Day 23, March 29 - Poor Sailmail Prospects

I woke up just after midnight to find that we had passed the 3000 mile milestone and were now 2980 miles from Fremantle. We had been still moving well all night and had made 70 miles from the noon marker. We were at latitude 39S32 and I noted that St Paul Island was at 38S42. It was still 1000 miles away but the iceberg incident had forced me up to the vicinity of the island's latitude and it was not too soon to make sure that I knew exactly where it was. I found the dividers, rolled out the paper chart, put on a second pair of glasses for close work, and carefully measured it to be 11 miles south of the waypoint. I would have gotten the original coordinate from the internet but it was safer to rely on the chart and to move its location south rather than north. It was a good exercise because on the chart I noticed a sea mount just to the south of the island that rises to only 90 meters from the surface, enough to cause turbulence on the surface and to be avoided. After a few sweeps of the radar I returned to bed.

I have receive more information on Jeanne Socrates' equipment problems aboard Nereida and she appears to be having a difficult time of it. Apparently she found herself in 6 meter seas, which damaged her radar mast that also supports her GPS antennas, and the whole thing is loose. Her wind charger has been knocked out and she needs it urgently enough to have asked the Round the World committee for permission to stop in Tasmania for repairs at anchor on the basis that parts be handed to her and she does the rest. There is a question of how she will be able to manage a dead lift of a new wind charger into position overhead. On Pachuca I have worked that out. I put a folded up wool blanket on the starboard solar panel, lift the charger with no blades from the cockpit seat up to the solar panel, then drag the blanket to the stern near the mounting pole. From there it is a short lift to the pole. However, even this needs a certain amount of physical strength. On this boat if I had lifting problems, desperation would drive me to find a way of using the topping lift to do the hoisting. As for radar poles, I've never liked them and see them as a cop out from taking the trouble and expense of mounting the radome on the mast where it belongs because there it is higher and safer. On the bright side, Jeanne's got good communications and support, is personally safe, and I'm sure that she will complete the circumnavigation OK.

I finished entering the positions in my written log as waypoints in OpenCPN. Unfortunately I was remiss in not beginning my entries until 14 Dec 2011, as I was approaching Cape Horn. Nevertheless the result is good. At a glance one can see where the boat was on each day of the various passages. I have backed the waypoint to a flash drive. From Fremantle I will email the small (1kb)waypoint file to Arnold so that he can load it into his copy of OpenCPN and to anyone else who may be interested. (OpenCPN can be downloaded for free.)

I visited the foredeck for the first time in 2 days. I put another strap at the forward end of the mainsail to tidy up a loose bit that annoyed me. The shock cord at the front end of the whisker pole had come loose again. I re tied it with a triple knot then tied a couple of loops of thin rope between the beak of the pole and the pulpit. All else looked OK. I'm expecting strong winds tomorrow and everything on that deck must be in order.

Sailmail provides a "propagation" tool which has proven to be a good guide of the usefulness of the frequencies of any station selected, based on the position of the boat and the distance and direction to the station. It presents a matrix with a row for each frequency of the station an a column for every hour of the day. Hopeless frequencies are in red, marginal frequencies are in amber, and feasible frequencies are in green. In addition to a color, each square has a number from 1 to 100, 100 being the best. Today I used this tool to investigate the prospects for Sailmail service as we progress further away from S Africa and they are not good. At 067E, the midpoint of this passage, the best cells rate in the 80's there is a 92 and a 93. At 080E the best rating is 71. At 090E the best rating is 62. At 100E the top rating is 64.

But at 0100E we will be getting close to Australia with its Sailmail station on the east coast and there will be a top rating of 90. At 110E I will be practically home (which is at 115E) and the top rating is 91. Stepping back toward mid passage, at 090E the top rating is 77 and at 080E the top rating is 65. S. Africa and Australia are the only two choices I have, and unfortunately for me the Australian station is on the east coast, no doubt to provide good coverage of the Tasman Sea and to the north. There should be another Sailmail station on the west coast of Australia, just as the Australian government has done for its long range marine service. My guess is that the low traffic in the southern Indian Ocean was deemed not to warrant the investment.

I have never had much luck with service from a frequency rated at less than 85. Last night it took me an hour to find a useable service from frequencies rated at 95 and when I did get connected the transmission rate was 200 bytes (characters) a minute. Last night's blog and a short position report took over 12 minutes to get out, with many retries. Because of the slow transmission rates I have not requested a grib file or spot forecast for over 10 days and have relied on SAMMNet for my weather.

The point is that we are sailing into long section of this passage that will present difficulties with Sailmail. I'll keep writing the daily blogs and try hard to get them out but no blogs should not be a cause of concern.. With the vagaries of radio propagation there are bound to be successes at times, and hopefully I'll be able to clear the backlog periodically. If too many days pass with no Sailmail then I'll ask Graham to email a message to Brenda for the blog stating that all is well.

The day's noon numbers were good:

POS 39S39, 56E51
NND 139 nm
DMG 1884 nm
DTG 2909 nm

The noon-noon distance was very pleasing, to say the least. It was not achieved by running hard before a strong wind and rough sea but through 10-20 kt winds on the beam, sometimes a bit forward, and sometimes a bit aft; and all for the last 3 days with headsail only. We were 2900 miles from home and 479 miles from the midpoint of the passage.

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