Thirteenth day out – Uh oh

Well we thought we were sitting pretty good until 0600 this morning.

We were cruising along with great speed directly towards our Hawaiian way point, 7-8 knots over ground and the trades truly pushing us along and then one of the worst (not THE worst of course) things happens, our autopilot stops working.
We were about 1200 nautical miles from the coast of Oahu when we got things settled down and figured out the autopilot wasn’t working. It was making a grinding noise and wasn’t moving the wheel. I crawled into the back and after some choice words managed to get the autopilot ram out.

After taking the ram apart I found that one of the delrin cogs inside was completely stripped. We had been sailing pretty hard for the last 24 hours, but I wouldn’t consider it the hardest we had ever sailed Asunto with the autopilot so I would have to assume that the wear was a built up over time as I assume the ram was installed when the boat was commissioned.

In hind sight I should have rebuilt or had a spare ram on board but it had worked so well for us over the years previously and up to this point in this trip I had thought very little about it, in fact I even passed up the opportunity to purchase a used ram for half the price of new on eBay that would have been an exact swap out for our existing ram.

We will now need to hand steer the last 1200 miles to Hawaii and hopefully there will be some wind to keep us moving.

Position update at 1200 local time April 5, 2016:
18 28.300 N
136 50.621 W
174 nautical mile noon to noon run
1185 nautical miles to destination
6.8 Kt. SOG
281 COG