the Atlantic. “You're not calling Sea Tow twelve hundred miles from shore,” he says with a laugh. He knew then he would have to go in, even without his diving gear, which was waiting in Fort Lauderdale. From a hose, a fender inflating pump, and some duct tape, the crew rigged up a breathing apparatus so he could go down and try to cut the line loose. The chef also went in as a spotter. A stew worked the radio to relay information while Lockhart attacked the line with a bread knife, breathing through the hose clenched between his teeth. He eventually realised it was hopeless. There was no cutting through the thick nylon line.

“Even if we had been anchored in an idyllic cove in the Bahamas, with unlimited divers and dive gear, we would probably still have spent an entire day trying to cut that thing off, and possibly still not succeeded,” says Lockhart, who reluctantly gave up on the plan.

So now what? The engineer had contacted friends, and a captain told them he had resolved a similar problem by reversing the engines. Initially, Lockhart was dubious: “The way that thing is tied around there, I’m thinking the last six wraps are melted to glass!”

But what other choice did they have? After tying weights to the rope's loose ends to keep them clear, and running a line up to the capstans on deck, the engineer fired up the engine in reverse while Lockhart, back down in the water, kept his eye on the process. And the line gave. A little bit. And a little more. The last six turns were so tight that the capstan alarms went off. But ninety minutes later, they were free.

“We tidied up our mess, and on we went,” Lockhart says. The crew discarded the offending line upon arrival in Fort Lauderdale, just one day behind schedule.

Looking back on what transpired, the captain says: “It was an enormous team effort, from the delivery engineer pitching me the idea of what finally freed us, to the second stew, now an unofficial radio officer, to the bosun working the capstans on the deck, and to my chef and part-time rescue swimmer.”

There is always the chance of encountering a problem at sea. And whatever it is, you need to be ready for it. “It’s a difficult concept, to embrace the unforeseen,” says Lockhart. “But that's something my father taught me – there's only one way to handle change, and that’s to embrace it.”