Worst Gear Breakdowns

Adrift in the Indian Ocean and stuck in the Panama Canal

- Ellen Massey Leonard

Editor’s note: This is the second part of a multipart series, “The toughest passages of 50,000 miles,” a look at the most difficult aspects of circumnavigators Ellen and Seth Leonard’s various ocean voyages.

In the last installment of this series (“Worst weather challenges,” September/October 2019, Issue 257), I covered the two passages that Seth and I considered our toughest in terms of weather and sea conditions. But challenging gales and storms are not the only ways in which a passage can be trying. Gear failures and breakages can be just as difficult and even threatening.

Like many sailors, we’ve also had troubles with the “Iron Mainsail.” This has mostly been due to the fact that for much of our 50,000 miles, our engines have been old and very used. We were even given an old transmission for free when we put in a 20-year-old, raw-water-cooled Yanmar to replace our 40- year-old, oil-spewing Westerbeke. We knew there was likely a reason it was free, but the transmission did just fine for the first few months. Not until Australia dropped below the horizon behind us on the first leg of our Indian Ocean crossing did we have problems. The clutch was slipping, we were already out of sight of land — and it was dead calm.

For six days we drifted. We didn’t have the parts or the expertise to rebuild the transmission, and once a clutch starts slipping it just gets worse with use. We decided to save any life that was left in it in case we had to motor the last bit into the anchorage in the Cocos Keeling atoll. Slowly, painfully slowly, the west setting current took us toward the wind line 200 miles away. Under the baking sun, the sea was deep blue and mirror still. The enormous brown bodies of Australia’s deadly sea snakes rippled across the surface. An oily swell kept