I woke up at 5.30 AM to a brilliant day, and with a falling wind over a falling sea it promised to be a day of heavy rolling and fretting sails. I dispelled the gloom of the latest gear failure of the C120 by thinking of the things that were still working. The rigging and sail survived the night with no apparent damage and the Monitor had done a brilliant job of steering. The spot forecast indicated no heavy winds for the next 3 days and after this day's lull of the wind I was hoping to get into a gentle routine of plodding our way to Cape Town.
Looking back on the impacts on the boat and crew during the doubling of the Horn, which took 27 days (Day 66/Jan 1 to Day 93/Jan 27) and I must say that we fared remarkably well. First of all, no really bad things happened: no rogue wave, no knockdown or rollover, no survival storm or "greybeard" waves. Discounting the torn headsail, broken inner forestay, broken Monitor control and trip lines, and autopilot problems, which either happened before the rounding or can be attributed to wear and tear rather than the passage round the Horn, the only tangible damage was the torn port D1 lower shroud and the loss of one empty fuel container. The life raft and Zodiac above it survived intact, as did most of the fuel containers on deck. Even the spray dodger survived without further serious damage: most of the rest of the starboard window was blown out and the port side retaining strap broke, but all of the canvas and the port window are intact and the dodger continues to provide valuable shelter to the companionway. I have to ascribe the good outcome to the benign season of the year, selection of the approach path to the Horn, and lots of good luck, particularly since I was not able to heave to properly.
I spent two hours looking into the chart plotter problem and got no result other than gaining more insight into the system. I removed the cover behind the C120 and saw that the connections being used are power, radar, Seatalk, and NMEA0183. Seatalk2 and DSM are not being used. The NMEA 0183 connection is for the non-Raymarine AIS transponder. Notably, there is no GPS input.
I then went into the communications closet behind the nav station and managed to open up a Raymarine junction box. Seatalk wires from the various Raymarine devices (3 wires per device) had been crimped together before connection to the junction box. There was no GPS input and then I realized that the Raymarine GPS antenna would have smarts in it to deliver its output via Seatalk, the same as the depth and wind devices. All of the corresponding Seatalk wires were spliced together, with the single Seatalk cable then going to the C120. I know from investigation that Arnold did earlier that Seatalk has a laughably simple structure and protocol, with no central control. So the question is why is the autopilot display reporting "Seatalk Failure" and the C120 not seeing any of the Seatalk devices? The only thing I can think of is that noise is getting into the system, either from a device or a bad connection. Regarding connections, they all looked OK to me and I jiggled them around while watching the C120 and got no success. I didn't go very far into isolating the autopilot from Seatalk largely because I didn't want to start cutting wires only to learn later that the problem was a simple one elsewhere. However, I did remove the fuse from the autopilot which should have made it dead in regard to the Seatalk network, and that got no result.
At noon we were at position 49S40, 53W48, making a n-n distance of 57 miles to 034T. We had been becalmed for 6 hours and were still waiting for wind.
With the impending light winds I thought that it was a good time to make the changeover to the mainsail. I dropped the trysail and stowed it in the cabin and fortunately I checked the main halyard up the mast before unfurling the mainsail. It was wrapped around the one step above the second crosstrees. I managed to free that but then noticed that there was a second wrap, between the first and second crosstrees, and it was behind a cord. I have a vague recollection of tying the loose end of that broken cord and I must have been too focused on the cord and not falling off that I didn't notice that I was trapping the main halyard behind a step. For now there was nothing to be done but put the trysail back up and wait for a quiet day so that I could go all the way to the top of the mast to sort things out. Until that calm and dry day came I would be sailing in a degraded mode. This step-cord business had caused me a lot of trouble and I must confess that it was self inflicted.
While all of this was going on fog began to roll in and the visibility dropped to less than half a mile. What had begun as a brilliant clear day had clouded up fast. Soon after the trysail was up and we were sailing to a feeble wind I began to hear a fog horn at about 5 seconds every 30 seconds. The sound was coming from ahead and it was getting louder. I was on the wrong tack anyway so I started the engine, tacked the boat, and began to move to the ENE. The horn still seemed to be getting closer so I turned on the radar. The radar went into standby mode OK but when I hit the command to transmit nothing happened. I remember being told that with modern radar all of the processing is done at the dome, so possibly the data was being passed to the C120 via the Seatalk protocol. It's a shame. I was planning to use the radar as a substitute for the AIS ship detection system. The only thing that the C120 may be useful now was for displaying AIS targets because the data is via the NMEA 0183 connection. To me this had exposed the big flaw of an integrated system.
OK, so I decided to hail the fog horn via VHF 16. "Fog horn at approximate position ... do you copy?" After 2 minutes of no response: "Fog horn approximately 185 miles NE of East Falklands, do you copy?" A minute later he responded. I explained that I was on a small yacht, gave my position, course and speed, then asked him if I would be OK. He said No Problem and that he was 3 miles away. I gave him my thanks.
By then a light wind had established itself and we were moving roughly NE at 2.5 knots and now that we were moving again I felt better, but I was determined to get the mast step problem solved as soon as possible.
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1 comment:
Take care lone sailor...weather changes regularly.
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