Back in the Saddle Again…Almost!

We’ve been back in Australia for almost a month, and I’ve yet to update you all on…anything. My bad, but we’ve been so busy.

We’re finally getting ready to leave Australia, after almost two and a half years.

We’d only planned to be here a year, then reality intruded. The battery project ran over and we extended our visas. It took longer to replace our hatches than we planned. Then we started approaching this huge block of travel off the boat for college graduations, visiting the U.S., dropping new college students off, etc. etc. Between June 2018 and January 2019 we returned to Australia and the boat twice but never for more than a few weeks at a stretch.

It’s been madness, the last year, with all the travel off the boat. But it’s over now, and the last month has been us, scrambling to get ready to leave. There have been a lot of upgrades (more on that later), a few unanticipated projects, and a lot of work.

The Plan for the Next Several Months

At present, our plan is to leave Sydney Harbour for the last time on Sunday morning, February 17th local time. Our destination will be Picton, New Zealand. The passage should take about eight days, give or take a day.

Our plan is to stay in New Zealand until the end of the cyclone season in the tropics, then strike out in April for French Polynesia. We’ll aim for the Austral islands and clear in there, making our way towards Tahiti in the following months. Danielle will join us from college in late May or early June (exact date TBD) and stay through early August.

We’ll plan to be in French Polynesia until at least November, when weather conditions become favorable to make an attempt to sail to Hawaii.

Crew Changes

With both kids off the boat, Kathy and I contemplated watches with just two people. We can comfortably sail the boat with two of us, so short passages of two or even three days are easy enough to do ourselves. But when you start standing watch with two people, nobody gets a lot of sleep. That means that while you can do longer passages with two – and we have many cruising friends that do – it’s a bit tougher on you. Sailing with four, then three, we’re not used to that type of watch schedule for weeks-long passages.

To solve this, we’re bringing some people along with us. They’ll help stand watch on passages, help us handle the boat, and stay on board do some touring when we get where we’re going.

For the next several months, through Tahiti at least, we’ve added Jennifer B. She’s an American woman who has done some living aboard and is looking for some off shore sailing and to see more of the world. For the upcoming trip from Sydney to New Zealand, my friend Lynne C. from Brisbane will be coming along. She’s done a lot of racing, even a leg on the Clipper Around the World Race, but hasn’t really cruised much on sailboats at all. When we reach New Zealand (and Lynne leaves us), we’ll be joined by Lauren M., an Australian woman who is just finishing up her EMT training in Sydney. Her school schedule made her miss this first leg, but she’ll be with us from New Zealand through French Polynesia while she takes a few months off between university studies and Real Life. Lauren previously sailed for several months on another cruising boat. We were actually in Opua, NZ at the same time as her last ride, but didn’t meet then. The cruising community is quite small.

In the future you’ll hear more about them, and perhaps we’ll do a more detailed introduction in future posts if I can induce them to write a little bit about themselves for the Crew page and get a picture or two.

Boat Updates

Evenstar has had a few updates since the last time we went off shore. Some were well overdue, and some were pushed on us in the last few weeks. Doing all these updates was part of the reason I haven’t been able to keep the blog up to date. We’ve been busy.

Automated Identification System

One big one is the addition of an AIS Transponder, which will show our position, name, course, speed, and other identifying information to other vessels we come across. This is an important safety feature, as we transform from a fuzzy blob on other boat’s radar to a little triangle with “Evenstar” next to it.

Other boats can now raise us on the radio by name, and automatically plot our exact course to determine collision risks. It also means our position is automatically recorded and reported in a lot of places, like Marine Traffic and other ship tracking sites. When we’re in range of coastal stations they will automatically report our position to these sites. A number of ships also will report us automatically via satellite if we come near them as well, but off shore it’s not as reliable of a means of tracking.

I’ll be updating the “Where’s Evenstar?” page with new and better ways to watch us go.

New Satellite Comms – Iridium Go!

We’ve also added new satellite communications via an Iridium Go. This device, with an unlimited data plan, allows us to download weather files more quickly, send unlimited e-mails and texts, send position reports, send off emergency notifications, and make a limited number of voice calls. The data download speeds are still not what anyone in 2019 would call fast, but they aren’t terrible for 1992. And they are considerably higher and easier to use than the SSB radio e-mails and downloads I was using prior to this. Minutes to get new weather data, instead of hours, and the data is more detailed.

We took the pains to install a permanent antenna to ensure that we always have a good signal while the unit is inside the boat. One of our least favorite features of our last sat phone was that you had to sit outside with it. This one is screwed to the wall and works with smart phones and the ship’s PC.

HF/SSB Digital Selective Calling

If you haven’t picked up on it, we added some new antennas to Evenstar. Three new antennas, to be exact – a dedicated GPS receiver required by the AIS, the Iridium Go antenna, and a five foot whip antenna for the SSB to have “DSC” capability. The aft, port corner of the boat is getting to be a busy place.

Our Single Sideband Radio (or “High Frequency” or “Shortwave” as you might have heard it referred to) has been a mainstay of our offshore communication strategy since we started cruising. We’ve used it to talk to other boats on long passages, to get weather reports, to report our own position, and to send and receive e-mails. One thing it did not have fully installed was Digital Selective Calling.

