Sailing Saoirse - our BRAND NEW propeller DOESN'T WORK!

The bush in our brand new prop stripped - with only 18 hours on it! When will this stop?! It feels like everything that can go wrong, is going wrong these days. A few days before leaving Langebaan to move to Saldanha Bay we were testing our engines, Chris picked up that the engine on the starboard side was loosing power as we pushed it to 2000rpm, it could have been 1 of three things: 1. A plastic bag or something else was wrapped around the prop 2. There was something wrong with the engines gear box 3. The bushes in the prop were slipping. 🤦🏼‍♀️😖 After checking for a plastic bag and ruling that out, Colben scratched a line across the cone and the propeller, Chris pushed the revs up again, Colben got back into the water to see if the lines had moved, they had. This meant that the bushes inside the props were slipping when the revs were pushed up too high. Definitely a better outcome than had it been a gearbox issue. We got brand-new props when we bought Saoirse. She initially had feathering props on and we got a set of fix props in the sale but we decided to go for the solid props instead and keep the feathering props as back up. We’ve done about 18 hours on the engines and in this time it seems it has worn the bush down inside the prop. We have been told that sometimes the props just come that way, highly unusual but it seems the universe felt we needed to be tested again. Because the props we bought over five years ago by the yachts previous owner, we didn’t have any guarantee or warranty on them to go back on. Chris Boock took that propeller back to Cape Town to have one of his guys look at what was wrong with it. We were happy to find out that they confirmed the bush theory, this was a less costly fix if compared to having to buy a new prop of comparable quality or have it be a gearbox issue. An engineering firm in Muizenberg replaced the bush and we were able to put the propeller back on. We then started sea trials! After getting the prop back we went out to sea for the first time! We were super excited to finally take Saoirse out! We had Chris and Tony Boock with us for Saoirse’s first trip out of the lagoon into the open ocean. We had a challenging 3m+ swell coming through when Chris decided we needed to do a man-over-board drill, it was quite successful for our first attempt at this on Saoirse and it was awesome knowing that Saoirse had seen open ocean for the first time in 12 years after he big mishap back in 2008. With the bumpy trip, poor Cleo did not fair well at all. She’s become accustomed to sailing in the lagoon at this stage but the ocean is quite different. She spent a good few hours laying as flat as possible across the saloon seat or snuggled in Denver’s arms dry retching🤮 but happily, as always, as soon as we got into calm waters again, she quickly felt herself again. PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/sailingsaoirse We hope you enjoy our video and don’t forget to subscribe to see where the wind eventually takes us. Thank you for watching! Follow our adventures through our Instagram accounts Sailing Saoirse : https://instagram.com/sailing_saoirse... Teagan: https://instagram.com/teagszastron?ig... Colben: https://instagram.com/colbenholmes?ig...