OMAgerd, a Cyclone!

On Feb 16th, 2019 Published By B.J.

So…about that Sunday departure…

We’re still in Sydney. We’re likely to BE in Sydney for several more days.

Last Friday we headed of to Costco to do a provisioning run for the passage. First, we got up early and dropped both sails. We replaced the jib halyard, and inspected the main halyard but decided we didn’t need the new one yet after all. The jib went smoothly, but the early morning calm may have been shattered by a constant stream of profanity muttered at the main sail as we tried to get it off. But it worked…

Given the early start to the day and the busy plan, I didn’t check the weather until we got back from Costco and got everything loaded up on the boat. Our last GRIB download showed a fairly easy passage, with winds perhaps a little soft and requiring some motoring, and picking up towards the end.

Friday afternoon, I downloaded this:

Yes, that’s us next Friday getting PASTED by a 960 mb low pressure system.

Friends don’t let friends sail off into cyclones. Tropical Cyclone OMA, to be precise.

There are two main weather models we look at for weather routing – the GFS model, produced by NOAA, and the ECMWF or “Euro” model produced from a weather center in Europe. They both have their strengths and weaknesses, but they do often diverge the further in the future you go.

In this case, the GFS model wasn’t showing us getting the low pressure system at all…until it was. The Euro model had been showing lows coming down south to New Zealand, but was far from the GFS a that point. Last Friday they switched, and the Euro started showing TC Oma bumping into the Queensland, Australia area and the GFS showed it hanging around New Caledonia, then sprinting down south to land practically on top of our heads.

Now the models still differ, but they are in agreement on one thing: If we leave Sydney in the next few days, we will get pasted with horrible weather. Where they differ is whether we get clobbered by TC Oma, or by some other fresh hell of a low pressure system that pops up around New Zealand as we approach it.

So we’re laying low and waiting for the models and the weather to settle. As it stands new, leaving next weekend could net us a nice trip over, though with some motoring. But the models are still showing INSANE wave patterns, and we think those won’t settle until the models have had a chance to make more realistic near term predictions on the wind.

We’ll keep you posted…

Posted in Cyclones, passages, Uh-oh, weather | Comments Off on OMAgerd, a Cyclone!

Back in the Saddle Again…Almost!

On Feb 14th, 2019 Published By B.J.

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.

We have this one. It’s really quite cool, and it also puts all our ships data on the local Wifi network.

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.

Iridium GO! 9560 Satellite Terminal with Wi-Fi Hotspot with FREE SIM Cards | eBay
It looks like that, except it has stupid wires hanging off it.

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.

1) Furuno GPS 2) AIS GPS (new) 3) Long Range Wifi 4) SSB DSC 5) Iridium Go 6) EPIRB (not an antenna…)

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…

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

The New Zealand Honeymoon of Necessity

On Sep 24th, 2018 Published By B.J.

The original plan for our 25th anniversary was quite simple; I bought a pair of  tickets to see Book of Mormon at the Lyric Theatre in Sydney and started looking for a nice place to go to dinner. Danielle would tough it out alone on the boat while we spent a romantic evening doing something we’d not done in a long time.

Then we tried to renew our visas.

As it turned out we solved several problems at once and ended up taking a lovely week-long third honeymoon on South Island, New Zealand while Danielle toured colleges in the states.

The Visa Issue

Through lack of clarity in the process and ignorance, the first time we renewed our Australian visas after a year in-country they granted us only six months instead of the year we requested. This was vexing since it was expensive as Australia charges much more for a visa if you apply while in the country and they required yet another set of chest-X-Rays and physical exams. It meant we’d need to apply for a second extension before we left since weather patterns don’t permit a sensible departure from Australia March when our Visas expire in six months which would cost an extra $345 AUD/person which we hoped to avoid by applying for a year to stay from March until June when we were leaving on our four-month road trip.

What we didn’t learn until applying for the second extensions is that the second time you apply for an extension, there is an addition $745 AUD fee applied to the $345 AUD “in country” renewal fee. So the cost of extending the visa for a few months jumped now to over $1,000 AUD per person – exclusive of any required medical exams – for the three of us to stay in the country for another three months.

Or, we could leave the country while our visas lapsed and apply for an “eVisa” on our return which allows for 90 day visits and costs $20 AUD each. We figured that for $3,000 we could have a nice vacation somewhere else instead.

Our first impulse was for the three of us to head to New Zealand’s South Island, as we’d always regreted not making it there on either of our visits to NZ. But we with Danielle being accepted to literally every college she applied to, she needed to make some campus visits since this was a huge decision she had to make with a massive impact on all of our futures. So with much sadness on her part, we booked her to the states and us to NZ.

To make this work though, we had to apply for the eVisa after our regular visas expired on March 26th and be out of the country. Since our anniversary is March 27th, we’d be out of Australia for it so I had to put the show tickets up on Gumtree and sell them.

South Island Itinerary

Our regrets for missing South Island were many. It’s the rougher, wilder part of New Zealand with fewer people and more wildlife. Penguins, albatross, sea lions, and fur seals are all relatively easy to see. Our penchant for touring Lord of the Rings movie sites also was luring us there, as they used many South Island in the filming.

So the general itinerary – which I can’t cover all in this post since I’ve already waxed on too long about visa issues – was as follows:

  • Friday March 23: Arrive in Christchurch, stay at a “Bed & Breakfast”. Leave early in the morning to drive south.
  • Saturday 3/24: Oamaru – Yellow-eyed penguins, maybe blue penguins, and a cool little town.
  • Sunday 3/25 – Wednesday: Dunedin – close to blue penguins, albatros, the Catlins. Pass our actual anniversary not driving between hotels.
  • Wednesday night: Stay at a winery in the Otago valley
  • Thursday Night: Fairlie – on the way from the Otago Valley back to Christchurch
  • Friday & Saturday nights – back to Christchurch.
  • Sunday – Fly back to Sydney.

Hey, That’s Not a B&B!

Landing at Christchurch was an easy flight. Getting the rental car took a little time, but we were going with an off-airport discount agency rather than a big name rental company so this was expected. We secured the car and then were off to find our B&B.

Kathy blames herself and her inexperience with online bookings for what happened. I don’t – the listing was written deceptively. Dishonestly, even. they could have fooled anyone; if they didn’t it wasn’t for lack of trying.

We’d booked what described itself as a “Bed & Breakfast”. It was priced…like other B&B’s in the Christchurch area. The text on the booking site used words like “hotel amenities” and other language about “facilities” and “features”.

As we drove into a residential subdivision we were a little confused. We’d had doubts about the place when I looked at the listing and saw what mostly looked like pictures of a home. When we pulled up in front of the address, it was just that – a house, in a subdivision.

