Day 10 - Good Wind and Power Management

At 5 PM last night I gybed the boat and for the first time since leaving the Sea of Cortez I was on a port reach heading east of south. This afternoon's weather faxes showed a front passing through California and approaching Baja and winds tending to veer from NNW to NNE. I had already picked up hints of the veering wind. A weather report from Stephen was very clear and specific about the stronger and N-NE winds expected for the next few days in my specific position, and that sealed it: I gybed the boat in anticipation of what is coming. Immediately I found myself on a course of 170 T, only 10 degrees from true south, whereas before I had been on a course of 225 T, 45 degrees from true south. Because the stern of the boat was presenting itself more square to the NW swell the boat rolled less and the sail was steadier.

I sailed all night to a good wind - at least I presume I did, because with the islands behind me and no perceived threats for the next few days I had a normal night's sleep which must have been a deep one because I woke up twice during the night wondering where I was. The boat was tracking dead south at 4 kt both of those times and it was still tracking south at 4 kt when I got up for the day at 6 AM.

One of the first things I did after getting up was to check the voltage of the house bank. I was shocked to see it down to 12.0 V. I immediately shut down the refrigerator (it needs defrosting anyway) and thought about the problem while having coffee.

The big electric power consumer is the refrigerator. It draws about 5.5 A while running, and runs about 50% of the time (50% duty cycle). I make that to be 66 a/h (amp hours) over a 24 hour period. That's about the amperage that goes into the bank with one hour of running the engine. That means that the solar panel and wind charger must cope with everything else, e.g. navigation equipment and lighting.

Eventually the refrigerator will not be an issue because as the weather gets cooler during my progress to the Horn the refrigerator's duty cycle will reduce, and there will be a point when I am in the 30-40 S latitudes when I'll be able to switch it off entirely and let the cheese, butter, and sandwich meats cope with the ambient temperature. Much as I love the idea of warming beef stews in the really cold latitudes, I doubt if I'll support the luxury of frozen meat as far as the Horn. I'll consume the meat before then and thereafter rely on the copious supplies of rice, spaghetti, canned fish, and other non perishables.

An immediate measure will be to shut down the Toshiba laptop at the navigation station. That is the one that I use for blogging, Sailmail communication, and using Dave's chart plotter software. However, now that I am past immediate land dangers there is no point in running it 24 hours a day, so I'll bring it up for about 2 hours per day for my Sailmail work, bringing down weather faxes and grib files, updating the inventory spreadsheet, and a look at the situation through Dave's chart plotter. The laptop seems to consume a modest 2 amps which suggests that I'll be saving 44 a/h a day with this new measure. A movie at night on the backup Toshiba would use, being as pessimistic as possible, 5 amps for 2.5 hours. In the scheme of things that's not a "biggie".

I started the engine at 9 AM and ran it at 1500 rpm for 2 hours, giving 105.0 hours on the engine.

At noon our position was 17N03, 112W48, for a 24-hour distance of 97 miles. We were 375 miles SSW of Cabo San Lucas.

In the afternoon I attended to the marine head, which had been blocked since I first used it several days ago. The joker valve was inverted, meaning that it the mechanism pumped out with great force but a blockage somewhere along the outflow line had caused enough back pressure to build up to force the joker valve to pucker back into itself. I had noticed that the thru hull ball cock valve of the outlet was opening only about half way. It appeared that something may have been pumped through the system and was jamming up the ball valve as it rolled open. With great reluctance I loosened the two clamps holding the outlet hose to the valve but found that I could not remove the hose because it had become annealed to the thru hull fitting. That's as far as I got. This is the sort of job that I need to do where there are materials at hand. It would have been likely that I would have to cut the end of that hose off, probably making it too short to reach the fitting. In any event, I didn't like the idea of fooling around with a thru hull fitting this far out to sea.

So it will be the grey bucket until Cape Town. Welcome to long range cruising, Robert.

At 3.30 PM we were still hiking along at 4.5-5 kt using the full headsail on a broad reach from a NNE wind exceeding 15 kt at times.

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