Day 7: Torm Timothy to the rescue
Sunday, 4th of July 2021 - 5:30 PM
37°58'94''N - 49°47'59''W
I woke up this morning feeling worried about our families and friends.
It has now been over 48 hours since we lost our satellite communications, and I have no idea if anyone on land has been able to catch our AIS signal on Marine Traffic or Vessel Finder to make sure we are still making progress across the ocean. What if no one sees that we are still moving forward and what if people are worried?
But I cannot think about it. They are safe on land, we are safe offshore. Eventually, we'll get the opportunity to reassure everyone. We need to continue focusing on the passage.
This morning, Ryan dug out his old Garmin InReach. The inReach is another type of satellite tracker that he bought before he flew to Greenland to ski in the wild, back in 2015. We brought it on board "just in case", and Ryan charged it up to see if we couldn’t use it as a backup.
But without a data plan to use it, the inReach is useless. As he turned it on for the first time in years, Ryan admitted to that before we left Bonaire, he came really close to re-activating a data plan. Eventually, he elected against it because… how in the World would the Iridium fail?!
But our Iridium Go DID fail. And although we do not technically “need” it, it is very, very nice to have contact with shore and easy access to a weather forecast.
Today, the sun is shining, the wind is blowing nicely in our sails, pushing us at 6 to 7 knots due East, and we are trying to not let the loss of our satcoms impact the atmosphere onboard.
For a while, we asked ourselves if we shouldn’t slow the boat down and try to “find” our buddy boat, Zanzibar, in the middle of the ocean. We knew Zanzibar to be within 50 nautical miles behind us. All we'd need to do would be to slow down and position Polar Seal so that Zanzibar would catch up to us and try hailing them on the VHF.
With their SSB radio and their own Garmin InReach, we could ask Zanzibar to contact Willem, our shore support, to let him know that we were OK, that we had lost our Iridium Go, and ask him to reactivate our Garmin InReach.
But our chances of actually finding Zanzibar at this point were about 50/50, and with strong winds expected to land in our area in the next two days, the safest course of action for us was to continue our fast sail Eastwards.
So we came up with another plan and decided that we were going to monitor our AIS closely all day until we'd find a ship that we could hail over VHF and ask for assistance.
A couple of hours later, an AIS target popped up for 5 seconds on the chart plotter, 35 nautical miles away from us. It looked like they were going in the opposite direction and a lot faster than us, but we gave it a go.
“All ships, all ships, all ships, this is sailing vessel Polar Seal, Polar Seal on channel 16. If anyone reads us, could you please answer this message, over”
A minute later, we heard a crackling:
“Polar Seal, Polar Seal, this is motor tanker Torm Timothy, Torm Timothy, we hear you loud and clear”
We switched to channel 06, and Ryan lost no time to ask:
“Torm Timothy, this is sailing vessel Polar Seal, we have lost our satellite communications and need assistance to get in touch with our shore support. Can we ask you to call a phone number and transmit a message, over.”
“Affirmative Polar Seal, send over the phone number and message, and we will give your shore support a call”
We couldn’t believe our luck. Ryan quickly sent over Willem’s phone number as well as the details he would need to re-activate our InReach, and we waited, breathless, our jaws dropped to the floor, for them to come back to us.
5 minutes later, we heard:
“Polar Seal, this is Torm Timothy, I talked to Willem, informed him of the situation, and gave him the details for your inReach. He says he needs the login to your account to activate the unit”
"Fuck."
The last time we used the InReach was in 2018, and I am pretty sure that Garmin had deleted my account since then.
“Torm Timothy, this is Polar Seal, we do not have the account login, please tell Willem to contact Garmin’s customer service, they should be able to help”
By this time, Torm Timothy has long passed our closest point of approach, and we started to lose them.
“Polar Seal…crrrr… contact….. ….. will call …crrr… do…. customer service...crrrrrrrrrrrr”
“Torm Timothy, this is Polar Seal, you are getting out of range and we are losing you. Our shore support should have the information needed and we’ll monitor our unit. Thank you very much for your help, Polar Seal back on channel 16, 16.”
And just like that, we were left with the hope that Willem would figure out a way to re-activate a data plan for our InReach, as well as a huge sense of relief, knowing that someone on land knew we were OK and could inform our families.
With that, we continued our route Eastwards and started to look for signs of the cold front we were anticipating to land the next day.
