Thursday July 7
N 5 05.157 W 134 16.575
2250 NM From Ensenada and 900 NM From Nuku-Hiva
Hello Friends and Family,
Since I last wrote I was becalmed in classic Convergence Zone weather, glassy water dead still, sporadic thunderstorms and hot. I anticipated this weather pattern and decided to motor given the very strong current running at 2.5 knots plus against me.
At about 9:30 PM after motoring for about 18 hours the winds switched back on like a light. Within minutes I had 14 KN. Unfortunately the winds were from the wrong direction, approximately SSE and my destination is SSW.
During my numerous sail adjustments needed for the changing wind conditions I experienced a malfunction with my roller furling gear. I have had problems with this equipment several other times and fixing it has varied in difficulty. I decided not to tackle the repair job in the dark and sailed with the Genoa in a more open percentage than I would’ve desired overnight. I had to reduce the main area to compensate but this created an unbalanced helm situation and the self steering was unable to cope with it. It was necessary to steer a less desirable course until I could bring the sail plan back into balance.
The following morning I sat on the bow sprite and unwound the line that had jumped off the furling drum and then rewound it onto the drum to allow it to function properly. It was a pretty funny scene with me getting dunked into the Pacific with every wave as the bow plunged up and down. Fortunately the water was warm!
If you are familiar with roller furling no need to read the next graph.
For those of you not familiar with roller furling, the jib or Genoa is threaded onto a long tubular extrusion that is wrapped around a wire at the front of the boat the forestay. At the bottom of the extrusion is a drum with rope coiled around it. When you pull the rope the extrusion rotates and rollers up the Jib or Genoa, when you let go of the line the sail extends.
In my case the sail was mostly out but the line jumped off of the drum and onto the extrusion. If I had pulled it hard in order to furl it up I could have damaged or broken the extrusion.
Once everything was working again I obtained the best course I could, sailing close hauled and still 30 deg off of the rhumb line. I have been on that course and point of sail for 3 days with winds forecast to gradually shift to a more favorable point of sail and allow me to sail a rhumb line course to the Island.
In other news yesterday I had a nice warm shower in the cockpit after drying off I sat enjoying the beautiful weather with a towel wrapped around me when a big wave crashed into the boat and over me! How was that for timing?
Water? Lots of people are interested in it and my boat. Water is a determining factor for many voyagers, those on limited budgets or those old school types that want it simple. My boat is equipped with one 20 gal internal tank, a 6 gal hot water heater that is not turned on and I carry 10 gallons in two Gerry jugs on deck as emergency water. This amount of water is sub optimal for a boat of this size and certainly for a voyage of this length. The boat could have been equipped with an additional 15 gals of capacity but the original owners decided to use that space as storage instead. Old school voyagers collected rain water and had rigs set up to catch the water in their sails and channel it to buckets and
tanks. I think if I had to I could have made the voyage using that method because of some of the heavy rain I received recently. However my ace is a watermaker!
What is a watermaker? A reverse osmosis desalination plant, watermaker for short. Simply it pumps sea water at very high pressure through several filters and finally a membrane that separates dissolved minerals from the water leaving fresh water. Unfortunately there are several catches with these systems, they take very high pressure to do this, on the order of 600-800 PSI and it requires a lot of energy to produce that pressure the other is that you only get about 10% fresh water out of salt water you pump in.
In most cases the solution I call brute force is used to make water, generators big pumps and fuel. My boat is too small for those solutions so I use an energy recovery watermaker. This is a system that recaptures the energy used to pressurize the waste water and recycles it into the new water coming in. So you only need to add 100-200 pounds of pressure to get back up to 600-800 PSI. The result is I can make 6 gallons of water an hour using 9 amps of 12 V power. I generate 2-3 times that with my solar system at peak times.
So I don’t have any water issues, the downside is cost and complexity. I like to joke that my watermaker costs as much as a car! Mine came with the boat but it needed an overhaul, I also redid the installation and bought a number of new components, supplies and spares. Thousands were spent, but I can have a shower anytime I want and sometimes 2 after a wave hits me!
One more funny thing about my watermaker, obviously it needs ocean water supply to work, the installers that originally put the unit in plumbed it so if I am on a Port tack and it is bumpy it sucks in air! I will have to address this issue at some point.
The latest sailing info is I got the much hoped for and anticipated wind shift last night and have been sailing at close to my desired course until about an hour ago and it has gone back to an unfavorable direction. This change was not forecast so we will have to see if it is just a temporary shift.
Take care,
Ben Lindner, S/V DAWN
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