DAY 24 - Fax Battle...

The boat continued on its NE course with good wind for the rest of the afternoon.

I had the usual evening radio sessions. Richard was sailing slowly in a northerly direction with an easterly wind. It was not the ideal course but it was taking him up to the latitude of his destination and besides he must have enjoyed sailing again with the direction being less important. It looked like Ryan and his crew were going to be OK with the weather. From the 48 hour wind/wave fax that I had downloaded earlier it looked like they were far enough eastward to escape the 7 meter seas just a few degrees to their west. It looked like they would encounter strong following winds and 3 meter sees. Hopefully they had dodged a bullet.

Before I retired I noticed that the wind had slackened (as expected) and rolled out some jib. The boat was still heading toward Vancouver Island and about 5 kt. The clock alarm went off at midnight and I could hear and feel that the boat was still sailing OK and went back to bed without looking at the chart plotter. This may have been a mistake because in the morning I found the boat heading S at about 3 kt. The track indicated that the wind shift had happened at around midnight. I had sailed SSE for about 10 nm but this was not as bad as it looked because the adverse track had been almost tangential to Cape Flattery. It was a cheap lesson learned. Unfortunately I cannot mount a compass on the forward cabin bulkhead because the big speakers of the sound system totally distort the reading.

I turned the boat and tried to sail but it was all wrong. There was a falling but still lumpy sea, the sea swell was off my beam causing a roll, and the apparent wind decreased to 5 kt when sailing downwind. I dropped all sail and had breakfast. After breakfast I took advantage of the lull to run the engine for an hour to charge up my batteries because I did not expect much charging help today from the wind or the sun.

After I shut the engine down and while the boat was till moving toward my destination under autopilot control I rolled out a bit of jib on my port side and found myself doing about 1.7 kt without too much flogging of the sail because of its small area.

I have been having problems with the Getfax weather fax program for weeks. At frequent and random times it crashes. I see a series of about 10 error message windows pop up in quick succession, each slightly displace from the previous one giving the effect of a pack of cards but forcing the eye to move with each pop-up frame. The whole thing is over in 3 seconds at which time the Getfax window disappears taking what there is of the fax with it and the error messages disappear too, before I have had a chance to read them.

I had been exchanging information on this problem with Jim at Sailmail technical support but I realized that without the content of those error message there was little prospect of a diagnosis and cure or at least a workaround. The Windows application and system event logs showed nothing. I had to try to capture that error message and here I got desperate and imaginative.

I took my digital camera and aimed it at the screen ready push the trigger as soon as I saw the error first box flash up. Eventually it happened and I was able to react quickly enough to get a photo of the 9th (and probably last) error pop-up frame. I uploaded the image to the Toshiba laptop and found it to be fuzzy and unreadable. I then tweaked the image with a photo software package until I was able to read the message: ACER VIOLATION OF ADDRESS 00401824 IN MODULE "GETFAX.EXE" READ ADDRESS 52ACFC48. I have passed this information on to Jim.

In the meantime I make do by watching the fax image with a magnifying glass as it emerges on the screen and recording the important data. As soon as I have the part of the fax that I want I manually terminate it which results in its being stored in the fax folder. If Getfax crashes at the beginning of the fax I restart it and am left with an out-of-phase image that is still readable. I can get by with this but soon I will bring the Toshiba laptop on line to see if the error persists. If the fax is not super important to me I'll let it run and often I get 3 or 4 complete faxes with no crashes.

At midday we were at 45.33N, 136.23W. The noon-noon distance was 94 nm and we were tantalizing close to a milestone: 504 nm from Cape Flattery.