DAY 12 - the POst U LAt-R (Post-you-later)

Hi, I have combined two of Bob's posts in this one Blog entry. Thanks,
Stephen.


Hi Folks,

I've been having trouble getting out my "noon" reports. It is hard to get a connection and when I do get one the transmission rate is very slow due to retries. Yesterday I was receiving data at the terrible rate of 50 bytes per minute.

Up to now I've had two radio sessions per day: the "noon" report one and a second one at night. I'm going to do all of my radio work at night from now on because the propagation and transmission rates are much better.

Robert

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At 8 AM on this morning of this 12th day I was at 32.05N and 150.5W, 740 nm from Oahu, 1530 nm from Juan de Fuca. AIS was displaying a ship 54 nm to my NW, expected to cross 9 nm from my bow. It was the Fairpartner, headed for Balboa. Later a second ship appeared, heading in the opposite direction. It looks like I may be crossing a Mexico-Japan shipping route. Yesterday I an AIS target at 96 nm away to the SE, expected to cross my stern at 61 nm. Those are pretty good ranges for a line-of-sight VHF system particularly since my antenna is low, off the pushpit.

The wind held steady yesterday afternoon. I spoke with Richard at 1.30 PM and he reported that he had had a bad night of 40 kt gale force winds. Then, incredibly, at the time we were speaking he was becalmed and surrounded by fog with visibility of 250 yd. He confirmed that he had a radar reflector.

In the afternoon I took out my sextant and took sights of the descending sun on one side and the ascending quarter moon on the other. The fix put me 2 nm from where the GPS said I actually had been at the time of the sights. The computations went so much easier on the foundation of good food, plenty of sleep, and a cockpit bath an hour earlier.

At 7.30 PM I spoke again with Richard. He was almost becalmed, making 1.5 kt in fog with flogging sails. I told him to expect strong winds the next day from another approaching low. He will be south of the center of the low so should get a good boost toward his destination.

Stephen provided me with the means to get weather information for any lat and long that I choose in text form. I can specify reports every x hours for y days. Here is a sample of my first one yesterday in which I asked for 6-hourly reports over 7 days:

Forecast for 32°00N 151°00W (see notes below)
Date Time WIND DIR PRESS WAVES DIR PER
utc kts deg hPa mtrs deg sec
----------- ----- --- ------ ----- --- ----
06-02 00:00 13.7 184 1019.1 1.6 202 7.5
06-02 06:00 13.0 186 1019.3 1.6 222 7.6
06-02 12:00 14.6 172 1018.9 1.6 230 7.7
06-02 18:00 13.2 189 1020.2 1.6 236 7.8

06-03 00:00 13.1 180 1020.0 1.7 246 8.2
06-03 06:00 11.5 185 1020.7 1.8 258 8.7
06-03 12:00 12.4 170 1020.1 1.8 266 9.2
06-03 18:00 12.8 183 1021.7 1.9 258 9.1

This is will be a great planning tool and is extremely efficient (ie low air time) in its delivery.
I have ordered a report for Richard's position which I expect to receive when I connect to deliver this daily report.

Richard has been speaking with Nellie One (or maybe Nellie Wan) which I am pretty sure is the Canadian boat that left Ala Wai at the same time as me. They are about 250 nn north of me. They are a crewed 45-ft boat bound for Alaska, Richard thinks.

In the late afternoon the wind started to seriously die down. I shook out the reef in the mainsail. When I spoke with Chris is was down to 10 kt, 9 kt apparent because I was on a broad reach. At times it dropped down to 7.5 kt. Chris said that 10 kt was what the weather chart had indicated for my area, and that he did not expect it to drop further. Fortunately he was correct. There was just enough wind and the sea was just calm enough to keep the sails full with the occasional flogging. A gentle following sea helped to keep the boat speed at between 3.5 and 4.5 kt. Jeff the Monitor performed superbly in these light conditions. I slept very well, with checks at midnight and 3 AM.

I was up at 6.00 AM and at 6.30 AM I fired up the engine for the first time since my departure. I remembered to ensure that the cooling water inlet valve was open. I had also removed the starting key as a reminder to check that the inlet valve was open. The final defense is that I now always verify the outflow of cooling water after starting the engine. The last few days of partial sun had resulted in a slow but steady drain of the battery A/H. I still had a reported 80% battery capacity, with 12.7 V on the house bank, but I thought it prudent keep the batteries at a high level and run the engine for an hour every few days.

After the engine run I set up my course and Jeff to find myself doing 6.5 kt off of a 12-14 kt wind,

Still no fish. Yesterday I swapped back the big lure and still did no good. Maybe word got around.

I've been having problems with my weather faxes for the last 24 hours. The first inkling of trouble was when I set the system on "continuous" mode. Twice during that session I noticed that the getfax program had died with no explanation and I restarted it. But since then weather faxes are not stored in the wfax folder once they have been completed. So I am reduced to viewing the faxes as they come down with no opportunity to inspect them later or to use the Zoom and Pan facilities. I've looked for options and settings that may have been changed and inspected the getfax .ini file and have found no problem. There is plenty of disc space and the folder permissions are similar to those of the Sailmail in and out box folders. The next step will be to consult the "Sailmail Primer" on my other laptop before asking the Sailmail organization for assistance.

At noon we had covered a 24-hr distance of 117 nm. SOG was 6 Kt, apparent wind 12 kt off the starboard beam.