Botany Bay Transfers Much Needed Water To Lord Jim

	Botany Bay Transfers Much Needed Water To Lord Jim
	On September 26th we were contacted by Lord Jim at the end of our communication with the Pacific Seafarers Net. We moved over to the Marine SSB band and found out that they had a failure in their fresh water system which resulted in the last 150 gallons of their normal 600 gallon load of fresh water getting dumped into the bilge and the automatic bilge pumps then pumped the fresh water over the side. An unfortunate situation as they were about 1000 miles off the California coast and had about 4 gallons of fresh water remaining. As Botany Bay has a Pur40E reverse osmosis watermaker aboard and our tanks were full we were in a position to help them out. We started a morning and evening radio schedule with them to compare our positions and start coming together. On November 2nd we finally sighted Lord Jim for the first time. It was a reasonably nice day with 15 - 18 knots of wind and a reasonable swell but nothing really nasty. We transferred 55 gallons of fresh water, some fresh fruit, and other items. Then it was off to make the other side of the Pacific high before the weather changed. We also printed out a complete set of weather fax images for them to help them make their way to San Francisco.
		Look carefully under the whisker pole and you can just barely see "Lord Jim" rise above the waves
	A little while later we get our first good view of "Lord Jim" sailing along
		A beautiful picture of "Lord Jim" under sail. This is before we started the water transfer. For the transfer both vessels were motoring slowly down the swells.
	For each transfer we would come up behind Lord Jim and pickup a 300' line trailing behind with a 25 gallon soft tank attached to the end. Rick would pick up the tank on the bow while I held position where I could keep an eye on the curve of the line between Botany Bay and Lord Jim. If the line looked like it would go tight we would jettison the line and try again. Rick setup a hose to the foredeck to fill the tank. Using this method we transferred one full tank of Botany Bay's water to Lord Jim. This was about 55 gallons of water and took 6 passes to move all of the water. We also transferred most the the remaining fresh fruit we had aboard as they had run out a month and a half before.
	The seas are not as flat as they appear in these pictures as you can see from how much Lord Jim is moving around. The hardest part was trying to stay behind Lord Jim on each pass. The swells were large enough that Botany Bay kept trying to surf while Lord Jim would not. Otherwise we might have been able to just run a couple of garden hoses and make the transfer.
	Our last sight of Lord Jim as we head for LA. Our read of the weather fax images suggested that we needed to be 200 miles east within two days or the Pacific high would make it more difficult to get to LA.


	I have some videos of the process of transferring water and of our adventures with Lord Jim and I will hopefully have some of them on this page soon.