Log: May 9, 2003—Skipper Rich Wilson

During the morning watch, we found something that we never want to find: a piece of a cotter pin lying on the deck near the starboard inboard jib track. A cotter pin is a piece of metal shaped like a “U” where the parallel lines are pushed together. It goes through a hole in a pin and keeps that pin from coming out of its turnbuckle or toggle. Where could it be from?

This particular piece of the cotter pin looked like one that had broken off the starboard cap shroud earlier in the voyage. We had replaced that pin some time ago in a dramatic bit of rigging at sea. I wasn't sure that the piece was from that same cotter pin, so I went aloft to inspect everything, taking several replacements pins of the same size. I looked at every fitting we had that had cotter pins in it all the way to the top of the mast. Since the cotter pins have sharp ends, and we have sails made of cloth, each pin was covered with silicone goo that had hardened into a rubbery, but generally opaque, blob. So it was very hard to see through those blobs to see if the entire cotter pin was still there. Several blobs had come a bit loose, so I could pry them back. To the best of what I could see, there were no missing pieces of cotter pins up there. I will cross my fingers and hold my breath until New York.

At 0605 ship time this morning, we crossed the equator back into the Northern Hemisphere—our home waters. We have sailed this year aboard GAII from Sydney through the Tasman Sea to Cairns; thence through the Coral Sea, the Solomon Sea; then the northwest Pacific Ocean to Hong Kong. Then on this voyage, we sailed the South China Sea, the Java Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the South Atlantic Ocean. It feels very good to be in the North Atlantic Ocean. That said, we have only seven knots of wind right now, and a long way to go to get through the doldrums into the northeast trades, where we'll be able to make some speed toward New York. This is a real close race. Sea Witch crossed the Equator much further to the west than we did, and that is much closer to New York. What an amazing ship she was....