Boatfolk among you have requested that we provide an accounting of our gear, sailing tactics and provisioning on this passage. We’ve deliberately avoided long posts about boat stuff and daily logs because it is frequently boring, but the home fleet deserves a report. And so in three parts.
Part I, Gear Performance and Selection:
In short, our gear has performed marvelously. Some of you are aware of our “unique” boat systems. The rest of you brace yourselves for a view of Bint al Khamseen’s tricks and hacks. As a disclaimer, some of these things are probably just a bad ideas and the prudent mariner will break out a credit card, pay the man and wait for UPS to deliver the top shelf goods. Following is a summary of the critical aftermarket systems we installed for long-distance voyaging.
1) Four 135 watt solar panels. This array keeps us topped up by 1100 hrs on a sunny day and provides all our power aside from a 175 amp alternator on the Yanmar. The charge controller is a cheap Xantrex no-frills 30 amp controller. In keeping with K’s philosophy of remote logistics, we have two cheap controllers rather than one super-groovy one. K added a Tahmazo “Watts Happening” volt/amperage monitor (really! we didn’t make that up!) to the Xantrex housing. These little beauties come from the model RC airplane industry and they run about $50. We have a second one by a different manufacturer (the “Watts Up” model) totalizing the house load. Between the two we know how much we are putting into the batteries and how much we are taking out.
The main power consumers are refrigeration, watermaking, and night sailing electronics and lights. In overcast areas we can run off the 600 amp battery bank for 3 or 4 days without inconvenience. This usually provides time for some solar charging or motor usage in the natural course of events to see us through to sunnier times. It is very rare that we’ve ever run the engine for battery charging since May 2009 when the panels were installed. Both times were tied to watermaking.
2) Village Marine LW160 watermaker. This thing has been foolproof so far, cranking out 8.25 gallons/hr in clean ocean water, both warm and cool. We have run it in harbors on flood tides and it worked fine but fouled a pre-filter. Our usage at anchor is ~ 16 gallons a day. Oddly enough we use more underway on long hauls, due to a longing for convenience and a sense of entitlement stemming from other comfort deprivations. We’ve started collecting drinking water directly into jugs. S does not enjoy the “green” flavor our tanks and plumbing impart. We’ve bombed the tanks with clorox and they still taste either like clorox or “green.” Water directly from the watermaker is tasty in a good way.
3) Self-steering. For self-steering options we have a Cape Horn wind vane (“Twitchy”) and a Raymarine ST 1000 tiller pilot (“Fritz”). We picked the Cape Horn for its off-center mounting capability (so we can use our swim step), the below-deck control lines option (no spider web in the cockpit), and of course, its price (several thousand $ less than others with similar features). The vane has several thousand miles on it and although its lines can be finicky and require occasional contortionist trips into the hades of the cockpit locker, once it’s running it will steer day in and day out, seemingly forever (even after its mola encounter). Recently we did explode one little control line block that had to be replaced, and we switched out one control line that was showing signs of wear at its cam cleat in the cockpit. Another selling point for the Cape Horn is that it can be controlled using a small tiller pilot. So for steering when there’s no wind we bought an inexpensive tiller pilot off eBay to direct the cape horn while it steers the boat instead of buying a full-sized autopilot. Though we had to have its motor replaced when we got to San Francisco, it’s worked fine since. It does have its quirks and it tends to take unplanned leaves of absence every dozen hours or so. The pilot itself is mounted below decks near the Cape Horn, but it has a wireless remote that we keep an eye on. Still, it has hundreds of miles on it and continues to push and pull as needed, keeping us on a very tight course.
4) AIS. Our AIS system is a PC software based program taking soundcard data from a hacked VHF radio. K cracked open our Icom M-502 and soldered a capacitor onto the discriminator signal board and added a tap for 3.5mm mono jack. The radio gets tuned to channel 87 or 88, the audio cable plugged into the laptop, then ShipPlotter decodes the data and plots it along with our vessel GPS data to provide a lovely radar display of traffic. We routinely pick up boats 300 nm distant with the mast-top antenna when VHF propagation is channelized. Typical range is more like 50 nm. The only drawback to this arrangement is that it monopolizes the main VHF radio. We only run the AIS at night and we keep a handheld radio on to cover Ch 16.
5) PC Repeater Monitor. Because many of our nav tools are PC based we wanted a little secondary weather-proof monitor in the cockpit to display laptop programs like the AIS ShipPlotter program. These animals are on the market but they are crazy expensive. So we got a 7 inch Samsung U70 USB monitor, spliced on a long USB cable and mounted it in a Seahorse waterproof box with a packing gland, plexiglass face plate and a big O-ring. We threw away the lid. It looks like a lunchbox with a built in TV. We Velcro this thing in different spots around the cockpit depending on what’s going on. The cable runs through a packing gland in a hatch over the nav station. A wireless mouse lets us operate programs from the cockpit as we squint into the mini-monitor. It’s not great in strong sun so we try to keep it in the shade.