There were no cars in the driveway, but there were kids bikes on the porch and several pairs of shoes. A note was left on the door, telling us the door was open and to come on in, and that our room was down the hallway to our right.

Yup, our “B&B” was a home stay. And not a particularly nice one. There was one bathroom in the house we’d be sharing with the people that lived there. Shower shelves and counters were covered with personal care products; this was clearly the shared family bathroom. The kitchen had an off smell of fried cooking, and there was one living room which was the only common area. So our choices were to stay in our room or invade a family’s space.

If it was dirt cheap we might have tried it. If it was a nice place with a private bathroom off our bedroom, we might have tried it. If the people had been home, and we found them welcoming, open and pleasant, we might have been too embarrassed to say “Oh, hell no” to their faces. But this place was a home stay advertised and priced (!) as a nice B&B, and I wasn’t having any of that.

So, tired after an international flight with no place to stay for the night I started making phone calls. Thank goodness I’d picked up a NZ sim for my phone on the way out of the airport or we’d have been real trouble.

We ended up finding a clean but small hotel in downtown Christchurch for less money than the bogus B&B was trying to fleece us for. The homeowners complained that we were “no-shows” and insisted we owed them for the night; we complained back that their ad was misleading and dishonest and we never would have booked a home stay at any price. But for once their complete illegitimacy worked in our favor – they were a cash-only operation and they did not have our credit card number to charge.

Christchurch was severely damaged years ago in an earthquake. It’s clear the downtown city still hasn’t recovered. It’s trying, but there are still holes where buildings stood, and shattered buildings that need to come down. The day we visited was cool and gray, and it didn’t really help the feel. But we settled in for a nice dinner at the pub on the first floor. We’d been off to an inauspicious start, but after a nice dinner and drink we made a nice recovery.

Coffee and Bookstores

It’s possible I may have mentioned our displeasure with the coffee situation in Australia & New Zealand. If I know you personally or we’re friends on Facebook, you’ve definitely heard me whining about it.

My working theory is that some time in Australia’s penal past, an espresso machine salesman did something awful and got himself Transported to Australia for his sins. Probably selling wretched coffee to the king or something. Once here, he did a bang-up job convincing everyone in Oceania that fussy barista style espresso drinks are the only way to have coffee. We’re Dunkin’ folks, not Starbucks. We prefer plain filter coffee, black. There are few things Kathy and I miss more about the U.S. than being able to linger over a bottomless cup of coffee after a meal.

In Australia and New Zealand that will break you. At $4.50 or more for a tiny, bitter espresso drink, there is no lingering and little enjoyment. Like Starbucks, you must adulterate it with creams and/or sugar to make it palatable.

For us, the best cup of coffee we’ve had since coming to New Zealand in 2015 was at a Denny’s in Auckland where there was bottomless American style coffee. The only place I’ve been where I don’t like the coffee are in Oz & NZ. It’s not the strength, it’s the bitterness. French coffee is strong; I drink it black.

When we found out there was a Denny’s in Christchurch our whole day’s schedule got slipped. Breakfast was ON, with filter coffee to boot. We normally avoid American chains while traveling. There so much good stuff locally, and often the best part of local culture is the food. Even in the U.K. (we had some good meals there…but I digress).

But after a year and a half without we couldn’t take a pass on a bottomless cup of coffee. That takes some time!

The one other need we discovered before we left Australia was for a new Lord of the Rings movie tour book. We had one on the boat, or so we thought. Debates raged over whether or not it had been stolen with our car in NZ last time, or if we’d managed to lose it in our few hundred square feet of living space. The argument was never resolved as the book was never found.

We needed a bookstore. And we needed a bookstore with one particular, not-entirely-new guide book in stock. We’d tried to find out in Australia before we left, but no luck. Sitting in Denny’s, we looked in earnest.

Out luck was in – so the next stop was to the bookstore to get a guide then on to Omaru!

Posted in Albatross, Customs & Immigration, New Zealand, Penguins, South Island | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

The Long Goodbye

On Jul 31st, 2018 Published By B.J.

Some of you may have noticed that I’ve not posted in a while. The reason is simple – we’ve been off the boat since June and traveling. In the last two months we’ve left Australia temporarily and have been to the U.K., France, and a now the United States. Evenstar is laid up on a mooring in Oz, awaiting our return.

For us, it’s a time of transitions and changes as our children are growing up.

We’re Going to Need a New Tagline

For years, it’s been “Two Adults, Two Teenagers, One Boat.” When Will  left us to go to college we kept it, since he’d still be spending summers and vacations with us. When he was no longer a teen, we let it slide because he was still a part of the crew.

Now things are changing.

Yes, he apparently has gotten taller while he was off at school. It’s not just the hat.

Though Will will always be part of the crew in our hearts, he’s also starting his own life. After graduating from Southampton Solent with First Honours, he’s taken a job with Betts Boats in Anacortes, Washington – the same place he did an internship last summer. So for the foreseeable future he’ll be in the Pacific Northwest and we don’t know when he’ll be making a passage with us again.

Many of you have experienced this. It’s the moment you’ve been waiting for since they were born – to see them as full-fledged adults starting on their own successful lives. And you’ve viewed it with as much fear as joy, because you know things are changing forever and your child isn’t really under your wing any more.

The Nest Gets Emptier

At the same time that Will is starting his adult life, his sister Danielle is headed off to college.Since she’s been boat schooled, we don’t have any graduation pictures to share with you. But we’re dropping her off at Bucknell in mid-August. So we still get her for some summer vacations, but she’s headed off too.

We’d expected an overlap year with both kids in college at the same time, while putting off this empty nest moment another year. But the UK university system is a bit more focused that the American system, and Will’s Bachelors of Engineering in Yacht Design degree is a three-year program, not four. They don’t waste a lot of time on niceties like a “core curriculum” or “rounding out your liberal arts degree”; he started doing all yacht design all the time on day one and so is through a year faster. While it’s a nice bonus to our wallets, it feels a little like we got robbed of another year with him.

So we find ourselves poised at this moment a year earlier than we expected.

The Goodbye Tour

We’ve got a lot to cover on this trip which is why we’ll be off the boat so long. Graduations, new schools, new cars, moving, drivers licenses, and a whole laundry list of things we want to do and that we must do.

I promise in the future I will include more details posts on this since we have a lot of pictures and stories to share. It’s been a busy time. But for now, here’s the summary of the last couple of months.

