Day 16 – One Day Out

On May 30th, 2014 Published By B.J.

As of this writing there are about 155 miles left until the anchorage in Nuka Hiva. That is less than our slowest day, and we anticipate settling in the anchorage late in the day tomorrow. Everyone is tired and ready to be there. It wasn’t a bad day but the little things are adding up.

Our decision to motor a bit last night paid off well. We planned to motor all night, but after heading about 40 miles West the wind filled in. When the engine came on we had 10 knots from the East and falling which with the rolling waves guaranteed a night of slow sailing way to the South with lots of rolling and filling and crashing of the sails.

By 1:00 a.m ships time though the wind had filled with 15-18 knots from the Southeast which was perfect and allowed us to cut the engine and sail faster in the same direction than we’d been motoring. This breeze held the rest of the night and most of the morning allowing us to, for once, sail exactly where the weather route suggested with good speed.

By mid day though the wind started to fade. We discussed putting up the spinnaker but realized we only had a few more hours of daylight to carry it so we decided not to. The decision to tough it out was made.

In the mean time a really large fish stole my favorite and most effective lure, and the generator decided to stop producing AC power once again. The little things, as said, add up. Now I get to debug the generator again when we get to paradise instead of sleeping all day like the dead.

About Time III

This is one of the sillier things I’ve learned about the Marquesas the time zone is just bizarre. Weirder by far than American Daylight Savings time (which is viewed as a pretty silly thing by much of the rest of the world, we’ve learned).

Time zones are an hour, right? If a football game starts at 1:00 EST, it’s on at 12:00 Central, 11:00 Mountain, 10:00 Pacific time and so on. It makes the what time is it over there right now pretty easy because all you have to do is figure out how far to move the little hand in your mind in nice easy hours.

Local times are generally expressed relative to UTC, for example EST is UTC Minus 5except during spring ahead. Or is it fall behind?

Time in the Marquesas is in fact UTC Minus 9.5 hours.

Yupit shifts half an hour instead of a whole hour.

Good like trying to convince your PC to set to THAT time zone, from what I can see it doesn’t exist in Windows. I’m guessing most of my other clocks will also be incapable of grasping this as well.

So let us figure this out. When can we call Mom and Dad without waking them up? They are at UTC 5 and we are at UTC 9.5, which is a 4.5 hour difference.

So cocktail hour here is 9:30 in the evening back there. I think I can manage that so long as no one says to me Call me at 2:15 in the afternoon at which case I WILL screw it up.

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Day 15 to the Marquesas – Are We There Yet?

On May 29th, 2014 Published By B.J.

It would be dishonest of me to suggest that this trip is not getting old. In truth with a working autopilot it would be a lot more relaxing, even fun. But hand steering has made it into a lot of work with sore muscles, not quite enough sleep all around and very little time with all four people awake and alert together.

.But we are approaching the end, we are less than 400 miles out from the Marquesas and should be making landfall some time this weekend. On the other hand the winds are dropping and have gone East which has made the sailing morechallenging.

Without the spinnaker up today’s conditions 10-12 knots from almost due East, would be mostly intolerable. We know this because we experienced them last night. Without a lot of wind in the sails and while trying to sail deep the waves have their way with you. This rolls you a lot, and exacerbates the light wind problem because the constant movement off of waves collapses the already limp sails. Even with yesterday’s spinnaker work last night was so slow we still put up our worst day yet 162 miles.

I’ll let you in on a little secret, tonight we are planning to be most un-seamanlike. Rather than flogging the life out of our sails to make five knots off the wind we are probably going to fire up the engine, point the boat more West, and get ourselves set up for a faster day of spinnaker reaching tomorrow. It isn’t our first choice, but tonight we’re not going to put the wear on the sails again either. So after a day of saltier-than-thou spinnaker sailing in light air, we are now putting up with the infernal racket of the engine for a few hours against the hope of better sailing tomorrow.

We’ve come 2,658 miles as of the last hour, all but about 10 of those under sail.

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Day 14 – Wind Shifts and Kites

On May 28th, 2014 Published By B.J.

First of all, apparently yesterday’s post was truncated right before I got to the utterly useless response I got from Furuno and my ensuing rant at their customer service. My apologies, I will repost the restor perhaps and edited with the cool clarity of time version which does not vent my spleen quite so heavily.