Without getting into gory, radio-geeky details, DSC is the ability for one ship’s radio to send a direct and targeting radio call to another vessel. This capability exists on short range (VHF) radio, and also on long range (HF) radios. But few cruisers use it, or realize the capabilities it adds.

Directly calling another boat without hailing the whole world on an open frequency has a number of advantages, even if you are only trying to invite one specific boat over for drinks and dinner without offending the rest of the anchorage. A regular radio is like a big party line, and everyone can hear you call and eavesdrop in on your conversation. With DSC, you get a more private line since no one hears you call the other boat, and the other boat’s radio makes a special alert to the call and switches you to a channel no one else knows.

But it’s real power is in safety and rescue operations. Commercial ships monitor DSC calling frequencies, and if you ever have to push the big red “Distress” button on your radio, every DSC enabled ship in range will hear your call. This works for VHF, with it’s limited range (20-25 miles), and with HF, which has a range of hundreds, even thousands of miles.

Unfortunately, our radio – the Icom IC-M802 – requires a second antenna to enable DSC. This is probably the most common radio on cruising boats, and most cruisers we’ve met don’t know they need to install the second antenna. And of those that know about it, like us, most never seem to get around to installing it. So not as many people have this tool properly set up on their long range radios. We carried the second antenna and the wiring for years before I finally did it. And I’m happy we did.

We’ll now leave our SSB on “DSC Watch” like the commercial ships when we’re off shore, and will hear any calls for help. And we’ll have one more tool in case something goes seriously sideways. We have an EPIRB if we have to abandon ship, a sat phone for calling to shore, and now we can reach out and touch any commercial ship within hundreds of miles if we have an emergency.

Battery Chargers

Upgrading the battery chargers was a bit of a last minute fiasco, but it had to be done. When I installed the LiFePO4 batteries sixteen months ago, I picked a type of charger I thought would be optimal for our batteries. They were not.

Those chargers were problematic from the first, and added many delays to the initial install. While the battery system integrated nicely, the chargers themselves were heavy, large, and ran REALLY hot. They weren’t designed for boats, and relied on massive heat sinks and cooling fins instead of fans and smart circulation to cool. Even ripping open our bed to get air down there, the chargers would heat up very quickly and de-rate their charging. We were aiming for 160 Amp of charge capability, but after less than an hour they’d only be delivering 130 Amps or less.

Eventually they overheated, and one of the main boards burned out and almost caused an electrical fire two weeks ago.

We yanked them out, and replaced the 160 Amp charger with a pair of 100 Amp Victron Skylla-i chargers. Those were on my radar as a choice when I first installed the system, but I ruled them out in favor of chargers that could talk directly to our battery protection system. In hindsight, an expensive mistake as those first charges are in the trash after a little more than a year anyway. But now we’ve got 200 Amp charging capability, with chargers that are half the weight and size, self-cooling with fans and engineered for a marine environment.

This one one of those things that was not on the “Mother of All Work Lists” we had for our departure preparations. It cropped up in the last two weeks and added a lot of complications to life!

New Dinghy & (almost) New Engine

It was time. The much abused and put-upon AB Lammina we bought in St. Martin in 2013 was becoming more difficult to deal with. She’d been trapped under docks, drifted ashore, jammed against rough steel docks, and endured a lot of wear and tear. The engine was getting older. Though it started reliably, we were concerned that a dinghy that needed a major overhaul and and engine that was nine years old but about seventy in dog years weren’t going to be our most reliable transport going forward to remote places again.

The Long List of Other Things

Since we’ve been in Australia for over two years, that also means we’ve not done any serious offshore sailing in a couple of years as well. Our longest trips were three day sails along the coast between Queensland and the Sydney area. While we were at sea for three days, we were rarely far enough off shore to lose cell signals. So all of our “deep blue water” sailing stuff has to be tested, inspected, maintained, repaired, replaced or upgraded.

Without going into any more excruciating detail than I have already, here’s a quick hit list of some of the things we’ve addressed in the last couple of months of preparation:

• Life raft re-certification. This is a big ticket item. Inspection, testing, replacement of out-of-date flares and stores, and so on.
• Replace EPIRB batteries / inspect EPIRB. Not a Do It Yourself task. Not cheap.
• Replace Personal Location Beacon batteries. Also not DIY. Also not cheap.
• Service all winches
• Recharge old life jackets
• Replace several life jackets
• Replace several halyards
• Replace all tethers
• FINALLY configure backup autopilot drive so we can use it
• Deal with a hydraulic leak in the primary autopilot and replace a worn hose
• Reseal and re-bed several leaky windows
• Deal with a leak in the cabin roof
• Pack up and ship back most of the kid’s stuff (*sniff*)

That’s not everything on the list, even…but it’s a sampler.

The Next Two Days…

…are going to be madness. We’re headed off to Costco to get provisions this morning. Then we’ve got pre-trip cooking, and even more last minute boat preparation. With luck, we get everything done and get out Sunday.

I’ll try to keep you all posted…