  • Early June: Leave Australia for Southampton, UK.
  • Help Will get moved out of his apartment for about a week while seeing Southampton.
  • Mid June: Take a ferry to Caen France. From there we spent a few days touring the Normandy region before heading for the Loire valley
  • A week in the Loire Valley and Burgundy, followed by…
  • A week in Paris
  • On June 30th we took the chunnel train from Paris to London, where we met my parents for six days of London tourism.
  • Return to the Southampton area to a rented cottage in Hamble-le-Rice, where we were joined by Will’s uncle and his two cousins.
  • July 10th – Southampton Solent Graduation
  • July 15th – Everyone heads back to the U.S.
  • July 18th – Rent a car and drive from Virginia to Florida to visit Kathy’s father and her younger brother. Also we had a mad scramble to get Will a driver’s license.
  • July 27th – return to Charlottesville. Will buys a car.

Over the next few weeks we’re headed up to Rhode Island to see friends and family, then to Bucknell to drop Danielle off at school. After that, we pack up Will’s new car and drive cross-country with him to his new job in Anacortes.

Sometime around the end of September or early October we’ll be headed back to Australia. Just the two of us, headed to a truly empty boat for the first time.

It’s going to take some getting used to. The good news is, Kathy and I learned back in March that we actually still get along quite well when left alone. Another blog post I owe you – our surprise week-long 25th anniversary getaway to New Zealand (while Danielle visited colleges in the US) – explains all that. We had two weeks on our own, and we had a lot of fun together. BTW the “surprise” was as in “unplanned” versus “someone did something nice for us”. The only real surprise there was learning how much Australia would charge to renew our visas unless we left the country and came back…

So with some luck, perseverance, and a spiffy new laptop I’ll bring you up to date on some goings on since my last proper update.

In the meantime…I’ll tease some pictures, everything from Penguins to Paris!

Posted in Family, Milestones | 1 Comment

Our New Home…

On May 23rd, 2018 Published By B.J.

Well, for the blog, anyway.

After way too much difficulty over a lost tilde, I finally got all the files and databases moved over to pull the entire blog and all its history to a new hosting company. So GatorHosting.Com, here we are.

Please stay up.

If you’re curious about the tilde, it involved WAY too much time and too many tech support sessions to get a simple question answered – “What do I need to type in to get access to my web site before I make it live?”

There was confusion about login names, passwords, security shutdowns, temporary URLs, permanent URLs, and finally…it was a tilde that was missing from one section of the temporary URL.

That missing tilde let me finally access the “not yet live” website and execute some scripts to import the database. And it still didn’t work fully until I actually pointed the internet at the not-yet-live site.

But we’re on.

If you see anything weird, please speak up.

Posted in Housekeeping | Comments Off on Our New Home…

Movin’ On Up

On Apr 14th, 2018 Published By B.J.

Sail Evenstar will be moving in the next week or so to a new host. So it may go offline or look weird.

Probably it will look weird, since I’m bound to screw something up. So please be patient…thanks!

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Movin’ On Up

The Hatch Horrors

On Feb 7th, 2018 Published By B.J.

Water, Water Everywhere

Several of our Lewmar Ocean Hatches have been a problem for some time now. Way back in 2011 as part of my preparations for cruising we replaced our crazed and cracked hatch lenses with new, shaded ones. Presumably new seals were installed, but we didn’t address any other hardware – the handles, hinges, and so on. They were worn looking, but serviceable.

Over the last couple of years the main hatch in the V-Berth has started leaking. Not in rain, but when water would come over the bow offshore. This is a bad thing, since it floods salt water all over Danielle’s room and her bed. Over time, several more windows developed similar leaks, including the two smaller windows in the forward cabins and the hatch in the saloon. The saloon hatch was taking water in heavy rain, even. But we couldn’t take the boat offshore without kluging up some combination of hatch sealing type, while draping the V-Berth with plastic drop cloths and towels.

Obviously, this is not a good thing. The Ocean Hatch series are big, beefy hatches engineered to keep the water out, and were no longer doing their jobs. In addition, some of them were getting quite stiff to open. Visual inspection showed daylight visible between the seal and the metal rim. Culprit found!

Seal Failure/Failure to RE-SEAL

Hatches aren’t cheap. Neither are Lewmar replacement parts, but $150 for a piece of rubber is still less that $1,500 for a whole new hatch. Research into replacing the seals on this particular model showed me it was a nasty job, requiring the sort of patience and care that I don’t usually have. I decided to hired a professional, and was pleased when I found someone who could do the job properly.

I have a long standing motto regarding boat projects and hiring people, which is “I can always fudge* it up myself for free.” This is from years of experience hiring tradespeople to do jobs I could maybe do and not being pleased with the results, and from tackling projects myself that maybe I should not have. But mostly it’s from spending money on dubious outcomes provided by “pros” to do jobs I ought to at least take a whack at myself. After all, if I completely screw it up I can usually hire someone to bail me out, or just throw the part out and get a new one. Why pay someone else to ruin the project for you, when you can do it badly yourself for no charge?

I should, occasionally, pay attention to what passes for wisdom in my head.

I will not mention names here, but hiring someone to replace the seals for us was an unqualified disaster and a complete waste of money. In brief, the guy was unprofessional, showed up way late after keeping me waiting for almost two days, then did the most work at night in the dark, and didn’t follow my instructions too well. It was sloppy, messy, and looked like someone had done it in the dark. Then he tried to charge me almost double what he originally quoted for doing less work than I asked for but more than I wanted.

The end product was so appalling that I’ve included samples. And get this…some of the windows now leak in light rain.

Seriously, if I wanted a sloppy caulking job that leaked worse than when we started, I could have done it myself. For free.

So much for saving money on this. After this little adventure we learned a few things. First, our seals were probably OK, the problem was more likely in our hinges. With one of the big windows, the hinge had corroded enough so the hatch wasn’t closing straight. In some of the others the hinges were warping the frames, they were so tight to open. On one window the hatch “expert” didn’t bother to check for hinge problems until after he cut the lens out and destroyed the window seal – against my explicit instructions not to do so.

After we got rid of this guy we were left with hatches we no longer trusted to take off shore. Three of them because he’d mangled the seals and probably made the leaks worse, and two more that were either not fixed, or in poor condition.

Please Take My Money

There was some confusion about the size of my hatches when seals were ordered for replacement. The seals were the wrong size, no surprise given the guy that ordered them seemed a little clueless in the end. But it turns out it that our hatches are a “special” size. It’s not clear to me whether this was a custom size made for Hallberg-Rassy, or if Lewmar used to make a size 66 window in the distant past, and simply stopped making them.

But hatches to replace our large ones are simply not made or in inventory anywhere. They would need to be custom ordered and made. At some point in this process, we realized we might as well do all the hatches at once, since the two little ones were dmaged replacing the seals, and the three big ones were all pretty baked even before the seal guy touched one of them.

Further exploration turned up stock in size 66 hatches at Hallberg-Rassy, in Sweden. But they had clear glass and would not match the tinited windows. And clear lenses are probably great in sun starved Sweden up near the Artic circle. In the tropics they will roast you in your own personal greenhouse; you really want some tint in the lenses.