Wind Shifts

As the forecast models have predicted the wind has both started to light and turn to the East. Unfortunately this came a little earlier than we expected, or perhaps our boat was a bit slower than expected getting to the spot on our weather routed course! We’ve had to start turning a bit earlier than we wanted to but we are fighting it tooth and nail.

The Spinnaker

One way to fight the wind shift is with our cruising asymmetrical spinnaker. This light nylon sail gives us more options when the wind goes light and behind us and today we broke it out.

I should preface this by stating that Kathy really hates the spinnaker. A lot. The only time she has apparently a documented four letter word in anyone’s hearing and this includes birthing two children was in dealing with the spinnaker.

To be truthful we’ve had our share of mishaps as we’ve been building our skills and Kathy actually bears a couple of scars from them. But we’ve gotten better with it, and even she will grudgingly admit there are times when it is the Right Sail to Use.

On a day like today we still wanted to travel as much West as we could while giving up Southward travel grudgingly. With the wind shifting from Southeast to almost East we have to point Evenstar more South to keep sailing on the same fast sail trim. Or we could go slow.

Orwe could put up the kite, another sailor pet name for the spinnaker.

With its giant sail area of more than twice that of our Genoa it pulls in a lot more air. Made of parachute like nylon instead of canvas like white sail cloth (in our case a high tech cloth called Hydranet), it fills and bellows like a balloon.

The kite does two things for us. First, it gathers more aira lot more airand helps us more more quickly in lighter more favorable conditions. Secondly because it helps us move faster it makes the Apparent wind, what the wind feels like on the boat, move forward. This in turn allows us to sail the boat a little more down wind.

The net effect this morning we were sailing with Genoa and Main, struggling to maintain 6 to 6.5 knots at a course of around 235-240 degrees. With the spinnaker up we’ve been maintaining over eight knots pretty easily and surfing on waves at 10+, while sailing a course closer to 255 degrees or deeper (less South, more West!).

That is a pretty huge impact on our day.

The downside is we don’t want to keep this sail up 24 x 7. Racers do that, but they have a lot more people and they are racing, not sailing their houses. We prefer to keep kite flying to a daytime activity.

Two reasons for this the first being it is easier to keep the sail full when you can see it and the waves around you well. The sail CAN collapse if you sail to deep and blanket it with the main sail, and you have to steer up to refill it which can be rough on gear if you do it to much. But the real reason is that this setup is more tender than the white sails and is much more likely to get messed up.

And when a spinnaker gets messed up, the mess can get big and ugly very fast. You can wrap the spinnaker around the headstay so tight you can’t get it down (done that), suck it into the rig and get it caught in the rigging (that too) or tear it on the bird spikes (yup) or rip off and destroy hardware like the loudhailer speaker (yeahthat was with the bird spike incident), lose the controlling lines, tangle up the dousing sock, etc. etc. So if you are going to DO these things it is better to do them when it is light out.

We try to avoid sending people on deck in the dark on long passages, it is just more dangerous and we see it as a an unnecessary risk if we can avoid it with care and forethought. And the spinnaker is an unruly enough beast in the daylight on a sunny day, we do NOT want to take any chance of getting caught in a surprise squall or having some other problem in the dark.

So tonight before dinner it comes down, and will probably be up again shortly after sunrise tomorrow.

Driving with the Kite

It should also be noted that driving with the spinnaker is also more challenging. Because we are hand steering the boat still everyone will get some spinnaker time. This does not make 50% of the crew happy (I’ll let you guess who is wearing the grumpy faces when it is their turn at the helm).

But even if we weren’t hand steering the boat we WOULD likely had steer with the spinnaker up. It is a tricky sail to keep full and fast and I am in no way convinced the autopilot could handle it. But this nowwell it isn’t really any extra hand steering, is it?

Posted in passages, spinnaker | Comments Off on Day 14 – Wind Shifts and Kites

Day Thirteen – Time Changes and Customer Support

On May 27th, 2014 Published By B.J.

This is going to be a fairly short one. We’ve adjusted the watch schedules to reflect our passage West and I need to sort out a better time to post I’m supposed to be sleeping now!

About Time Redux

Well our Ship’s Time is now completely at odds with reality. When we started this journey the 0600-0900 watch was supposed to be the Sunrise watch with no real night sailing as the sun was rising around 0600. Today it rose somewhat after 0830, ship’s time.

