The very thought of it made my eyes pop open as I lay in bed one night several months ago: that the windvane oar would somehow come off its post and float away – or worse yet, sink. Both our self-steering systems, the windvane (“Twitchy”) and the tiller pilot (“Fritz”), use the windvane oar to steer the boat, so while it’s not critical to the boat itself, it’s a pretty essential piece of equipment for improving the comfort factor of life aboard during passages, freeing us from the drudgery and weariness of steering by hand for hundreds or thousands of miles. We had a spare vane but not a spare oar, so we had to be sure that it stayed with us. While at anchor in the Tuamotus we tested the oar to see if it would float. It did, but just barely. And I made sure to check the safety line that tethered the oar to the boat in case it did come off its mount. It was tied to the vane shaft, but to make myself feel better I retied the bowline around one of the struts bracing the vane shaft against the transom.

So how was it that I found myself, a few nights ago, staring in absolute horror and disbelief at the oar as it disappeared behind us into the darkness? I admit, I was likely the initial cause of the unfortunate chain of events that lead to this dismal sight. But first, to forestall any pooh-poohing of the Cape Horn windvane by our boatie readership, I want to be clear that we are very happy with our windvane. It’s not as if the oar was prone to coming off its mount, but this night it kicked up while I was adjusting it (a normal response to too much stress – or an impact with a sunning sunfish), then shortly after that it came completely off its post, perhaps due to the boat’s motion. But even with the oar off its post it should’ve stayed tied to the boat because of its tether. We’ll never know how it slipped its moorings, but we do know we still have the safety tether with intact bowlines on both ends. Somehow the bolt that the tether was tied to came free. But it remains a mystery.

We searched for hours on a calm but very dark sea. I had hit the “man overboard” button on the GPS after the oar came free, and we ran a radial search pattern from that waypoint out to a range of 600 ft. K drove the search lines while I scanned the sea from the side deck with a million candle power Q-beam, which seemed to delight and/or dazzle the night-hunting squids who live in the Tonga Trench. We saw hundreds of their eyes shining red and unblinking in our search beam.

After two hours of searching we had covered all the likely sectors of the compass and were idling near the waypoint when a huge whale surfaced 15 meters from the boat with a blast of whale breath that sounded like a steam plant relief valve. Soon there was a whole pod of them on the surface near the boat and they gently pointed out that it was very late to be lighting up the Tonga Trench and that we didn’t have a prayer of finding our cricket-bat-sized oar when we couldn’t even see a pod of whales a boat length away. K picked up on their message. I was too depressed to pay attention, beyond just hoping they wouldn’t get angry at us and our light and ram our hull (at the time, that seemed to be the way my luck was running). So we agreed with them, and sadly turned off our beam and putted in silent darkness away to the southwest.

Giving up our search for the lost oar, which the manufacturer later told us was a waste of time anyway as the oar didn’t float, meant our options were to: continue on our way, hand-steering for the remaining 900 miles to New Zealand (ugh); return to Tonga to order another oar, which would take an unknown but guaranteed long time to arrive; or build one ourselves. K was confident he could build one. He also likes Napoleon’s philosophy of, “Onward ever, backward never, to rest is not to conquer.” Neither of us really wanted to turn around. We were half-way between Tonga and Minerva Reef, so we opted to continue on to Minerva and take a whack (literally, it turns out) at building an oar with the materials we had onboard.

We had a day and a half of hand-steering through a windy, rainy cold front, each taking 3-hour shifts. The good news is it wasn’t as bad as we (or at least, I) thought it’d be. K queued up his heavy-weather Gatecrasher on the Ipod during his watch and was no worse-natured than usual when it’s cool and damp enough to wear threads. We found that the road from Tonga to Minerva is full of potholes and at least once an hour we’d unexpectedly plant the bow of the boat into these ocean holes, sluicing the deck with sheets of saltwater and waking the offwatch with the alarmingly loud report. But the rain and wind eased as night came on, and early the next morning a squad of crusty, battle-scarred dolphins escorted us into the new day and around the north end of the submerged atoll. There’s only one pass into North Minerva, and it’s deep and wide. We soon had our anchor plopped down into nice sand on the south rim of the lagoon.

There’s an old blacksmith saying, “By hammer and hand all arts do stand,” which is a good thing because hammers and hands are nearly the complete repertoire of our floating machine shop. Oar construction is moving at an Iron Age pace, we spent a day and half beating a stainless plate into submission. Hopefully we’ll finish the new oar tomorrow, and it will steer like a champ. Then we’ll go back to weather standby, waiting for a slot to dash across the traffic of subtropical lows and highs that need to be avoided for a pleasant crossing to New Zealand.