Then it started getting weird – we started getting quotes. One Australian vendor we talked to was insanely expensive for the custom order. Another was lower priced, but still expensive. Ordering them a place like Defender in the states and importing them ourselves could save money. It turns out the absolute cheapest option was to order the three big hatches from Hallberg-Rassy, and get the two smaller ones locally. Except we’d have to deal with Customs to import them ourselves and arrange local delivery, which may not have been worth the few hundred dollars we’d save.

Eventually I called my friend Phil and asked him if I could ship the hatches from Sweden to him. At this point he politely reminded me that he also sold hatches (I should have figured this out, given he owns a company called DeckHardware…) and would I consider looking at a quote from him? Sure I said, thinking about where else I could send my Lewmar hatches.

So…more options. We got more information on the availability of Lewmar Size 66 hatches with “smoke” lenses (availability: poor) and more pricing. We got quotes back from Phil which were a tiny bit higher, but his were made from 316 stainless instead of Aluminum. But this unbdugeted nightmare was already out of hand, and we really wanted to keep costs down.

We finally decided…we’d order ALL FIVE from the cheaper local supplier and let them deal with customs and importing. The Lewmars were an exact replacement though, and therefore zero risk about fitting in the boat. So I picked up the phone to place the order…

Your Money is No Good Here

I always wanted to hear that phrase, maybe after I’d saved the town from the bad guys or helped shore up a local pub against rising flood waters.

In this case though, they meant my credit card was no good here. Not because I didn’t have enough credit, there’s enough open limit on that card to buy a small car. But because my credit card is foreign. Even though I told the vendor I was an American and planning to pay by credit card a week earlier, they neglected to tell me they don’t take foreign credit cards (for no clear reason) and insisted on a wire transfer for any “foreign” transactions, even though I am sitting in Sydney.

I’ve used this card over the last sixteen months for paying for everything from coffee to a new head installation that cost over $5,000 AUD. Never a problem. But this company wouldn’t even try to run it. I’ve explained elswhere why the credit card works so much better for us even when businesses charge a surcharge. It gets us out of foreign currency fees, wire charges and having to have a bunch of cash ready to transfer out to someone on a wire. We keep cash around for operating expenses, but most of our capital outlay money is less liquid than cash because it’s not impulse money. In this case, it would cut about a week or the ordering time, which with a delivery time of ten weeks for the hatches, is pretty imporant since we’d already been putzing around for two weeks just to get comparative quotes.

Did I feel like spending the next week liquidating assets, moving money, then arranging a wire to prepay this order with cash? No, I did not.

I called Phil and we took a bus out to his shop to look at those hatches. We made a few modifications (added a 25mm lip around the bottom, and some locking handles) and he got back to me the next morning with revised numbers. If the Chinese New Year doesn’t mess with the supply line, we should have them in about 45 days. Yes, they’re more expensive than the Lewmar windows. I also think they are better, being 316 stainless instead of aluminum which we’ve had corrode on us. We’ll meet Phil at the Middle Harbour Yacht Club, he’ll drop off the hatches, then we’ll hoist a few cold ones up the bar. Problem solved.

Man Ship Hatch, courtesy of DeckHardware

Schedule impact

This hatch debaucle has not been without effect. Our original plan after the new year was to sail down to Tasmania. It became quickly apparent that sailing off shore with dodgy hatches wasn’t a good idea. We’d hoped to rectify this by replacing the seals. As you now know, that was a disaster and made the leaks worse. And new replacement hatches were going to take 2-3 months to arrive, by which point it would be snowing in Tasmania again.

So Tassie is out. All offshore places are out. With luck, on a calm day with the wind behind us, we can make the sixteen mile trip back up to the Pittwater to get out of Sydney. But we’re not going anywhere we can get waves over the bow.

That’s a bit of a bummer, and spirits have been low over it. But…c’est la vie afloat. Things break, and you deal with them. Next time we head off shore we won’t need to put tarps all over the V-berth though, so that’s something.

Posted in broken things, Leaks | Tagged | 5 Comments

Passage to the Marquesas – a Flashback for the Archives

On Oct 1st, 2017 Published By B.J.

This was originally run on Sailing Anarchy as a front page story in June 2, 2014, right after we completed this passage. I thought I’d cross-posted it to the blog for posterity, but it turns out I did not. So I’m going to post it here in it’s entirety in case SA ever removes the article. It’s the best summary of the passage experience that I’ve written so it belongs here, too.

Here is the original article link…please note that I didn’t pick the title!

tough enough

Anarchist BJ Porter takes you in a world that you might have always wanted to be in, but perhaps you never should…

For years a part of our plan to cruise was to cross the Pacific to French Polynesia to explore the fabulous cruising grounds there. We’ve been cruising since July of 2012 with our two teenagers, Will (turned 17 on the trip; you may be familiar with him as “Bob’s Intern” from those threads) and Danielle (14). After leaving Rhode Island we spent the rest of 2012 cruising Maine and the Chesapeake then headed to the BVI’s with the Salty Dawg rally in November. The next year was in the Caribbean, riding out hurricane season in Grenada and Trinidad then making our way to Panama at the end of November 2013. After passing through the Panama Canal in December we spent a few months doing some repairs and refits in Panama while until leaving for the Galapagos in April.

On May 15 of this year at 1900 UTC we weighed anchor on Isla Isabela and set out for the Marquesas.

By the Numbers
Total Miles Sailed: 3,008

Miles Hand Steered: 2,702
Departed Isabela, Galapagos: 05/15/2014 1900 UTC
Arrived Taiohae Bay, Nuka Hiva : 05/31/2014 2335 UTC
Elapsed Time: 16 Days, 4 hours, 35 minutes
Average Speed: 7.74 Knots
Daily Average: 186 Miles
200+ mile days: 2
Engine Hours used (including anchoring and approaches): 9.7
Miles Sailed on Starboard Tack: 2

Mistakes and Lessons
The first and largest mistake that was made on this passage occurred not on board during the passage but two years previously in the spring of 2012 when I was completing the fitting out for our departure. One item high on my priority list was replacing the aging autopilots on Evenstar with a new pilot from Furuno. Evenstar came with two old Autohelm 300 processors, one connected to mechanical dual linear drives and one connected to a Whitlock Mamba integral rotary drive. My initial plan was to remove the inadequate linear drives and old processors and connect the new Furuno Navpilot to the Whitlock drive, saving myself the cost of a new drive.

