fetchinketch

We are now 150 miles from our predicted landfall, and within range of the marine weather radio for Southern California. We now are blessed (?) with accurate (?) local weather forecasts. All the planning and arranging we did to avoid hurricanes on the way to Hawai’i, and we are most impacted right here off Southern California. Ok, it’s not a REAL hurricane any more, but the tattered remnants of hurricane Karen are bringing us scattered rain showers, and ironically, light winds as what’s left of the storm system suck the life out of the normal pressure gradients along the coast.

In the interests of public service, I have developed the following translation for the official National Weather Service wind strengths.

35 to 45 knots: Can we stay home today, Please?

25 to 35 knots: Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride

15 to 25 knots: A beautiful day for sailing, and there won’t be any of those pesky fishing boats in our way.

10 to 20 knots: Perfect for lessons!

5 to 15 knots: Could be fun, could be frustrating, and the weather guy gets to be right either way.

10 knots: A special wind forecast. No other forecast gets a single number. You think this means the forecast is for between 9 and 11 knots. Wrong! It means somewhere out there today, at sometime, the wind will peak at ten knots. The rest of the day you’ll struggle to get your boat moving.

Less than 10 knots: See above…

Variable: They don’t know, and don’t feel like guessing today, but it will likely vary between too little and none.

Calm: Gentlemen, start your engines!

Right now as I write this there are four ships showing up on my instruments within 25 miles. There was not a minute all day where we had fewer that two within range. Not all of them came close enough for visual contact, but that is way more traffic than I expected.

We are seeing so many here and now because we are crossing the main shipping lane from China, Japan, and Korea to the western end of the Panama Canal. That’s an awful lot of “stuff” moving around!

So far this trip while out on the open ocean we have had to alter course once to keep a safe distance from a cargo ship.

A great day of progress. We are now about 300 miles from the coast. The wind has been very cooperative all day, hopefully that will continue for the next couple of days.

The Fetchin’ Ketch is a ketch type sailboat. One with two masts, the one in the back smaller and called the “mizzen”. I have been told several time by people whose opinions on the matter I trusted that when you are sailing upwind the mizzen sail is no help, and might even slow you down. I experimented a bit to test this theory, but never really carefully, and just accepted it as an axiom. I really only worried about the mizzen when sailing off the wind when it was a great tool.

As the wind dropped at the end of yesterday below about 14 knots it became a real struggle to get the boat steering herself reliably. What had been simple at 20 knots became almost impossible at 12. I fiddled with the trim of the job and mainsail, back and forth, every way I could, with only limited success.

Finally, running out of options, I raised the mizzen, and sheeted it home. Magic! It was like somebody put rails in the water for the boat to ride on. Perfectly straight over wide wind strengths, and at wide range of wind angles. My advisors were right about one thing, we did not go any faster, but what a difference in control. It was an experiment that would have been hard to do in San Francisco Bay. Finding a long enough run of water with lighter, unchanging winds would not be possible, but out here on the open water we had the perfect controlled experiment. I love sailing: there is always something new to learn or figure out.

The wind hasn’t been as cooperative today. We even had to resort to using the engine for a few hours this morning (Please, don’t tell anyone!). Last night was long and tedious with many patches of time where it was just too light to keep the boat moving in a useful direction. It didn’t help that all day today was gray and dreary but we are now mostly caught up on sleep, and we have about 12 knots of wind we are enjoying forward progress without the hard work of beating into the bigger waves. Looks like 4 or 5 days to the coast.

AIS is an acronym for Automated Information System. A less descriptive name I could not have invented, but it is a fantastically useful thing. Here is the description of two interactions between large ships and small yachts sailing at night, and what happens…

The skipper is asleep, and the crew on watch sees ahead lights just breaking over the horizon. As they were instructed, they wake the skipper immediately. Since the lights have appeared ahead of us, we can assume they are sailing in our general direction at something like 18 knots, and we are going toward them at 6 knots, closing speed of 24 knots. We know from previous experience that ship lights like this appear over the horizon at about 6 miles away. We have at most 20 minutes to decide if there is a risk of collision, and then decide on what to do that will not make things worse, and then execute whatever evasive actions we think best, in the dark, all while just awake from a deep sleep. Very stressful.

Now in a world with AIS, the situation looks like this: the crew sees an icon appear on the chart plotter at a distance of about 30 miles. They touch the screen, and information appears. The other ship’s name, destination, course, heading, speed, length, beam, draft, current rate of turn. Everything except how the Captain takes his coffee. Most helpful is the Closest Point Of Approach. Our plotter has taken course and speed from both boats and calculated how close we will get at the closest. The crew can immediately look at that display when the ship is an hour away and decide if the skipper needs to be awakened. ALMOST all the time there will be plenty of room even at the closest, and sleep need not be disturbed. The skipper likes this.

Of course, we still need to look around. It is possible that a ship has a malfunctioning system, or is small enough that AIS is not required. But the vast majority of interactions between ships are now so much easier, less stressful, and safer.

On the boat today, the wind is 20 knots from the NW, we are close reaching at between 5 and 6 knots, on a straight line course for our first anticipated landfall 565 nautical miles away in the Channel Islands. It might not be our anticipated destination, but the sailing is good, the weather is good, the boat and crew are good. Life is good.

