Notes from Esperance Trip

I wrote the following notes on 15 May:

Yesterday I had the unpleasant job of dismantling the totally blocked marine toilet. The culprit turned out to be the rubber drain plug from the wash basin. Somehow it got into the toilet and got pumped through the "joker" valve and jammed up where the outlet pipe constricts. The result was a monumental compression of toilet paper and other material. I have decided to not provide colour photographs of the task to the blog.

We think that we have tracked down the source of the salt water filling up the bilge while we are sailing. The outlet hose for the electric bilge pump has a very short loop at the lazarette before it bends back down to the outlet on the lower side of the counter stern. We think that the constant slamming of the counter stern into the sea, combined with the effects of heeling over and heavy following seas could lead to the steady ingestion of water over the loop and then straight into the bilge. We have confidence in this diagnosis because believe me, we have eliminated every other possibility.

Yesterday we spoke with Peter Turner at Maritime Electronics regarding four issues:

1. The compass of the Autohelm may be disturbed by stowage of cans and other metallic material within a meter of it. Sure enough our troubles started after we stocked a plastic bin next to the flux gate compass with cans for the trip. When we are out at sea we will clear the compass area and run some tests.

2. A tanker reported that he was getting only our MMSI (i.e. ID number) and location from our AIS transmission. Peter expressed surprise because he had keyed in our boat name, call sign, etc into the system. We have instructions for inserting this information into the AIS transponder via our laptop and we plan to do this while at sea.

3. Peter gave us instructions for interfacing the "Lifetag" man overboard alert bracelet system to the Raymarine "seatalk" system. The instructions simply did not cover the nitty gritty of interfacing to Seatalk on our boat. The instructions were somewhat surprising, involving splicing the Lifetag system to other spliced wires, and taking the power from an independent source. We will attempt to do this while still in Esperance.

4. Arnold got insight on the problem where the radar image did not conform to the chart displayed on the C120 plotter. The system gets its direction from the GPS antenna. But for this to work the boat has to be moving. If the boat isn't moving the GPS location jitters around and the system cannot properly orientate things. So we will run our tests while the boat is moving, not while it is stationary.