Winging it

As Bill finished off in yesterday morning’s post, he had adjusted our heading to go more southerly and set the sails to wing-on-wing. At 4am I was rousted to take the next shift. I will say Bill seems to sound the happiest I hear him all day when he wakes me up – a sing-song “Time to get up Shawn”. I will give him the benefit of the doubt that he is trying to “be gentle”, but in reality I just think he just loves doing it.

Anyway, the mystery to the faster speed he mentioned when flying the spinnaker became evident over the morning hours – the winds just continued to get stronger and we went from 11knot winds to 15 to 18knots. Bill’s decision to be cautious and drop the spinnaker before sunset was more than validated, otherwise we would have been on deck in the middle of the night trying to “douse it”.

We continued wing-on-wing for most of the day as it keep us pointing on a pretty direct course to Hiva Oa, our destination.

I know this will probably be boring for the sailors and more boring for the non-sailors, but tonight we will spend a few minutes talking about about why sailing wing-on-wing is like dancing with a bad dance partner. You are always having to move your feet in unexpected ways to avoid being stepped on.

The balancing act for wing-on-wing is you need to keep the winds nicely balanced, almost but not quite directly behind you. The bow of the boat is at the “0” and in this picture the winds are at 160 (the needle) – right where we want them. This keeps nice pressure on the mainsail so it stays to the left/port, but lots of air to fill the genoa on the right/starboard.

See the little red and white circles at the bottom on either side of the needle? These indicate the range the wind is bouncing around in. If the wind and needle move to the left of the 180 then the wind can get “behind” the mainsail pushing it from the port side across the boat to the starboard side. This is called a gybe. Sailors can do this on purpose, gently, when they want to adjust course and bring the boom across, but often it happens by accident because the winds have shifted and it can come crashing over with a bang – damaging equipment or people.

And like a dance floor, nothing is staying fixed and in place. We might have expectations based on the tempo where the next foot will go, but…

The dance is continuous – the range of those red and white dots can be from 170 to 150 as above or sometimes from 150 on the left to 120 on the right – all over the place. I have adjust course up 10 degrees since I came on shift as the winds have altered. Even the light waves we have tonight keep us bouncing, rocking and rolling. So you can see in the picture above, we rig a preventer to try and keep the mainsail in place if it tries to gybe, giving us time to adjust our course and the wind angle. In the first picture on top you will see the line (sheet) out to the genoa goes through another line to try and keep it pull outboard and filled with air, otherwise it flops around and does nothing or gets caught on the radar mount.

Enough about wing-on-wing.

As Bill mentioned, he and I spent a few hours on Monday and again yesterday in the engine compartment on the port side becoming intimate with the water maker. (No lewd comments Nancy!). I have to admit this is probably the most convoluted (but important) piece of equipment (yes I am getting stinky again). We are spoiled on Lake Ontario – if we want fresh water, we fill up at the dock. Because we need to empty the “holding tank” every week (no poop into the Lake), we need to go to a marina regardless. Even the bareboat charters our family have done in different parts of the world never have a water maker as you rent the boat for a week or two and back to the marina.

So this device is black magic. It sucks water from the sea, runs it through a strainer to remove any big stuff, then two water pumps in parallel combine to push the water under pressure through another 5 micon filter. The water then travels up past an accumulator that is designed to “even out the pressure” and into the Clark pump (real black magic – the one called Specta in the picture above), a piston that slides back and forth from the water pressure alone in a convoluted closed-loop flow though multiple valves. This rig then pushes the water at higher pressure (10 to 1) through the long tube under the shelf which is where the reverse-osmosis membrane is. This is where some of the seawater is pushed through under pressure and 1/10th gets through as fresh water and 9/10ths (called brine) gets expelled back into the ocean.

OMG – either genius or an intellectual booby trap. Luckily the Starlink (still amazing at 99% uptime and 110mbps download speeds) let us download troubleshooting guides, more manuals, review sailor chat forums where people describe their problems with water makers and more.

We think we are making headway – we have pressure from the feeder pumps, it sounds like the Clark pump is cycling. The problem seems to be that when we open the value that lets that 9/10ths brine go back into the ocean, we loose pressure in the system (back to 10 to 15psi static level). Thoughts anyone? We replaced one of the feeder pumps before we left Puerta Vallarta and replaced the Clark Pump with a backup which Bill had purchased from Lola’s (yes the puppy) Bob, who had in turn purchased it from the estate of a deceased sailor. The issue is that when you read all the manuals they talk about “pickling the system” for 6 months to a year, but the water maker has not been active since 2021 when Greg and I were previously aboard and we have no idea when the rebuilt one was done. Today is another day and we will go at it again!

So to finish off (7:05am so I expect to see other bodies over the next hour), some random items…

It was “pitch black” before the moon came up last night, and even then it was often totally behind the cloud cover. As Bill said “you might as well be in space”. When I went out for a late night pee over the stern rail, it was somewhat surreal.

Sharon’s bread was awesome! It was a little dense like a sourdough, but fresh bread and “French-Canadian fried eggs” with some tomato and pineapple were great for breakfast yesterday.

I am up another 10 degrees since last time – 20 degrees since Bill hit the racks, as the winds continue to shift.

We finally have the tracking system working properly. If you go to the Turtlebones.ca site and click on the “Where are they”, you should see a red dot which is our current position, updated hourly. A couple times a day we lock in a “white dot” so we have a recorded date/time and some data at that point.

Bill heard back from the PredictWind helpdesk with additional instructions (recorded in none of the documentation we previously found), but it works. What it means is we need to leave the old Iridium GO turned on all the time just to track position, so we have 2 live networks onboard – that and the Starlink. Unfortunately it is costing $150US/month for the old Iridium GO subscription just to keep this track. This is over and above sunk costs on the Iridium GO Exec which we ended up sending back to New Zealand.

I am pretty confident as Bill sat watching the Blues Jays highlights/game yesterday, he and all of us would agree the Starlink was the right tech in today’s (changing) world.

So we are passed the 1/3 mark and projections still show us arriving April 25th or 26th. Winds will increase slightly over then next few days but the big question remains the transition zone. Fingers crossed!