6) Radio Scanner. We have a Beartracker BT700 receiver scanning 121.5 kHz at all times. This is the frequency of the small locator beacons we wear while on singlehand watches. The scanner feeds into the boat’s stereo speakers with volume set high. In the event of a 121.5 kHz signal (e.g., the watch person falls overboard and activates the beacon) a loud alarm signal sounds through the speakers to wake up the off watch. The only drawback is that some airline pilots use 121.5 kHz for radio checks near US flight paths and this too can wake up the off watch. The BT700 has also been hacked for AIS signals and functions as a backup AIS receiver. In theory it will circle-scan for AIS and beacon signals, although in high traffic areas AIS will monopolize the scan. It has a dedicated VHF antenna mounted on the dodger which also serves as a spare for the ship’s main VHF.
7) Radar/chart plotter. We have a baseline JRC 24-nm radar/gps/chart plotter that is sadly discontinued. It’s a fine little unit and feeds RS-232 data to all our PC based and Raymarine displays. The controls are culturally Japanese and were not initially intuitive for us. The radar hangs on a backstay gimbaled mount that K put together with some stainless rail tubing, stanchion fittings, stainless bearings, a 17-4PH bolt/shaft and several covert hours with a UW Oceanography Department tig machine (thanks TJ!).
8) SSB and HF Modem. All our gear was bought used. We operate an Icom 710 single sideband marine radio and a Pactor 3 modem for voice and email. The 710 has been hacked to transmit on ham frequencies. All the gear has worked flawlessly, except for some reason the 710 only puts out ~110 watts of its 150 watt rating on the lower frequencies. We also carry a spare Icom 706 MkII ham radio with pre-installed connectors as a backup . The 706 has not been hacked for marine channels.
Our tuner is an AT130. The ground plane is the aluminum toerail, cockpit stainless railwork and lifelines. Our primary antenna is a piece of coated 1/8 inch stainless wire hauled up between the backstays on a skinny topping lift. We carry two spare dipole antennas cut for key frequencies in the event of a tuner failure. We certainly don’t compete with our friends transmitting at 200 watts on Icom 802’s but we get fast data connections and chat with remote stations at will. Our favorite data connections are thru HAMs in Austin, TX (WD8DHF) and Atwater, CA (K6IXA). We love those guys.
The freeware Winlink email software is a truly incredible tool, all the more so as a non-profit effort from an extremely dedicated group of radio twigets. We get most of our weather data from the Winlink catalog and provide all our at-sea fixes and email with it. We also download weather faxes directly from the SSB using JVComm 32 demo software.
S calls into radio voice nets once a day to provide our location and weather and see who’s around. She is also a net controller for the Pacific Puddle Jump group.
9) Satphone. We carry an Inmarsat Mini-M NERA Worldphone mostly for phone calls to our parents. These old phones are available used for ~$100 on eBay. No contracts are required for service, but rates are ~$1.75/minute. It will provide data at 9600 baud with a dial-up account.
10) Inverter. We never planned to have big inverter but K found a Triplite 1000 watt unit on eBay for $40… part of an office computer backup system. It has been great as a way to run power tools, the sewing machine, and even our little ShopVac vacuum cleaner. The key is to run it while the engine is running or in the afternoon when the batteries are charged and the panels still have capacity.
11) Wi-Fi directional antenna. We use a “cantenna” that K built from a wi-fi USB bridge and a pirouette cookie can. He made a spare one from an aluminum fire extinguisher; it’s more robust but less efficient. This bad boy is the bomb for accessing wi-fi from a great distance. We lash it to a winch handle in the outhaul winch above the nav station. Then we spin the cantenna around on the winch to point at the nearest source. It will connect up to a couple of miles away. We use Network Stumbler to snoop around for signals. This system only really works when the wi-fi is unsecured or you have access codes, but it saves a ton of hassle dragging the laptop all around town and on dingy rides through the spray and rain.
12) Dingy and Outboard. The dingy is an 8-ft Mercury we bought from DefenderUS.com. It’s been a fine little inflatable with high pressure floor that patches easily, even when punctured in 8 places by the dorsal spines of a panicked rockfish. For this trip we bought a pair of hard plastic dinghy wheels, which generally work well, but we admit there were times when we dragged rather than rolled our wheels up a beach and looked on our neighbors’ larger inflatable wheels with envy. That said, our wheels store handily in the anchor locker where there’s barely an inch to spare. The outboard is a Tohatsu 9.8 hp 4-stroke bought used (thru eBay) from a dinghy rental business on the Columbia River. It’s dependable and very economical, and is also nearly silent when running. The drawback is its 80-lb weight and physical size. In a wrestling match between it and S, bet on the motor. We keep it below on a bracket in the quarter berth while underway, and it is a cargo-worthy stevedoring operation to haul it inboard and get it stowed below. We use a handy second topping lift. This topping lift has been recently upgraded to potentially serve as our trysail or spare main halyard, should the need arise.
13) Ground Tackle. Our anchor inventory was documented in an earlier post “Bahia San Marte II”. Our primary rode is 200 ft of 5/16″ high tensile chain. We also carry a 100-ft length of 5/16″ chain, and several shorter lengths of 3/8″, and various lengths of 5/16″ and 3/8″ line. All these bits and pieces fit into a dreamy 3-point mooring design for tropical storms. Our windlass is the Lofrans Progress unit that came with the boat. So far, so good. The solenoid in the IMTRA SPA-10700 windlass controller occasionally sticks, requiring a sprint down below and a good whack or two with a special solenoid whacking mallet.