Day 4, 10 March - Pactor Modem Problem

At 8 PM last night normal Sailmail service through the Africa station was restored and I sent out blog entries for days 1-3. I then tried to send out some replies to messages that had come in and the Pactor modem had lost contact with the computer. Normally the Pactor modem shows up as COM5 on the machine, but no matter into which USB port I inserted the Pactor cable the computer did not see it. I brought out the spare computer and got the same result. I then swapped in a spare cable and still no joy. I then noticed that the lights on the Pactor modem are not normal. At this point it looks serious because at about $3,000 per modem I do not have a spare, and without a Pactor modem I have no Sailmail communication. At this point it appears that I will have to send occasional messages to blog via SAMMNet. I don't want to burden Graham an Sam with too much email work on my behalf, so perhaps a weekly update will have to do. At this point the situation looks grim and depressing. Perhaps in the morning I'll find the solution.

I stopped the engine at 11 PM and went to sleep. I wasn't willing to motor all of the way to 40S so I may as well take a break when it suited me.
I woke up at the crack of dawn to the new reality email communication for the rest of this passage. I feel that I am letting the blog down and want to apologize, even though these sentiments are irrational. I will pass the news to SAMMNet and ask if they will pass on an occasional status report along the lines of "Pos xxxxxS, yyyyyE, All Well". I will also have to rely on SAMMNet for my weather reports. By the time that the signal fades half way to Australia I should be able to receive weather faxes from Australia. We had drifted 7 miles to the west in 5 hours, which wasn't surprising given that we had a gentle easterly wind. After that jolt of insecurity I have dug out the Freiberger sextant and will polish up and try to improve my astro navigation. I want to get to the point where I can determine my position with the sextant, a copy of the nautical almanac, my sight reduction tables, an accurate clock, and a pencil and paper.

I spoke with Graham and Sam at both of the SAMMNet sessions. In the morning session I told them of my problem with the Pactor modem and that it was likely that I would have no email capability for the rest of the passage. Graham immediately asked about notifying someone and asked if I wanted him to report my positions to a web site. His previous message to Brenda had bounced because of a mistake in the address. We sorted that out and framed a message to her. During the afternoon session Graham confirmed that he had sent a message to Brenda and he was waiting for her reply. He had told her the web site where my positions would be reported - one other than the Pangolin site that I have been using. Later in the session I heard Graham talk about Jeanne Socrates aboard her boat Nereida. She was at 43S46, 076E12. The Australian mainland is about 115E, so she is still in the Indian Ocean. She is dealing with a problem with the water circulation system of her engine which prevents her from running it. I don't think that she is allowed to use the engine for propulsion but I am sure that she would love to run it for electrical power. If I heard correctly, she has changed the water pump but the problem is deeper than that. I could just see Mark shaking his head now that both of the boats he has been tracking are having technical problems.

Regarding my problem, although it is terrible that I have lost communication with my friends and the blog, the fact is that I've got what I need to get this boat to Australia safely: hull is well founded and the rigging and sails are in top condition. I regard electronics as the vulnerable area of modern sailing, as a convenience and luxury that one must be able to do without.

The weather report from the afternoon SAMMNet session was not good. Another high is headed my way and I can expect at least 3 more days of light winds. For serious winds I would have to get down to 43S. I had shut the engine off for the session and afterwards noted that our drift was now to the SW at less than a knot, rather than W as before. This was consistent with the Pilot Chart, which showed the Aghulas current curving toward the south to join the east-set southern ocean current as I moved South. By then I had motored for another 6 hours or so and was at latitude 38S337.

During the morning I dug out the Pactor CD and had a good look at the manual. Unfortunately it didn't show me any way to go forward with the problem. Then the AIS began to report a problem and stopped working The error message displayed on the chart plotter stated "12V" and I thought 'Oh shit, do I have a systemic electrical problem?'. But then I noted that with the engine running the house bank was reporting 14.3V and wondered if the AIS transponder was objecting to the high voltage. I had a look at the manual and sure enough the error meant that the voltage was out of specification. I immediately shut off the transponder and turned it back on when the engine was off and the resting voltage was at 13.3V, and it seemed to work fine.

At noon our position was 38S20, 20E27, giving us a n-n distance of 56 miles, largely from motoring.

In the afternoon I decided to take advantage of the calm conditions and top up the fuel tanks. I didn't want the tanks to get too low and wanted to get some hard data on my fuel consumption. Even though both fuel tanks are connected I like to fill from both sides so that I can give them each a dose of biocide. The fuel in the tanks already had biocide in them, as had the fuel containers. However, I am very freaky about the algal growth than can happen in the boundary between the fuel and water so I give the tanks another dose during the fuel transfer. I put 20 liters into the port tank and the starboard tank took 12 liters. So 32 liters had been consumed after 25 hours of engine running time, yielding an average of only 1.3 liters per hour. The tanks were now full and I still had 58 liters in the containers.

But I decided that it was time to stop fighting nature and accept the fact that after a fast start out of Cape Town I now had days of waiting ahead of me. After all, we were well away from the mainland, well south of the Aghulas bank and shipping traffic, the sea was calm, temperature moderate and sky sunny - and we were now drifting toward the south. Given that, I not only preferred to conserve my fuel supply, but also wanted to proceed to Australia with my fuel tanks full in order to minimize algal growth. The movie last night had been entertaining and the bean stew that I had cooked was outstanding, and I would do it again this night and as many nights as I had to wait. I remember the joy I had when I spent my first night on my first boat (Chiquita) all alone and beyond the sight of land. Wow! I was actually living on a boat! Well, 20 years on I've got to remember that this is what I wanted to do when I got the Sailing Bug at the ripe old age of 42. So the bottom line is: no more motoring until I either must recharge my batteries or I have reached Australia.

During the afternoon I attended to another problem that I thought was behind me. In trying to steer the boat in light winds the autopilot had moved the rudder hard over to where the linear drive was hammering the rudder quadrant into one of the wooden blocks that I had put at the end of the rudder travel below. I got a scare afterwards when I could not move the wheel. With a desperate heave I freed the wheel and decided that it was too risky to let this happen again. I dug out the manual then at the steering station saw that the rudder travel was 18 degrees but the autopilot was set to move the rudder up 20 degrees to either side. I thought that I had corrected this before but nevertheless changed the parameters again to reduce the travel to 15 degree.

I also did some sextant work. I took 3 sun sights and used the excellent "Navigator" software on my laptop to reduce them in an instant. My sextant work must have been acceptable because I got lines of position 0.8, 1.5 and 3.9 miles from my actual position. Tomorrow I'll reduce the sightings by hand.

Just before dark is saw that there was a light 7 or 8 kt breeze from the east. I thought that the sea might be just calm enough to allow the sail to stay full so I had a go. It's 6.30 PM now and for the last 2 hours we've been sailing south at a modest 3 kt. Let's hope that it lasts throughout the night. Better yet, after finishing a movie over a stiff brandy I checked the computer ports to make sure that COM11 and COM12 were up and ready for the navigation software and to my amazement I saw that COM5 wss up with the Pactor modem on it. I cannot understand it because I have done nothing other than be naughty with a couple of brandys.

If this item reaches the blog it means that there has been a minor miracle aboard Pachuca.

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I tried connecting to a Sailmail station but the Airmail3 software replied that COM5 didn't have CTS (Clear to Send?) and to check the connections. I had a look at COM5 with the Windows tool and the port was 'not ready, Code 10'. If I had access to the internet I could research this and if I had access to Sailmail I could get advice from Stephen in Australia and Arnold in the USA. But I don't.

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