The trouble is we’ve sailed a couple of thousand miles West, crossing a few times zones, and now everything is out of synch. The result is we’ve had to shift our watch schedules forward a total of three hours over the last few days, in order that the first Night Watch actually happens in the dark and the Morning Watch doesn’t.

No changes to ship’s time yet, that would mess up the logs but we’ve moved the watches.

Speaking to Furuno

Well this whole autopilot incident has really, really changed my opinion about Furuno as a company.

Last Friday when the autopilot failed after working with the Mamba drive unit for three hours I sent off a lengthy e-mail to Furuno support.

I detailed everything that happened with the error messages, all the tests we’d done with the new and old autopilot processor and drives to determine there were no problems with the drives. And I also CLEARLY spelled out the urgency of the situation and that we were (at the time) 1,500 NM from land on a passage in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The only thing I didn’t have was the exact model of the Whitlock Mamba drive which I update in an e-mail from them.

This morning I called Furuno, later I got an e-mail back about the submitted incident. They’ve been closed all weekend, and with Memorial Day weekend they weren’t dealing with support calls or e-mails until Tuesday.

The callwas fruitless. I confirmed what I already knew that I’d have to completely reset and reconfigure the autopilot to have any hope of clearing the error code. That didn’t work by the way, Furuno was explaining to me that my drive must be causing the error (it was working fine from what I can tell) and then the sat phone cut out. I didn’t bother to call back.

Even more appalling was the tech support e-mail. With all the detailed description of the problem and the stated urgency of an off shore failure in the middle of a huge ocean passage I got the following response:

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Day Twelve – Happy Birthday Will!

On May 26th, 2014 Published By B.J.

Today, in the middle of the Pacific ocean miles away from friends, family, cake, ice cream and all the rest Will turns 17. Happy Birthday!

We plan to celebrate it more properly when we are someplace the cake batter won’t slop out of the pan before it can set in the oven. In the mean time we’re trying to acknowledge it a little. This morning I took the unprecedented step of making doughboys for breakfast, one of Will’s favorite foods. Frying things in oil isn’t something you usually do in a seaway; it was mild though and I put on protective clothing.

Tonight Danielle has made brownies and frosted them for our little celebration. Will has a few small things to open and a nice gift from his sister, Mom and Dad aren’t exactly with the program yet.

One thing we’ve not adjusted to in this lifestyle shopping ahead, and shopping for some things when you can as opposed to when you need them. As in thinking REALLY ahead. You can’t think about things like Birthdays when you are someplace like the Galapagos where many items are unavailable and those you can find are low quality and/or three times the cost as a mainland store.

Instead when you are in someplace like Panama, months in advance, but with excellent shopping and good prices THEN you need to think Hey, it’s Will’s birthday in three months we should buy something for him now even though he’s given us no indication what he wants or needs! Then and only then will you not have to give your kid some chocolate and cash and say we’ll get the rest to you later.

We do look forward to a more proper birthday celebration when we stop moving.

Progress

We’re now in the home stretch, the last 1,000 miles (less, really 2,131 miles as of our last log entry). We can see a possible time for landfall that is looking more firm – probably the weekend which is more narrow than when we started when it was Early June-ish.

The winds are getting a bit lighter and starting to shift to the East. This is about what we expected though, if you’ve been following along you remember we’ve been holding North in anticipation of this eventual shift.

Safety Update

From a safety and security perspective the worriers in the audience can also be assured of one additional reality. We’ve reached the point now where we have enough fuel to get there even if there is a catastrophic rig failure.

Evenstar carries about 1,300 liters (about 340 gallons) of fuel with a full load. At Cruising RPM we consume around 10 Liters (2.5 Gallons) per hour. So from a full load of fuel that gives a maximum range of a bit over 1,000 miles of straight ahead motoring at a pretty fast cruising speed. That does not account for the fuel used by the generator, but it also doesn’t account for the fact that if I go only a bit slower (say 6.5 knots instead of 8.0) I will also used a LOT less fuel. The generator uses .9 Gallons/hour at full load, we rarely have it at more than half load so fuel consumption is a but less than at, but we’ve still probably used 50 gallons on the generator so far. We also carry an extra 20 gallons in jugs on deck that won’t get us far motoring but it will keep the generator running (and the food cold, water tanks filled, instruments on, etc) for 5 or 6 more days.

