fetchinketch

We spend last night quietly at anchor in Rock Sound at the southern end of Eleuthera. We were up and moving pretty early because we expected the weather to be good for some fishing. It seems like forever since we have had the chance to get some fishing in.

By 11 AM we had our lines in the water hunting for one of the best tasting fish in the ocean, a Wahoo.

Just about an hour later, we had hooks into our target, and a few minutes later, a 28 pound Wahoo was on the deck. Not a monster, but a respectable catch.

Butchering a large fish like this is not a quick process, and it leaves the cockpit a bloody mess. But eventually the fish was turned into portions suitable for the freezer.

We ended the day at Little San Salvador, with a beautiful sunset, and fresh fish on the dinner table.

We spent last night at Royal Harbor near the northern end of the island of Eleuthera. A cold front blew through with a bit of rain and winds in the mid twenties. This is one of the few places in the Bahamas with good protection from all directions, so the shift winds as the front moves by aren’t an issue. Not to rub it in for our readers in more northerly climates, but “cold” here in the Bahamas in January means the mid 60’s

Today we are taking advantage of the winds from the northwest to make our way south and east. In the protected waters east of Eleuthera we are sailing fast downwind, and as a sailor friend of mine used to say, “Fast is fun!” Although I’m pretty sure he wasn’t thinking of this, that is not only true for the people on the boat.

For most of the past hour we have had a lone bottle nose dolphin accompanying us. Sometimes following behind, sometimes racing ahead to play in the bow waves.

Whenever these creatures come to the boat to visit and play, I am never sure who is watching who, and who is enjoying the game more.

We’ll be anchoring in Rock Sound this evening. The forecast for tomorrow is for much lighter winds, perfect for fishing!

Making your way eastward on a sailboat in the Bahamas is a challenge. Sitting squarely in the tradewinds, the prevailing winds in the islands varies from northeast to southeast. Any trip to the east requires either waiting for a break in the winds, or sucking it up and beating into them.

Our usual preference is to wait, and we have, for weeks in some cases. This time we decided to take it on the nose for our voyage from Lucaya to Royal Harbor. The forecast was for winds of 10 to 18 knots, and was very accurate.

We’re now about 26 hours into it, and closing in on our destination. The boat is making good speed, close hauled, a smooth ride, although a bit wet on deck.

Of course in an Amel cockpit we are bone dry.

Harmonie has been waiting, patiently, for a bit of a break in the steady SE tradewinds so we can move to the southeast and Eleuthera. We have been tied to a dock at Lucaya in Grand Bahama, a very easy place to check-in to the country, and break for weather for a reasonable price.

Today, it looks like we catch a SMALL break with the weather, with the winds forecast to lighten up a bit, although mostly blowing exactly from the direction we want to go. We have about 24 hours of close hauled sailing ahead of us as we move toward Royal Harbor near Spanish Wells where we will be anchored for a few days while the next weather system passes through.

Under sail, crossing the Gulf Stream toward the Bahamas. Our passage was fast and fun. Once again, we ignored the advice of the local weather guru, and took our our council. We exited Port Everglades at about 4PM in a building Northwesterly wind, pointed the boat east, and took off. The wind varied from 9 knots to nearly 20. The ride was very comfortable, and Harmonie strutted her stuff making well over 8 knots through the water most of the way.

We arrived on the south coast of Grand Bahama Island quickly enough that we hove to, backtracking a bit, waiting for sunrise, before entering the channel. We tied up to the Grand Bahama Yacht Club to complete the check-in formalities with Customs and Immigration. The check in process went smoothly, as it always has for us.

By 11:00 we were tied up to Scarborough Docks where we met the crew on Harmonie’s sistership Idun to help her crew on a couple quick projects and later, dinner.

The local bay is either “Flamingo Bay” or “Bell Channel Bay” depending on which chart you look at. Getting in through a well marked channel is not hard, but the channel is not deep. The forecast height of tide at Freeport Harbor was 0.7 feet as we approached about 45 minutes before low tide. We saw a lot of depth readings of 7 feet. Since our keel is 6’6″ that’s pretty close, but you get used to it in these islands We did touch (gently) in one sandy spot just inside the entrance. You have not visited the Bahamas until your keel touches sand!

We had thought we would turn around and be out of here today, but, but we decided to hand for a few days and let the easterly trade winds moderate a bit for our next jump over to Eleuthera.

After much too long tied to the dock, we are off! We just cleared the Port Everglades inlet on the way to the Bahamas.

We have been working hard getting our projects done, getting our boat ready for time away from what passes for “civilization.”

If you want to follow us, don’t forget our tracking link has updated, use this one! https://saillogger.com/svharmonie/monitor

It will be a while before we miss the hustle and crowds of south Florida. Right now we do not have any specific timing for a return. We will be heading down south and east through the Bahamas, down the eastern Caribbean chain to Martinique. At that point, it gets a bit fuzzy. Right now our best guess is a jump to northern Panama.

Hopefully, we will have more interesting things to write about than (another) boat project!

Right now we are motoring away from the coast, looking for more wind!

Sun, Ocean, Sand, Beach, Palm Trees!

We are in Florida. Fort Lauderdale, to be exact. Harmonie is docked up the New River in a canal behind a private house. We have been hustling to get a bunch of projects done, this time pretty much all “lifestyle” projects instead of functional ones.

A new mattress for our stateroom. The old one was… old. Having our old bones bounce down against the hard plywood underneath was no longer acceptable. We were replacing a ~10 year old polyurethane foam mattress, but ran into a problem. The thinest innerspring mattress we could find was too thick to allow use of the leeboards (that keep us in bed in rough sailing). To the rescue, a custom latex mattress about 5 inches thick. Hopefully many years of very comfortable resting!

