The passage to St Lucia was 11 days, 2096 nm. By day two we had caught 2 small mahi mahi and had fish and chips for lunch. Peter and Max did an engine service on both motors on day 3 which went smoothly and took about 2 hours per engine.

We settled into the watch, sleep, eat, watch, sleep eat etc routine quite quickly after the last two legs of 3 and 4 days. We all do a 2 hour watch each at night and by day Shaunagh is off as she does lunch and dinner so Peter, Max and I do 3 hour watches. There are one or two funny watches that don't quite fit the pattern, but basically, we all get 6 hours off each between watches. We eat lunch and dinner together and sort our own breakfasts out.

Then…. The morning of the 21st we lost our hydraulic steering! Max was on watch and got us all up to sort out why the rudder was stuck in position and the boat going all over the place. We attached the emergency tiller and for 5 hours Peter fault found, talked to the service guys in Palma and googled factory websites. It turned out that the brushes were worn out - they had been overlooked at the last steering service in June, this year it seems. The Palma guys were great and dropped everything to do group video Whatsapp calls. Finally, Peter managed to clean up the commutator and packed out the particularly worn brush and we had a temporary fix. Poor Max had been hand helming for all this time. Which, by the way, is very heavy going with one rudder on a large catamaran. These boats are impossible at the best of times with even just only one motor. We mirrored one of the monitors to the ipad and set that up in front of him so he had some idea where he was going! We did try to steer using the motors and the throttles but this turned out to be impossible - the boat immediately veered off to starboard at the slightest increase in speed from idle no matter what we did with the throttles. We have happily manoeuvred around anchorages and marinas on throttle only but that is at about 3 knots in calm water. It just wasn't working in even a slight sea at any speed. It may be a conversation we need to have with Lagoon one day…. We did put the underwater camera over the side to check that the rudders were not fouled and moving freely.

Just to add to the stress levels, the starboard bilge pump went off loudly every 10 minutes from the sea getting into the emergency tiller opening where Max was standing.

Shaunagh spent the whole time running messages from Peter in the port engine bay to me on the flybridge helm and to Max on tiller on the back step of the starboard engine bay. Our headsets or phones couldn't cope with the engine bay noise to be any use. She ferried sandwiches to our various positions for lunch as we all missed breakfast. At the end of it all managing to produce a wonderful medley of stuffed aubergine and capsicum for dinner!

We were quite seriously thinking of having to be taken off the boat as the option to hand helm for 6 days was not manageable at all. In fact, it would have been nearer to 11 days given the reduction in speed to 5 knots. Turning back was not an option either as we would have had a head wind and really there is not much help to be had in Cape Verde. Peter advised the insurance company of our position and situation.

After a nervous night with the steering working well, Peter inspected the fix and decided that his instinct was to leave it alone. It was holding and working, the whole area was cool and no sparks. He did however have to re screw the top of the pump down as it was moving back and forth with the steering. We had decided to head to Barbados but upon doing some research on the place decided that the extra 90 nm to St Lucia was worth the risk. We know that island well from our time in the Caribbean before and are confident in being able to get parts and can ship in a spare pump for future back up.

The result of all this was - no WINGit flying happened, it's fairly obvious to say! We may get some winds off St Lucia that we can practice in.

Transferring the fuel from the 4 extra bladders on deck was easy and went smoothly - just used gravity. We set our own local boat time and disabled the auto update on all our phones - it was too confusing for watches. We've been altering it manually every 4 days - St Lucia is about three hours different to Cape Verde.

There is quite a bit of floating weed in the ocean, some biggish mats and others trailing streams of quite a few metres.

Another inspection of the steering fix on day 7 convinced us to leave it alone for the timebeing.

We arrive in Rodney Bay Marina in St Lucia exactly 11 days after leaving Cape Verde - very relieved. A few days there then off down to Marigot Bay Yacht Haven where the boat and Max and Shaunagh stay while se go quickly back to Australia. We had been here several times before - very nice.