I was charged €80,000 for a tow

ANTON DIMECH: What should have been a standard delivery trip turned into a very expensive detour when the steering fluid ran low

- Anton Dimech

Delivering a Sunseeker Superhawk 43 from Malta to Majorca is one of the joys of being a professional skipper – if that’s what the client wants then I’m only too happy to oblige. Earlier this year, my route took me from Malta to Sicily, then on to Sardinia and across to Majorca. The first part of the journey went smoothly enough, stopping briefly to brim the tanks in Marsala on the north-west coast of Sicily before pressing on towards Carloforte on the island of San Pietro off Sardinia.

The Superhawk was running like a dream, skipping across the sea at 32 knots. But after a couple of hours, the steering veered off to one side and an alarm came up on the autopilot. I went to check the engineroom and discovered that the steering fluid level was low.

I had half a litre of ATF fluid on board so I poured it into the system and carried on. After 45 minutes the alarm went off again, but with no more spare fluid, I resorted to siphoning some out of the trim tabs and used that instead. It wasn’t enough though, and I could now see that the fluid was leaking out of the steering rams.

We were still around 10nm from the southern tip of Sardinia but even at idle, the propellers pushed the outdrives over to one side so we could only go round in circles.