New windows for the dodger. The hard plastic windows on the Amel dodger are a vast improvement over the soft vinyl windows use on a lot of boats, but even these have a finite life. I have a couple words of advice. The first time it even crosses you mind that the view thru the windows is looking a little “fuzzy” schedule to change them. Really. The improvement in clarity is breathtaking. Use acrylic (“Plexiglass”) not polycarbonate (“Lexan”), and choose clear, not tinted. The tinted windows are nice in the hot sun, but the reduction in visibility at night cancels all other benefits. There is a reason that cars are not allowed to have their entire windshields tinted! At the same time, we have a new lens to replace the one in the aft cabin hatch. 

Our refrigerator in the galley has been struggling for some time. We have managed to drag it along, but the cost of diagnosis and repair outstrip a new unit by a significant margin, so a swap out has been arranged.

The BIG project is refinishing the cabin sole. Unlike a lot of Super Maramus, our cabin floor is wood. It had been refinished once before in its life, but the finish was thin, and had started to fail, and was looking pretty tired. We hired a local woman who had done some finish work for us in the past to do this project. As I write this we are a few days from completion, but the floors are looking SPECTACULAR.

In about a week, we will be back underway again, headed to the Bahamas where there is warm weather, beautiful, empty, beaches to enjoy, and fish to catch.

More boat nerd project information…

Antenna Choices

When you sign up for Starlink you have a choice of either a “High Performance” antenna, or the standard antenna that has somehow come by the nickname “Dishy”. Months ago it was announced that Starlink applied to the FCC for a license for a new “mini” dish, but as of this writing (Dec 2023) there has been a new antenna announced at the same price point as “Dishy” It is not yet clear to me if this is a replacement, or a line extension.

Here is how currently available options compare, as I see them.

There is not a simple “always correct” choice for a cruiser. If you are power limited, the “Dishy” option is likely your best choice. Putting together an elegant permanent mount of a Dishy can consume much of the cost difference between the choices, but if you use a simple mount, it is clearly the budget option. If you do not expect to use Starlink underway, the Dishy is easy to remove from a temporary mount and store away while you are sailing.

If your primary use is going to be remote work off grid, then the high performance antenna is likely to be your best choice. Maybe you can get work to pay for it, or at least get a tax deduction 😉

We went with the “Dishy”. We have not yet fully worked out how we are going to mount it in the long run, but its performance so far has been excellent for routine web browsing, at the dock and underway.

Router Information

Startlink Dishy comes with a WiFi router in an elegantly stylish case that plugs into 110/220V 50/60Hz. Mixed in with all the rest of the misinformation on the internet, I have seen people say this can only be used with a pure sine wave inverter. That is certainly not true. Ours ran fine on our ancient Xantrex 110V modified sine-wave inverter that was built in the last century. Will it work on your old inverter? Probably…

The Starlink router works fine, it is very simple to set up. If you can easily feed it AC power, you might be perfectly happy running it. We felt we could improve the integration of this part of the system into our boat’s systems.

Inside the sexy Starlink Router case are three things. A pretty generic WiFi router. An AC to DC converter to supply 48V DC to the Antenna, and a POE (Power Over Ethernet) injector. That’s it. No magic. I have put together a set of components to do exactly the same thing powered from our boat’s 24V DC system–no AC power required. Since we already had a DC powered WiFi Router onboard that was being used all the time, it did not make any sense to spend the power to run TWO routers, and especially since we could stop using the inverter to power the Starlink router..

Here is a photo of the breadboard of the system as I assembled and tested it.

A 24 Volt to 48 Volt converter, a high voltage POE injector, and a Pepwave MAX-BR1-MINI-LTEA-W Router. The Starlink cable from the Antenna has been modified with a standard RJ-45 plug, and there is a “special adapter” cable between the POE injector and router. Starlink cabling standards are different than everybody uses, so be sure you get them right, and there were a few modifications to the Pepwave setup needed. (I’ll write that up shortly…)

For someone using Starlink as a primary connection for video conferencing, or other highly connection sensitive applications in an area they also have access to a marina WiFi, and/or a cellular data connection, a PepWave router is an awesome piece of kit. It can seamlessly switch from one data source to another, in a priority of your choosing. These things can do everything you ever imagined, and a whole lot more. A simple setup is pretty simple, but you can dive in as deep as you need. PepWave makes many different ones of different capabilities. If you need this capability, do what I did, talk to a networking expert who can help you make a selection, and the initial setup.

Despite what you might read on the internet, once configured properly, you WILL be able to fully interact with the Starlink antenna using the Starlink app with the generic router. If you are not a total network nerd, you might want to be sure that you use a router that you can confirm will work, and make whatever setup changes are needed. There are a few router specific functionalities that will disappear (Like the advanced speed test) but everything else works exactly as you expect.

Power Use

You can see in the above photo the Ammeter readout of the consumption of both the Starlink Antenna and the Pepwave router (1.62A) This number is highly dynamic, and varies from 1.3 A to 2.1A (All measured at 26.9 Volts). Using nothing more than my eyeballs to estimate it, an average use of about 1.6A or 1.7A (or, multiplying by 26.9V, 43W to 45W) seems like a good number to plug into an energy budget. The router by itself has a typical power draw of 13W. This is not a negligible power consumption, but not a huge one either.

All these numbers are for the “Dishy” antenna. I don’t have any measurements for the High Performance antenna. As minimum, I would expect the High Performance antenna might need a 24V to 48V converter with a higher rating that the 120W model I chose to power our Dishy.

I had no quick and simple way of measuring the energy use for the system when it was powered through the Starlink router, so I don’t have those numbers.