After spending some time reviewing the manuals I erroneously concluded that the old Whitlock drive would not work with the Furuno Navpilot 511, so I ordered an Accu-steer LA100 24V Hydraulic Ram and installed it (with the help of SA poster Anomaly2). It occurred to me that I could keep one of the 300 processors and maintain a mini Seatalk network with a compass, processor, autopilot and controls as a backup. Unfortunately it didn’t all go back together quite right, the drive engaged but it drove the boat in circles and giant S curves. So I made my critical mistake – I figured that I had a brand new state of the art Furuno Navpilot with a hydraulic linear drive that was actually over powered for the boat I’d be fine – my initial plan only called for one autopilot, right? So I put the backup autopilot on the back burner for when I could find a “Seatalk Whisperer” to help me get it all set up.

At the time I had a six page punch down list of prep work and the clock was ticking towards departure. There is a lesson to be learned here, especially since it stayed on the back burner as there was always something else to be fixed and the new autopilot had been working without a flaw.

The Trip
The trip started out smoothly. We were leaving the Galapagos within a few days of some other boats and we agreed on some protocols to join up every night by SSB between the ongoing larger Pacific Puddle Jump and Pacific Seafarer’s net.

Our first day out we had good breeze and covered 192 miles easily. Our weather information had suggested that as we approached the Marquesas the Southeasterly trade winds would go light and shift to the East, so we decided to run as far West as we could until the wind forced us to turn down. For the most part this was our strategy and we stuck pretty well to it, downloading weather GRIB’s every couple of days and confirming with the Routing module we have for MaxSea which actually did a pretty decent job.

Our watch schedule was the same fairly loose one we’d used on previous passages. Will would take the 2100 to midnight watch, I’d take Midnight until 0300, my wife Kathy would cover 0300 – 0600 and Danielle would relieve her for the sunrise watch until people started waking up. During the day with autopilot sailing there was always someone awake and in the cockpit but no tight schedule was followed.

The Problem
We ran into trouble the second night when just after I took over watch at midnight the autopilot started beeping and popped up a “Drive Failure” error. We’d noticed while in our cabin on the prior watch that the LA100 seemed to be straining a little more than usual (it is installed under our berth and can be heard quite clearly). But it just quit on us. The clutch would engage, but then the arm wouldn’t move as the pump made whirring and clicking noises. Kathy joined me and we spelled each other through the night as we thought through what to do.

The next morning we had a family meeting in the cockpit where I laid out the options. They were simple – either turn back and seek a repair, or hand steer all the way to the Marquesas. Turning back would mean hand steering 300 miles back to the Galapagos, then hand steering another 900 miles back to Panama or mainland Ecuador since the Galapagos is not an excellent place to ship things or get work done.

The other option was pretty straightforward, we’d have to set up a more aggressive watch schedule and EVERYONE would need to take time on the helm. Equal time, as much as possible. Watches would need to be two people, one on the helm and one to do everything else – trim sails, fetch drinks and snacks, help watch out and of course take turns at the helm. With no ability to let the wheel go for even a moment the helmsman was limited to what he could reach – the main sheet, the winch buttons (go in, not out…that takes two hands), and a small rack with cup holders and water bottles. With four people on board we’d all need to be on for twelve hours of the day and steering about six of those.

The reactions from the family were immediate – everyone wanted to press on. We’d spent four frustrating months in Panama dealing with one system failure after another and missed seeing Costa Rica and other places on our “to visit” list because of the horrible timing of the things that had to be repaired. None of us could stand for one second the idea of going back to Panama. Both children solemnly agreed that this was what they wanted to do, and they were willing to pitch in and do their share.

The new watch schedule I drew up tried to meet a few new goals – give everyone a six hour block to sleep, put the adults on the core of the night watch, give Kathy a clear window to secure dinner, and of course make sure we always had two people in the cockpit. The six hour sleeping window also meant everyone had to take a six hour block on. The theory is that the two people would split helming duties, and the not-driving watch stander could catch up on some sleep in the cockpit.

Hand Steering
So that is what we did – we stood watches and hand steered. There were certainly a lot of changes with daily shipboard life. We did less fishing, since a “Fish On” drill usually took a couple of extra people to deal with slowing the boat and wrestling the fish on board. Having all of us awake and alert in the cockpit at the same time was a pretty rare occurrence, so some of things we normally enjoy like listening to audio books to pass the time went by the wayside. Everyone was more tired, everyone was a bit sore, and all of us had some adjusting to do.

The Low Speed Chase
With a handful of boats traveling in a loose pack there was some fun each night comparing positions and conditions. As one of the later starting boats we were behind everyone, but we gradually overhauled everyone on the group except the Hylas 46 that started four days ahead of us – they beat us to Nuka Hiva by about eight hours.

There was a surprising amount of breakage in the small fleet, we weren’t the only ones with some major systems that got over stressed. One boat had a main furler problem and had to proceed without their main sail, another stripped out the drive gears in their jib furler. Water pump failures on generators, spinnaker mishaps, broken halyards – almost everyone had a little trouble. The boat that left after us never got their SSB sorted and we relayed their position via e-mails from them through OCENS.

The Fix (sort of)
After a couple of days of hand steering and ruminating on the problem some, I went back to the books and dug out every manual I had on all the autopilot systems. The one critical missing piece was the Whitlock Mamba drive, I did not have a manual for it and I wasn’t even entirely sure what sort of drive it was at the time. None of the drive types I had on hand were shown in the ‘how to connect’ sections of the manuals, but I noticed that the leads were the same on most of them anyway so I could find a way to get the Navpilot to talk to the Mamba drive. I set to it, and it worked!

For a while. Like three hours. For three wonderful peaceful hours all four of us sat in the cockpit, reading our books and talking with dreams of a relatively normal night’s sleep in our heads. Until the Navpilot started beeping with a “Clutch Overloaded” message.

According to the manuals this message meant that the clutch circuit was drawing more than five Amps. With some help from a friend on land with real internet access we’d identified the drive and he managed to e-mail me the salient points from the manual. With communication limited to Winlink/SSB speeds there was no way to send the whole book. But I knew this clutch was rated for three Amps, and more importantly the four Amp fuse on the Autohelm 300 had never blown in years of use. I connected the Mamba drive back to the Autohelm and it worked; well as well as that setup worked, driving us all over the place and every which way but straight. But the key point is the clutch and drive engaged correctly.

This didn’t matter to the Navpilot. Instead of waiting a few seconds to check with the drive, on any attempt to make it access the rudder including a “Rudder Test” it instantly reported that “The Clutch is Overloaded, Please Check Circuit.” Since the circuit consists of exactly two wires that run from the Mamba drive to the Navpilot processor – well, there isn’t a whole lot to check.

At this point any attempt at a jury rig was pretty much doomed. I actually contacted Furuno support by mail, and eventually even called them on the Sat Phone – they could shed no light on what was happening beyond that “the clutch must be pulling more than five Amps.” Not helpful, and the Furuno tech support bureaucracy needs to be taken to the wood shed for how they handle a “so I’m 1,500 miles from land and my XYZ broke” support requests since it took three business days to get to a technician. Enough said on that.