Of coursethis is a 3,000 mile trip and we have 1,000 miles or so of motoring range. But we are a sail boat so far in 2,131 miles of sailing we have had the engine on for less than three hours, including getting the anchor up and motoring out of the harbor in the Galapagos. Hopefully this will be the case right up until we pull into Nuka Hiva decent winds keep us sailing and not motoring.

If the wind were to die on a long trip like this we still would not likely motor except in the last couple of days of the trip. We literally have food on board for months, and can make our own water so long as we can charge the batteries. So it the wind stops early in the trip you suck it up, go slow, and wait for breeze. Otherwise you might find yourself at the end of the trip with no windand no fuel to run the generator.

But from a SAFETY perspective, from where we are now we could make it back to land under power. So hopefully a few people will rest more easilynot that we’re about to start motoring.

Sailing is generally faster, more comfortable, quieter and far more pleasant. The engine is an auxiliary power source its really all about the sails.

Posted in kids, passages | 2 Comments

Day 11 – Closing on 2,000 miles

On May 25th, 2014 Published By B.J.

At our last hourly check point 0200 UTC (8:00 p.m. ship’s time) we’d sailed 1,957 nautical miles. At our current pace sometime in the middle of the night tonight we will pass 2,000 miles sailed on this trip.

Two thirds of the way, that’s a nice benchmark. We’ve been putting up daily distances of 180-200 miles so we’re very happy with our progress.

Low Speed Chase

A while back we mentioned that there were a small handful of boats that all left within a week or so of each other from the Galapagos. In order relative to us they are Anthem ( almost 4 days), Elysium (1+ Day), Déese (1+ Day), North Star (two hours) and leaving a few days after us, Cetacea.

We’ve been chasing each other over this open stretch of open in this long term 3,000 mile race at a median speed just below 10 miles per hour.

We passed North Star early on as they only had a 13 mile head start, even though they are closest to matching us in speed we seem to have a small edge. We never saw more than their AIS signal on our plotter.

Déese we passed in the night two days ago without ever seeing, they were 50-60 miles South of us.

Last night we saw the first boat we’ve seen since the might we left when we saw the lights Elysium some 8 miles or so to the North as we caught up to them. We had a lovely chat over short range VHF radio and we were both thrilled to actually be seeing another boat near by. It is reassuring to know there are others within few hundred miles, we all provide a nice safety net for each other.

Autopilot Update

There really isn’t much to update. I’m beginning to think the problem with the Furuno brain/Whitlock drive is the fault of the Furuno processor. It seems to have decided the drive is broken and now reports an error without seeming to actually check with the drive. I suspect it hasstored the error in it’s non-volatile memory so now every time we turn it on it thinks the error is there. I suspect, but have not confirmed, that at this point even if I plugged the LA100 drive in I’d get the Over loaded error. We know the Whitlock drive is working well, we tested it again today making giant S shaped wakes with the Autohelm pilot.

There are steps we can take, maybe, to clear this but it seems that wiping the memory of the autopilot and re-calibrating the unit from scratch. Some of this is problematic, in that the Dockside Setup items sort of expect you to be not moving with the rudder loose. Somewhat problematic when you are 1,000+ miles from the nearest dock.

So the double watch and hand steering continue.

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Fruit Roulette

On May 24th, 2014 Published By B.J.

The Really Cool Organic Shopping Experience

Before leaving the Galapagos we visited a local organic farm to get some fresh produce. After the paltry selections we available in the little tiendas in the towns perhaps we got a little too excited about the fresh produce. We do that.

The farm experience really, really neat. It is a family run operation a half an hour from town on Isabela. We were greeted by one of the family members and a whole passel of friendly exuberant dogs.

We expected to visit a shack near the house and pick out some vegetables and fruits from an assortment of picked produce. Nope, the farmer, who spoke no English, grabbed a machete and some gardening shears and led us into the fields.

He was familiar with provisioning cruisers and what we wanted fruit and veggies that would ripen over time so we had some fresh goods off shore for as long as we could. So he walked around, pointing, asking and telling. Pineapple? Ocho dias. A whack of the machete and the fresh pineapple was ours.

Walking around he cut fresh sugar cane for all of us to chew on while we shopped, and we gathered peppers, tomatoes, papaya, melon, watermelon, hot peppers, a huge bunch of bananas, spices and herbs and so on. Our favorite were the oranges right from the tree. I’ve not been able to get my kids to eat oranges, well hardly ever. Danielle only just started with a good lot we got in Panama, Will had no interest. The fresh oranges off the tree? I think Will ate two on the spot as the farmer hooked them out of the tree, and two or three more before the end of the day on the boat.

