Abort! Abort!

July 21, 2014

Like Mopelia and the Tuamotus, Suwarrow is an atoll, but the pass is about as straightforward as they come, with the exception of not being marked at all.  So, we rely on our charts, the reports of other cruisers, and most importantly, our eyes to find the coral shelves that lie on each side.  We had a bit of a false start though, because we got just about to the pass entrance when we realized our depth sensor wasn’t working.  Tim was standing on the bow while I was at the helm, and he turned around and asked me the depth.  When it is too deep for the depth sounder to get a reading the instrument display blinks.  So, when Tim turned around and asked me the depth, I shook my head indicating that it was too deep to get a reading (which is somewhere around 500 ft).  He yelled back, “I can see the bottom!”  After a split second we both processed the situation.  Abort, Abort!  Tim gave me the, “Oh crap, turn around as fast as you can” signal. 

We turned around, power cycled all of the nav electronics, because sometimes when we transmit on certain frequencies with the SSB it wipes out our wind transducer, so we thought maybe that happened to the depth one.  No, that wasn’t it.  We figured out by slowly approaching that we just weren’t picking up depths greater than about 45 ft.  So, we cautiously proceeded through the pass and made it to anchor.

At anchor, Tim cleaned the depth sensor, but that wasn’t it.  So, we lived with it until we could get a new one.