The Rest of the Trip
The rest of the trip was pretty much without incident. We fished less, but we still had a couple of nice Mahi Mahi dinners. We slept at odd hours, but we all got along and everyone pulled their watch without any more than the usual grumbling about being woken up when the sun wasn’t out. We had good breeze almost all of the way except once. We flew the spinnaker a couple of days and made some excellent progress in spite of the wind going light and East on us. Although half the crew hates the spinnaker with a passion they all bucked up and learned how to drive it because it was The Right Sail.

We did use the engine one evening after a day of flying the spinnaker. The wind had dropped to ten knots from the East and the Pacific swells were running. We were two or three days from arriving, and the prospect of sailing more South than we wanted to while struggling to make five knots on a broad reach while the boat rolled and the sails flogged was too much. We dropped the kite and pointed the boat almost West. It paid off well, after about forty-five miles we found 15-20 from the Southeast and found ourselves shortly after midnight broad reaching along the same direction we had been motoring making 8+ knots until the next afternoon. Not a bad tradeoff if you ask me.

The Lessons
The number one lesson of course is that if you are planning to have something on board as a backup it is no damned good at all to you if you never get it working. The backup autopilot should have been a much higher priority, there were many places from Maine to Trinidad where I could have found someone to help me sort it and of course it appears with hindsight I could have sorted it myself if I took the time. There is absolutely no excuse for not having that thing working when all the hardware was installed, wired together correctly and lighting up. Even if all it could do is point the boat in a straight line it would have saved us untold aggravation and lost sleep.
That is the Big One, and it will not be overlooked again. No system is foolproof, even if it is “over engineered” for the application. If I had a buck for every time I’ve heard “well our product usually doesn’t break like that” well, I’d go out for more nice dinners.

Other lessons include “When You Have New Favorite Lure, Use a Damned Leader” which I offer up to the fish that made off with my screaming pink Smoker Baits “Hootchie Troll” which had literally produced a Mahi Mahi as long as my arm every time it hit the water until some nasty Wahoo or other toothy critter made off with it.
“Get More Music” because even a playlist with hundreds of songs gets repetitive after a few days.
And yeah, this trip was daunting and we did it.

Conclusions
Kids are tougher than you think. Personally I think I have great kids, of course every parent does. But I felt particularly proud of the way my kids handled this adventure. No complaints, no whining, and no dodging – they woke up, did their shifts, took their helm time and just got it done. Anything we needed done, from sail changes to help with dinner and they were there and on it right with us. We all agreed in the end that sure, the trip would have been a lot more fun with the autopilot but it could have been a lot worse. We had good weather and good wind and that means a lot.

And maybe we’re a little tougher than we think too, because we decided not to turn back, but instead to face the remaining 2,700 miles of the trip in spite of the problems we were having.

For the daily updates from the trip and more check the Sail Evenstar blog…

Posted in French Polynesia, Marquesas, Nuka Hiva, passages | 1 Comment

Adventures in Woodworking and Soldering

On Sep 19th, 2017 Published By B.J.

Straight off, I have to disclose that the title of this post isn’t strictly accurate. I don’t really do “woodworking.” It’s more like “woodabusing,” in which I end up forcing, splitting, cutting, re-cutting and usually abandoning what seemed like such a good idea at the time. So I may buy the wood, measure the wood, and cut the wood. But the odds of my producing anything that looks more professional than a kid’s fort in the woods built from scrap wood and corrugated metal are pretty low. Wood isn’t one of my strengths.

I’m also not an electronics guy. I do electricity quite well and can integrate electronic systems, but my experience with making circuit boards, or assembling gadgets that work from scratch out of piles of resistors, capacitors, and MOSFETs (go ahead and Google it, I had to the first time saw it dropped casually into a technical solution) is very, very limited. That I am middle aged and have had typical near vision degradation like many in our fifties,  learning to solder tiny little components to the back of circuit boards is somewhat problematic. Though with two pairs of reading glasses and a really bright headlamp I finally did it.

Meanwhile, back at the Battery Balancing…

When we finished the last post I’d started the balancing. This gave me several days of slack time to work on other aspects of the project while the charge level of each cell slowly crept closer to 3.5 volts. Other than checking the cells periodically, there was little to do with the balancing process. The way we’d set up the batteries – in the empty battery compartment under our bed in the master cabin – it was easiest for us to move from our bed to the V-berth for a couple of days while this happened. Just a small increase the pandemonium on a boat filled with boxes, brackets, and wiring.

Battery Framing

Setting up a couple of the battery frames had convinced me that they just weren’t going to work. Which was unfortunate, as the vendor who provided them had charged us a lot of money for “cutting and assembling” even though they arrived completely unassembled. They didn’t look much like the pictures I’d seen when I decided on this solution, either. But my plan to have the BMS and all its switches and components installed all neatly in a single location lay in ruins.

I began to toy with the idea of building a wooden box within the battery box to contain them. I drew sketches, made measurements, and bought wood. I started cutting the wood.

Bad idea.

Not just the cutting, the whole lot of it. After cutting and fitting and playing with various options, it became clear that there was no way we were going to secure the batteries well enough to stop all vibration and movement.

Part of the trouble is the batteries themselves need to be secured into non-moving blocks. Some do this with steel bands. It was one of the design functions of our almost abandoned metal framing. You also need compression on the ends of the cell groups, to prevent swelling and distortion in the battery cases in the event of a Bad Thing happening to them (overheating, overcharging, etc.).

On the advice of one of our vendors, we tried banding the batteries with really strong nylon packing bands. Steel bands require extra special tools and expense. So we spent a day driving off to an industrial packaging supply shop to get some banding tape, and made these nice little bundles of cells.

Those weren’t, ultimately, going to work. Two bands made nice tight groups and the straps had several hundred pounds of breaking strength and were plenty strong. But the metal connector made it impossible to keep the cell groups installed flush to the wall of the battery box. There would be wiggle room, even if the sides and bottom of the battery box were completely flat and smooth, which they were not.

When I inserted the cell groups into my “nice, compact block”, what ended up wasn’t tight or compact. As I put the boards of the box-within-a-box against the cells, it became clear that I’d need to do a lot of shims and wedges to make things tight. After collecting some wood for this and trying it, the futility of the whole exercise finally struck me. No amount of shims and braces would ever get me what I wanted – firmly mounted, immovable batteries.

When the balancing was near complete, we were back to square one on how to secure the batteries.

My First Circuit Board

Abusing wood and flailing at battery boxes wasn’t the only thing I’d done during the three-day hiatus while the batteries balanced. I also opened up the BMS box and started trying to make sense of the installation.