The Roulette Part

Now, eleven days later we’re nearing the end of the fresh things.

Most of it has been excellent, but some has been game has been more like Russian Roulette, where you don’t know quite what you are getting. The quality of the produce was generally excellent, but sometimes our storage techniques were lacking. And some things seemed to ripen faster than we expected.

The bananas, the huge stunning amount of bananas, worked out well. We ended up losing only about a dozen of them. We ate tons and we got my sisters banana bread recipe which makes for an excellent watch snack. The entire front of the boat smelled like bananas. We were unable to hang the bunch thought or we might not have lost the dozen or so that we did.

Melons weren’t such a success. The local melon, well wasn’t what we were used to coming from cantaloupe and honeydew backgrounds. We ate one and didn’t love it, the other two went squishy the next day but we were not heartbroken. Just a different flavor that we didn’t appreciate.

Watermelons were decent but ripened fast. The second one was perhaps a little past its prime.

The papayas were similar, the first one turned yellow and was ready right freaking now, it’s mate unfortunately did the same thing before we noticed it was squishy.

Tomatoes have had a high mortality rate due to our bad handling of them, we don’t really have a place to put them to ripen where they will not roll around under foot all the time.

Scallions we ate some and the rest are hanging on.

The basilwell we didn’t get to make the pesto in time.

We have no idea why we even bought the mint other than it smelled so good. Its not like we’ll be making mint juleps under way.

We still have a lot of limes. Again, no cocktail hour off shore

The oranges have been the best, but are now getting challenging. Since everyone loved them so much we bought a lot. They aren’t as sweet as a California navel, but are tangy and tart with a different, excellent flavor. They are also green and juicier than any orange we’ve ever seen, really messy to eat actually. But worth it.

Following instructions on how to store citrus Kathy wrapped them all up individually in foil. Now, some of them are goingpast. So now it is a bit of a toss of the dice, we discovered that an orange that has gone soft on the outside isn’t too good on the inside either. You can sort of almost tell from the foil wrapped outside but you can’t really SEE if you have a delicious treat or a foul squishy mess until you open it up.

Overall we think it was the best we could do on fresh things for a trip like this. The quality was so much better than in a store and you can not argue with the freshness. But we will need to figure out a slightly better way to store some of these things for the next time.

We miss the bananas already, and we are going to miss the oranges some time soon.

Posted in bad smells, Provisioning | 1 Comment

Day 10 to the Marquesa. Still steering.

On May 24th, 2014 Published By B.J.

Autopilot Update

Well, it wasn’t fixed and now we have a whole lot of weird going on.

The Mystery Drive in the old Autopilot system has been identified as a Whitlock Mamba 24V drive, so that is good and thanks to my best friend Andrew for tracking down information for me.

The Furuno 511 Navpilot, the Brain in the new system is convinced that the Mamba is Overloaded and that my circuitry is a mess. The circuit I need to check is two wires. The Overloaded means the clutch circuit is reading more than five Amps of current, the Mamba is rated for three so I don’t see where that is happening.

We plugged the Mamba back in to the old Autohelm 300 and it happily drove the boat in all sort of wild circles as is its wont. The point is the Mamba drive easily engaged the clutch for the old system and turned the wheel.

The new AP bring doesn’t even seem to check with the Mamba drive, it instantly replies that the circuit is overloaded and that we are done here. I’m still looking for more information on this; any Autopilot geniuses out there by all means speak up in the comments, I will get them sent to me.

In the meantime, life goes on.

The Night Watch

Night gathers and now my watch beginsI am the watcher on the walls and the horn that wakes the sleepersI pledge my honor to the night’s watch, for this night and for all the nights to come.

OK, maybe I’m being a little melodramatic. But I’ve been a fan of George R.R. Martin since long before HBO decided to do a T.V. show. But night watch is a lot of work these days.

Yesterday afternoon with the autopilot newly fixed we all sat around in the cockpit, reveling in the idea of a cut back watch schedule and a good night’s sleep in a comfortable bed. Shortly before dinner the autopilot disabused us of these happy, sleepy thoughts and we went back tot he same routine.

