Day 9, March 15 - Still Little Wind, Airvane Repaired

A weak NE wind sprang up at 6.30 PM but it was just strong enough to fill the headsail and get us moving at 4.5 kts to the SE. This was the first time I had raised sail in over 24 hours.

The Sailmail session brought in a message from Brenda to Graham of SAMMNet and myself on the voice broadcasts of High Seas weather coming out of Australia. This information will be valuable to me as I approach Australia, and Graham seemed keen to have it in order to advise boats that are headed that way. If, heaven forbid, I lose the Pactor modem again I'll now be able to get the weather directly from the HF radio.

At 8 PM UTC I successfully downloaded a weather fax out of the Wiluna station VMW in Western Australia on 7535 kHz. It was grainy but legible. It didn't cover the Indian Ocean but that wasn't the point. I now knew that I could get weather faxes out of Australia from my position 4000 miles away, and the reception should get steadily better.

It turned out to be a difficult night of sailing. The wind was much weaker than predicted and the headsail was fretting so much that I rolled it in to a smaller area to reduce the stress on the sail and rigging. We managed to average about 3 kts to the SE, though I figure that we could have achieved half of that speed by simply drifting ahull. At 8 AM we were at latitude 42S35, only 25 miles N of 43S but the grib file predicted no sailing wind after midnight tonight. I would have to be patient but planned to work my way to 45S when the wind returned.

Then I got a scare from the Pactor modem. COM5 disappeared again from the laptop so it could not communicate with the modem. At the back of the modem I noted that the cable was carrying the weight of one of those big square chokes. I could not find a quick way to support the cable so I removed the choke and reseated the cable. I still had no joy with seeing COM5 so I squirted some CRC electronic cleaner into the USB connector at the computer end of the cable, which was showing signs of rust. That didn't work so I plugged the cable into the USB port I normally use for the mouse and bingo, COM5 could be seen. I then moved the cable back to its normal USB port and now the Windows OS could see it there too. I connected to Sailmail and sent out 2 messages with no problem.

I am becoming more familiar with the Pactor modem and am less panicky and more confident in dealing with it. I must say that I did a superb job in mounting the modem. It is firmly held on a shelf that is suspended from the sturdy shelf of the HF radio above. So the modem doesn't move around and is protected from any water that might find its way into the compartment by the HF radio above it which is itself protected by a plastic cover over its top. None of the connectors at the back of the modem show any evidence of corrosion. I have written a diagram of the three cable connections so now I feel confident about removing the two round connectors to get to the square printer cable connector that its the focus of all of the attention.

At 8.15 AM I gave up and rolled in the headsail. According to two weather forecasts I should be in 10-15 kt winds going to 15-20 kts in a few hours. All I was seeing was a miserable 6 kt breeze. Our speed when "sailing" had been 2.9 kts to the SE. Five minutes later when things had settled down we were drifting at 1.7-2.0 kts to the SE. Pachuca was becoming a high tech Kon Tiki.

I cheered myself up by cooking the first real breakfast of the passage: two eggs and one sliced tomato fried in a pan, buttered toast, and believe it or not cheese that I had purchased in Brazil. I enjoyed both the cooking and the eating and I much regret making the snap decision at the grocery store not to purchase 2 or 3 dozen eggs for the trip. (I've got 3 eggs left.)

I had a very good session with Graham on SAMMNet at 11.30 AM. We agreed that for now I'll contact Sam on the 40 meter band at the 6.30 AM session and Graham on the 20 meter band at the 11.30 AM session. The wind forecast was disappointing. It looks like I will continue mostly lying ahull the rest of today, all day tomorrow, and until noon the following day (Sunday), when there will be a period of 36 hour of good winds. I will use the opportunity to slant further south, with 45S a my goal.

At noon our position was 42S40, 26E31 for a surprising n-n distance of 79 miles. Ten of those miles were due to the two hour engine run but the rest was a pleasant surprise. The saving grace in my problems with the lack of wind is the current.

Incidentally, the ship's clock is set to UTC, which is now about 3 hours behind my local time. So for example when I write that I saw first light at 3 AM as I did last night that's closer to 6 AM local time.

At about 1 PM a weak wind came up from the north I rolled out some sail and soon we were ambling along at 3 kts to the SE without the headsail flogging too much. I then turned my hand at the useful chore of the day, repairing the light weather airvane that had wound up in the cockpit floor a few nights earlier. I had been using one of the 2 spare heavy air airvanes, but they are narrower than the light weather one and given that I had shortened the airvanes so that they would fit under the davits I figured that they needed to have maximum area. The task was to cut the bottom 40mm off the airvane then cut two new slots to take the bolts used to clamp the airvane onto the main unit. These slots had to be of minimum width, the correct distance apart, at the correct angle, parallel, the the correct length. The slots had to be correct because they defined the angle at which the airvane rose from the monitor. The plastic was brittle and all I had to work with was a fine tooth panel saw and my drill set. I used the spare airvane to define the angle of the cut across the bottom and the slots for the bolts. I then cut off the bottom of the airvane which had collapsed after 4 years of use then managed to drill holes of the correct diameter at the head of the bolt slots without shattering the plastic, which had been my biggest worry. I then used the saw to cut along the marked lines to the holes I had drilled and now I had the slots. After tidying up the edges of the cuts with sandpaper I went to the monitor, took the heavy airvane off then fitted the repaired one with no problem at all. As far as I was concerned it was as good as new and should get me to Australia. OK, the airvane was now 40mm shorter but I didn't expect that to noticeably affect its performance.

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