The BMS is a tiny little black box about two inches by three, with two multi-pin connectors in the back. It comes with the connectors, the “optical isolators” for inter cell communication, and some wiring. Everything else is pretty much a la carte. I’d worked with the vendor that sold the Emus BMS to provide all of the equipment I’d need. This included the power supplies, the relays, the contactors, switches, fuses, and the “cell monitors” that are also made by Emus. He’d also recommended “active balancers”, which are devices outside the BMS that help maintain cell balance.

I opened my boxes and started my inventory of parts and bits, trying to match them to the wiring diagram and invoice manifest provided by the vendor. Most of them lined up, but a few puzzled me. One of the more vexing, which wasted a couple of days time, was the DC-DC power converters.

On a 24V boat like Evenstar, dealing with 24V to 12V DC converters is nothing new. Many boat bits just aren’t made at 24V, so I’ve had to deal with converters with systems from the refrigeration to the NMEA 2000 instruments. You get a little box with four wires on it…two for 24V in, two for 12V out. You wire it in and forget it. That we needed a 24V-12V converter is a subject of another rant; suffice to say that what we got was I suspect what was in inventory, and I believe a 24V based system (which would have made sense for us) was a special order item.

What I didn’t expect was something that looked like this:

There were “board ready” DC-DC power converters. What they were NOT was “user ready” as a power supply. To top it off, I’d been charged $120 AUD each for these tiny 30W power supplies. Discussions with the vendor were fruitless…we needed “isolated” power supplies, and these were special orders and couldn’t be returned.

For about $103 AUD I could have gotten something like this, which would have been adequate to run the whole show and has 100W of power, not 30W.

Little holes for wires, no soldering. 3X the power.

Needless to say, when I found out what I could have ordered a “board ready” power supply for myself (a lot less than $120) and that I would need to find a way to mount, wire and rig these things the whole process made me a little hot under the collar. There may have even been a discrete bit of foul language dropped.

But I owned the stupid things, and I needed two power supplies to make it work. One supply dedicated to the BMS and its functions, and one to run the relays and larger contactors.

It took too many trips to Jaycar (a store that is what Radio shack used to be before it turned into a retailer for RC toys and modular connectors) to sort this, but I finally did. Initially, I purchased some of the wrong things, like a breadboard (useful for prototyping electronics, but not for permanent installation) instead of “Vero Board” for the circuit, and a box that didn’t fit everything.

 

Vero boards are quite handy things. You can cut them to size, and the provide a number of continuous bus strips you can use to electrically connect your project.

Eventually, after the second or third trip to Jaycar, one broken vero board, and several false starts, I learned how to solder circuitry to a board and built this:

It looks cheesy and I don’t trust it, but it works. There’s even a cover…

This was the sort of thing that would have taken an experienced electronics hobbyist a couple of hours to do, and this person could have gotten everything sent mail order and right on the first try. For me, it wasted a couple of days.

I still may buy that pretty blue box for $103 AUD, because I don’t really have much faith that this thing will survive in the marine environment in the long haul.

Installation Inspiration

About the time the batteries were nearing balancing, I’d reached the hair-pulling frustration level about how to install both the batteries and the BMS in an acceptable fashion. When the balancing finished, it was time to fish or cut bait and I had to move.

Kathy hit the solution. There is a settee next to the bed with some space under it. She suggested that I could fit the BMS components in there if I could get the wires to reach. There is also a space at the corner of the bed, next to the battery compartment, where the main power bus and the negative shunts for the boat wiring all meet. This is between the settee and the batteries and was a perfect place to install the master switches and contactors. So the decision was made – we’d go back to the frames we’d ordered, and we’d install all the components in these two spots. Perfect!

With the batteries balanced, my kluged up power supply complete, and a spot for the equipment located, we were ready to rock and roll on the installation!

But wait…there’s more!

Really, I can milk this for a few more posts; it was a pretty major undertaking.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Adventures in Woodworking and Soldering

Measure Twice, Cut…How Many times?

On Sep 15th, 2017 Published By B.J.

“No Battle Plan Survives Contact With the Enemy”

–  Helmuth von Moltke

If you haven’t figured it out from my posts to date, the initial battery installation didn’t go as smoothly as planned. There were some speed bumps. A few dips in the road. A couple of potholes. A long, lost meandering in the woods, another in the desert, some epic struggles, blood, sweat, tears, and foul language. Lots and lots of foul language.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration. Nobody actually cried.

But now I sit, thirty-five hours after my last charge, with the batteries resting at 65% remaining. I can live with one percent consumption per hour, that puts me right at the three days between charges I was aiming for.

Arriving at the Marina

The trip up to the marina may have been a harbinger of things to come. With the batteries on a truck somewhere in Australia and a delivery status of Friday, we wanted to make our best effort to be in the marina when the batteries showed up. The fellow that shipped the batteries didn’t think there was much change they’d be there Friday, but the delivery company’s web tracking said that was the day.

Gold Coast City Marina is a fantastic place to do a boat project. There are dozens of marine vendors on site – a chandlery, metal fabricators, electrical shops, shops devoted entirely to stainless steel screws and bolts – a treasure trove for the optimistic Do It Yourself-er embarking on an ambitious project. After we got there, we also discovered they had a courtesy car we could use also, which turned out to be a life-saver.

The one thing it is NOT, however, is right on a big body of water. It is on the Coomera river, which is part of a network of rivers, streams, and canals at the north end of the Broadwater on the Gold Coast. This network actually runs all the way through the space inside Stradbroke island up to Moreton Bay and the entrance of the Brisbane river. But we’re too deep of draft, and there are overhanging wires that are lower than our mast. So we can’t go all the way through. But we can get to GCCM.

The way is long, narrow, shallow and twisty. But that’s not where we ran aground.

The marina office closes at 5:00 p.m., and it’s always good to arrive when the marina is open so you can get things like bathroom keys, WiFi codes, instructions on how to hook up the power, and other useful bits of information for your first night in.

The day we needed to travel, August 4th, high tide was about 6:00 pm. That was an unfortunate time for several reasons. Ideally, when traveling somewhere expecting low water, it is best to travel the lowest bits an hour or three before high tide, if it’s deep enough. That way, if you run aground, the water will lift you off again instead of stranding you high and dry if you run aground on the falling tide. In this case, it meant that we could travel on the rising tide, but we had to leave on the bottom of the tide, at low, in order to make it to the marina while it was still open and we could receive the batteries that were scheduled to arrive. Also, we prefer to arrive when it is light out and a high tide arrival would mean arriving at a strange marina in the dark. So we set out as the tide turned (1:00) for what we expected to be a two-hour trip.