Four Red Lines

When hand steering during the day concentration is needed. You do want to stay pretty close to the course, and it is easy to get distracted looking around especially if we are visited by dolphins or birds. Your watch mate is usually awake though and others are around. You’ve got waves that come up and push the boat around to deal with and you need to work to keep the boat straight.

Night is a bit different.

When we left the Galapagos the moon was starting to wane from full, now it is a new moon. In other wordsno moon. And there have been clouds in the evenings too, occluding some of the starlight. Since you can barely see your hand in front of your face there is not much to see but stars, phosphorescence in the water, and the instruments.

When driving though your world collapses down to four red lines.

All of them are on the compass which is lit with a soft red in the evening to preserve your night vision. The lines are the line representing your course, the two lines that are five degrees on either side of it. The last line is the the needle that tells you what the compass is actually reading.

Your job is to keep the needle on the course, or at least as close to the lines on either side of your course as you can. The wind pushes you. More importantly the waves push you.

Unlike the day time you absolutely can not see the waves. There isn’t the light, and even strong moonlight isn’t enough to really tip you off. You must sail by feel.

There are right and wrong ways to ride the ways. Wrong, and you shoot they boat way off course, roll it violently, slow the boat down or all of the above. If you do it right you can keep the boat on course, turn the force of a wave into a surf down the wave to speed you up, and you keep the boat moving fast.

Again, this is by feel, your only guide in the pitch dark are the four lines and what you feel of the motion of the boat as the stern lifts and the bow swings and the waves take hold. Right now the waves are running around 3 meters, or 8-10 feet. Big but not huge. And in the Pacific they tend to be longer waves not steep and choppy so they are a little harder to work with.

Your watch is either three of six hours. You trade off driving with your partner, on a three hour watch you will general drive for an hour, rest for an hour, drive for half and hour, rest for half an hour. You can drive for half the watch if you want to, but 90 minutes makes you a lot more tired than 60 and you need more time to recover.

Light guide us, for the night is dark and full of freighters

Actually that’s not so true. I assume there is shipping out there, we just haven’t seen any of it. The last light we saw in the distance was a week ago, a few days back we saw a brief AIS signal from another boat. Other than that we haven’t laid eyes on another boat the whole time we’ve been out. We should be passing one of our fleet in the next 12-18 hours, maybe we’ll see them.

Keeping WATCH is important, but there isn’t so much to hit out here. When you are driving and all you can see is four red lines you can’t see much outside of the boat when you look up. We run the radar, but we’ve not seem a contact this whole trip. With a new moon and clouds it is so dark that I wouldn’t see an unlit 800 foot tanker until I almost hit it, but fortunately all the boats are lit up. That is what you look for out there the lights.

Watching is a big part of night watch usually, but right now hand steering is really the big part.

Posted in passages | Comments Off on Day 10 to the Marquesa. Still steering.

Reports of Resurrection are a Bit Premature

On May 23rd, 2014 Published By B.J.

The autopilot worked beautifully for about three hours, then right before dinner it coughed up an error message and stopped working.

“Clutch is Overloaded” or some such nonsense. It then refused to engage in any and all calibration and configuration exercises, telling me to Check your wiring.

What I am guessing is there are some calibration differences between the two drives. There may be a bit more play in the hydraulic drive than in this one, since the rotary drive is actually geared directly into the steering system.

We noticed a lot of small tight erratic motions when it was steering and this may have been our downfall.

Cross your fingers for tomorrow morning, and hope we can get this configuration sorted.

+

Posted in broken things, passages | Comments Off on Reports of Resurrection are a Bit Premature

Halfway There…WITH an Autopilot! (Day 9)

On May 23rd, 2014 Published By B.J.

And there was much rejoicing

Today at around 1230 ship’s time (1730 UTC) we passed 1,500 miles traveled. This means we are about half way to the Marquesas! It also means we have now exceeded out longest distance at sea in a single stretch and are extending that figure every day.

Total time to come this far was 7 days, 23 1/2 hourscall it eight days. I am very pleased with our progress so far, if we can keep this pace I will be thrilled.

And for the REALLY Good News

The really good news is that I managed to jury rig a fix for the autopilot, so for the time being we can stop hand steering the boat and get better sleep, catch up on our audio books and have a bit more fun.

The Embarrassing Back Story

OK, this is where I have to come clean about the other autopilot. Yup, l you read it rightthere is another autopilot. A backup that never actually worked.