The events of the last two days have been driven completely by a little, tiny, 8mm set screw.

That screw came loose on the wind steering vane, which allowed it to fall out of alignment, which lead to it twisting in a way it wasn’t designed to, and that caused the main casting to crack. That whole sequence of events left us steering with the electric autopilot.

The electric autopilot was doing fine. Then Karen says, “There is a little pile of new metal filings here.”

“Where?” says Bill.

“Under the autopilot.”

As I bent down to examine the issue, the autopilot seized up with a loud clunk. A mechanical investigation quickly showed an unrepairable problem. This left us with two choices: continue on 15 days to Hawai’i, or beat our way back to the west coast in 6 or 7 days.

Hawai’i might seem the obvious choice except for a characteristics of most sailboats. They can hold a steady course by themselves when going upwind, but need constant attention when going downwind. Hawai’i is downwind and will require someone to sit behind the wheel 24/7 The west coast is upwind, and the boat will (more or less) steer herself.

So now we are headed upwind toward a landfall between Santa Barbara and San Diego, depending on the wind.

Everything else on the boat is doing well, including all crew members. Weather is warm and overcast. Last night we had a gnarly spell of wind up to 27 knots, but things have settled down to the neighborhood of 15 knots. The forecast is for more of the same all the way in.

I’ll have more of an update later, but we had some more issues around our autopilot. We have decided to head in to Southern California to get it fixed.

I know you have all been waiting on the edge of your seats to find out the solution to yesterday’s riddle. I’ll get to it in a minute…

There is so much new and different it is hard to pick a single coherent topic for a day’s post. One of the things that might be different than some people expect is that the middle of the ocean is not a desert, empty of life.

We have had birds everyday. Black-footed albatross, and a white bird I think is a kind of petrel. I suspect we are as much a highlight of their day as they are of ours. Especially the albatross spend a lot of time circling the boat, checking out the intruder. Or maybe just hoping for a handout.

Every morning while during my rounds checking equipment, I find a few small 4 to 6 inch long flying fish on deck drying in the sun. We see constant marks on the fishfinder, very deep during the day (>1000 feet) but rising toward the surface at night.

As soon as I finish this we are getting our lines back out and seeing if we can find something worth catching!

Right now our weather routing program is predicting an arrival at Diamond Head off Honolulu on the 17th or 18th, but we have been running a little ahead of its predictions so far.

Oh yes… The answer to the riddle about the GPS saying we went way further than we did: While it WAS wrong about how far the boat moved, it was right about how far IT traveled. The key was I was using a GPS unit mounted at the top of the mast, which moves dramatically from side to side as the boat rolls. It adds all those motions up for a total distance traveled. A quick check of the math confirms that is the most likely answer.

There was much head scratching on board yesterday evening. I used the “odometer” readout on our GPS to determine our miles run for the day that I posted yesterday with such glee. Even under those nearly ideal conditions I was amazed at how well we did. For some reason, I went back to my chart, and actually measured the distance on the paper. Surprise! Not 166 miles, but 122, a much more realistic number.

After checking my paper plotting, and rechecking, and re-rechecking, I concluded that it was right and the total distance reported by the GPS was wrong. After much cogitation, I know why…

The boat has three separate GPS sensors that are connected to the network. One is built into the chart plotter in the cockpit, one is part of the AIS system on the stern, and one is part of the combined weather/compass/GPS at the top of the mast. The masthead unit has always given the most stable and consistent reading so that is what I was using.

While we did not go in a PERFECTLY straight line, we certainly did not wander around in our course enough to add any significant extra distance, so that’s not it. Soooo….

What do you think the answer is? All relevant information is in this post, and some information is present just to “unclarify” the issue for extra fun!

I’ll post my answer tomorrow.

[Trevor: Feel free to use this as an example in your GPS class.]

P.S. The skipjack tuna was delicious!

Yesterday shortly after noon I set out a fishing line for the first time on this trip. We had seen some evidence of fish and a little bit of bird activity, so what the heck! While in the middle of prepping dinner…

Dinner: London broil, baked potato, sautéed zucchini. We aren’t exactly roughing it!

…the rod announces the fish bit with a loud zing of line peeling off. Wake Karen from her well deserved nap, get the boat stopped, and in a few minutes we had a beautiful skipjack tuna in the cockpit. Not huge (maybe 6 pounds) but reports are they are very good eating. He’s on the menu tonight.

The second success was our forward progress. Noon yesterday, to noon today we made 166 miles by gps. Awesome. That’s a tough one to beat!

Early this morning we crossed the “magic” line from coastal weather to the tradewinds, those more or less constant winds that blow across the subtropical oceans. Big breeze and a few light showers announced the change in weather pattern and we are now moving quickly along on a beeline to the islands.

Once the morning showers cleared, we have been treated to a beautiful sunny day with the boat flying along at speeds of up to 8 knots.

We did have one major issue today. Our wind vane steering had a major mechanical failure. A small set screw came loose, and a part dropped out of alignment. When the paddle tried to turn, it was trapped and the main casting cracked. Nothing to be done about that out here. Our trusty Wendy is our first casualty. We’ll be relying on the electric autopilot from now on. The primary down side is that we will be running the engine daily to charge up the batteries. Oh well.

1844 miles to go!