We actually got into trouble where we didn’t expect it, at a spot marked eleven feet on the charts. With our eight foot draft, it should have been a no-brainer. Out of nowhere it started shoaling out. I cut the throttle, but we still hit bottom and stuck. The bottom there appears to be soft sand or something forgiving, so we backed off it pretty easily. But the way north was definitely shut for a while. The upside was, there was a spot nearby where we could anchor while the tide came in that had Wallabies hopping around on the beach that we could watch with the binoculars. So we parked, called the marina, and waited out the tide. All the twisty narrow parts? Those were tense, but we didn’t have any problems and even made it in time to get the bathroom key and WiFi codes.

The Lack of Batteries

What we didn’t have when we arrived was any new batteries. As it turned out, there was some confusion about the shipping slips, and there was one created initially by the shipper and not used, and other one created when he dropped the cells off for shipment. It was the one that wasn’t used that said Friday. We didn’t get the cells until Tuesday. But there were still things to do.

The first step was to figure out how to keep the lights and refrigeration on while we were in the marina with no batteries. One bit of information I picked up from Stan Honey’s notes on his LFP installation was that they picked up a Switched-Mode power supply to run their boat when in marinas. The technical rationale is that LFP batteries do not like to be “float” charged, which is what happens to them in marinas. But a “switchmode” power supply can give a fixed voltage with current sufficient to run the boat’s basic systems.

The power supply was ridiculously easy to set up, and in short order I had the boat running from it instead of the batteries. So over the weekend we pulled the old batteries out and starting puzzling over the Battery Management System and the battery frames. We also had the chargers in a huge, heavy box, but I didn’t want to unpack them because that would then leave this uncrated, awkward thing underfoot and ready to gouge up the interior wood and stub toes. So we left it in the box. This proved a big mistake.

The First Pieces Don’t Fit

My plan for installation was pretty simple. The LFP cells are much smaller than the AGM batteries they were replacing. With the huge battery compartment, once the AGMs were out there would be plenty of room for the more compact LFP batteries and all the extra wiring and system components needed for the BMS and its contactors and switches. Cake, right?

Look at all that space! You could fit a person or two in there. Well, if they were fairly compact. The metal frame there is for holding one of the eight four-cell groups.

The metal frame in the picture is what we ordered to hold the batteries down and in place. It wasn’t actually what we expected. The framing was different, and it was larger.  The cells were not going to end up in a single tight mass of cells, but instead, would be spaced out by a couple of inches from each other in groups of four. You can’t tell from that picture, but there is not actually room in there for eight of those frames to fit. End to end, four of them were about two centimeters too long for the space.

But worse…when you put two rows of batteries in there, there was not really enough room to work with the BMS components. They weren’t going to fit.

I’d measured this stuff, sketched it out, looked at the drawings…it was supposed to work. But the only possible way the BMS components could go in there would be if I installed them first, before the batteries. And they’d be impossible to reach and service once the batteries were installed.

This was a problem.

My initial thought, and that which eventually worked after haring off after some more idiotic ideas, was to simply shave a centimeter or two off of each frame. There was enough extra to do that and still have them provide sufficient support. So Monday morning I dropped the frames off at the metal shop to be shaved down.

Balancing Act

One of the little joys about this project has been the wealth of wildly inconsistent information available about how one should actually do such a project. This allows the inexperienced installer like me plenty of opportunities to agonize over what is the right way, the wrong way, and the workable compromise that I’m going to choose.

One of the tricky things about LFP batteries that I’ve alluded to in prior posts is their voltage. In particular, their lack of change in voltage as they discharge and charge. It changes very little between 80% discharged and 90% charged. Given the sensitivity to overvoltage, it’s important to not overcharge them. If each cell in a bank has a different voltage, the battery charger will stop before the first cell reaches a dangerous voltage. This means all the other cells in the bank will also stop charging, and potentially they will do so well before they are fully charged. If one cell hits 3.5V before another cell hits 3.35V, the lower voltage cell will never get fully charged, and battery capacity can suffer badly.

So the concept of “balancing” your individual cells is an important one. You want to keep the voltages between the cells close. The best way to do this is to start out balanced. So how do you get there?

Well…that depends on who you talk to. My research showed me there was an established (sort of) method to “Top Balance” the batteries to all the same voltage at the full end of the scale. There is also a “Bottom Balance” one can do, but it’s not optimal for a boat bank. This whole topic could be the subject of a 5,000-word blog post that would send most of you running screaming if it didn’t instantly put you to sleep, so I am not going to get into more depth.

But in short, the process I read about speaks to charging ALL the cells to the same voltage at the same time. The trick is in the details. Some suggest doing this on a cell by cell basis. Some suggest wiring all the batteries up in one massive parallel bank and bringing them all to the same voltage together. Where it gets confusing is when I talked to the guy that sold me the batteries, and with the guy that sold me the BMS. They both had entirely different methods to balance the cells that I’d never read about anywhere.

I decided to make one big parallel group of 32 cells, and attach them to a bench power supply. This supply could provide up to 60A of current (in theory) at a specific voltage between zero and twelve volts, exactly. This process would take days, however.

Thirty-two 180 Ah cells in parallel make one BIG cell with 3.6V nominal voltage and 5,760 Amp-hours (32 x 180) in capacity. Assuming the cells were 50% discharged when they arrived, that means I’d need to supply 2,880 Ah of power to them at a constant voltage. My power supply was rated for 60A, but could realistically deliver 50A without overheating. Quick math will tell you that is 57.6 hours of charging if my 50% assumption was correct (2,880 Ah / 50A = 57.6 hours).

When the batteries finally arrived, I cleaned all the contacts, applied a conductive carbon grease to the terminals, and wired them all up in the battery box in parallel. I plugged in the bench charger and…immediately discovered I’d spent hundreds of dollars on the wrong type of power supply. There weren’t enough knobs.

I’d ordered a power supply which had a knob to set the desired voltage but had no knob to control the desired current. This meant it was a “constant current” supply, which would do everything it could to give max current, including lowering the voltage supplied. This was not going to work since the LFP batteries would suck every amp they could out of this thing and eventually burn it out or lower the voltage too low to make it useful.

Fortunately, I was able to get a power supply with two knobs sent to me overnight, and the balancing could being after another delay of a day.

Once the balancing started, I turned my attention full-time on how the heck I was going to fit all the batteries and the BMS into the battery box. I really, really liked the look of all thirty-two cells in a nice, compact block with plenty of room for the other equipment. That’s how they were for the balancing, and it looked good.

I began to consider doing something to secure them with wood. When I start thinking about wood, it always ends badly.

I’ll leave you there for now though with a cliffhanger…much more to come.



Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...

Posted in 24V, Batteries, Lithium | Comments Off on Measure Twice, Cut…How Many times?