That it did not work really was inexcusable, but since I was very comfortable and confident in the new installation it got sent to he back burner when I couldn’t find the resources to figure it out. There were so many other systems to deal with and projects to sort out dealing with an old, messed up cantankerous system that might never work anyway kept falling to the back of (but not off of) the work and to do lists when we had a shiny new one that I’d never planned to back up anyway.

So yes, there was another autopilot and I am now duly chastised that I should never have left port without beating the thing into submission and making it work. I do have many excuses why not though, from a lack of proper documentation on the drive unit to the inability to find a solid Raymarine technician that could sort the cranky mess out.

An autopilot system essentially has two parts, the ‘brain’ and the ‘drive’. The brain is the thing that gets course and compass information, rudder position information etc. and figures out how to make the boat go straight. The Drive is that connects to the boat steering system. The drive is essentially brainless and awaits electrical commands from the Brain about what to do with the rudder.

Evenstar came with two autopilots installed. These were older Raymarine units and had a switch to cut back and forth between them. There were two separate brains and two separate drive systems. One of the drive systems proved woefully inadequate and we actually stripped out the drive arms and destroyed them. The other drive system is an inline electrical (non-hydraulic) heavy duty unit of indeterminate make and model with no manual. Given this was all older technology using proprietary Raymarine communication and would not integrate with the new instruments I was installing we decided to replace it all with a modern system.

The original plan was to to remove both Raymarine brains and use the rotary in line drive unit from this old backup with the brain from the new one I installed in 2012. This would get me set up with a single new autopilot system for only the cost of a new Furuno brain a significant cost savings. However, none of the documentation showed how an old (1997) drive this this odd type could work properly with a new snazzy new autopilot, so after I took all the new Furuno gear out I figured it wouldn’t work. By this time I’d already removed one of the original brains (the one connected to the rotary drive) and sold it off on Ebay, I still had the brain from the destroyed linear drive system but it wasn’t programmed for the other drive.

I decided then to leave one of the original old autopilot brains in place with complete wiring and everything it needed to operate as an independent subsystem, then install the complete new system beside it with a switch to all
ow be to cut power over to the backup when I needed it. The only downside was that the wiring was slightly different, and the Linear drive brain would need to be reprogrammed with the different drive information. But the plan was to allow a complete cutover to a fully functional system in the event of a catastrophic failure of the main instruments and autopilot.

Everything worked on the electrical end of the solution I needed to put a switch in so that either autopilot could be turned on but ONLY one system at a time, lest two powerful drives decide to turn the boat in different directions and rip my steering system apart. That all worked, but the problem was the backup, when engaged, drove the boat in circles and I could not figure out how to make it go straight.

The new Furuno system I installed with the brand new powerful and way more than adequate hydraulic drive unit worked like a charm. The old system would turn on but drive in circles, but that is just a little tweaking, right? Except in the event the new, over powered system drops dead on you.

The Fix is In

After ruminating on the problem for a while I went back and took a closer look at the old and new system manuals. The old “electric inline rotary drive” system had four wires (two “motor” and two “clutch”). The old system manual listed numerous drive system options and how to install them, none of which were anything like the installed system.

I turned on the backup system to see what I could do with it. It went so far as to turn on, show it was making it’s limited connection to the boat’s instruments, getting good GPS, compass, course and rudder position data in other words it was ready to go. We turned it onzzzt. Nothing. A closer inspection showed that in the last couple of years of not using it a few wires had corroded and needed reconnection. Not a biggie, I sorted those out then we fired up the backup which promptly tried to drive us in circles.

From looking at the schematics, I discovered the new Furuno brain has the ability to deal with a four wire system, albeit it is supposed to be a “linear hydraulic drive”, not this crazy weird unnamed beast in my boat. But hey, it needs Motor+, Motor-, Clutch+ and Clutch- wires just like the old system, so maybe I can fake it out? So I disconnected the drive from the old system and plugged it into the new one. There were a few corroded connections to fix, positives and negatives to fix (the guy that put both clutch wires in with red wire should be punished), and voila – the new autopilot is now humming along driving us with the old drive unit.

We’re going to scale back the aggressive watch system but still have an extra pair of hands readily available just in case something goes wrong with this jury rigging. But for now things are going to be a little more back to normal. We are looking forward to an end to sore and tired arms!

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