Sea berth surprises (& other tidbits) Part 3

8º 06.082s 136º 28.182w

Sun May 05 2019

OK, so let’s consider autopilot behavior and our available sail plans.

Our autopilot is named after our dearly departed friend Travis “Chevy” Chevallier who sailed with us last year, along with his lovely lady Cheryl. A former work associate, Chevy was a brilliant test pilot and a great friend whose candle burned out way too soon. His loss to a sudden illness left us all stunned, to me it was like General Patton getting run over by a car after spending his life fighting wars.

Anyway, Chevy lives on in the form of our autopilot, a Simrad AC42 with a big hydraulic ram, the one with the cylinder separated from the pump by 1-meter high pressure hoses. Just couldn’t fit the single piece unit in there. I purposely chose this unit as it’s oversized for our gross weight, and it has enough cylinder stroke to maintain full rudder travel, a big deal when maneuvering in tight quarters. Chevy is loafing in terms of overall control loads, but he’s a busy guy especially in these flakey winds and following seas we’ve enjoyed for so many days.

Chevy has a mode by which he can steer us to the apparent wind angle. That means we can trim the sails to that wind angle then ask him to hold that angle as constant as possible. It works really well when we’re close hauled, a little less so when the wind is on the beam, and a little less so again when the wind is back around 120 degrees and aft. Control activity seems to climb as the wind goes aft, and that translates into a lot more power consumed. Don’t forget we live on batteries that need recharging at regular intervals.

Add to the above points the issue of a rolling boat. When we have seas with a beam component we roll as previously discussed. The roll angle amplitude isn’t a lot, but if you look up at the mast head and observe the wind speed and direction sensor, it’s doing the watoosie. That back and forth change in measured angle is just an artifact of the rolling motion, but it changes the instantaneous measurement of apparent wind and Chevy ends up working his ass off trying to adjust heading to compensate. The B&G chart plotter can display rudder control activity versus heading change, and it’s not a pretty sight. I think if I get down in the weeds of the autopilot gains I can clean some of that up, but I’d rather not monkey with it during this trip, because if I break it we’ll all get to hand steer for the duration. Would cause great consternation amongst the crew, and during the discussion of the dining arrangements I would likely end up on bread and water rations. Hopefully the tech support guys at B&G can offer me some tips on system optimization; they will hear from me after we anchor at Nuka Hiva.

Now let’s consider the sail plan options available on JollyDogs. We just replaced our main and jib; got the new Zoom main through Jamie Gifford and we’re extremely pleased with the construction and performance. Got the new jib from Neil Tasker at Barracouta in Australia; he supplied the original sails for JollyDogs and knows these boats inside and out, and we’re very pleased with Neil’s work as well. Those sails cover the majority of conditions we’ve encountered where the apparent wind has been from 45 degrees to about 130 degrees, and anywhere near 15 knots or above. As the wind has climbed in velocity and correspondingly the seas have gotten bigger and often sloppier, we’ve put in reef 1 and then reef 2 on the main sail, and funnily enough just about maintained the same speed with a tremendous improvement in comfort. Things got interesting enough during those reef 2 hours that we furled a portion of the jib just to slow ourselves down a bit, maintaining that level of comfort and perhaps improving the aerodynamic balance of the boat.

In lighter airs and an apparent wind angle of about 70 to 130 degrees, we’ve flown our screecher instead of the jib. It lives in a bag and is built with a soft furler on the luff, and it gets installed on the bowsprit, sharing the same halyard we’d use for the Parasailor. It’s a big ole thing, similar to a code zero that one might find on a monohull. Swapping from the jib to that bad boy will get us an extra knot or more in the right conditions, but it doesn’t like lumpy seas; in lumps it sounds like a giant bowl of Rice Krispies, popping and cracking. Makes me wince, as snatch loads are terrible for just about everything.

If the wind comes farther aft than about 130 degrees and we’re not keen to jibe downwind, we can switch to either the Parasailor or the simbo rig. The simbo is super easy to deal with, and loves anything from dead downwind to about 30 degrees apparent wind port or starboard of the stern, so about +/- 150 degrees apparent. The rig is simply our new jib and our old jib both hanked on to the roller furler; fortunately it has 2 slots so it’s easy. To get the luff tension right for each sail we lash them individually. We’ve built up barber haulers to pull each jib out sideway using a line with an alpine loop set between the forward and midships cleats on each ama. We secure a low friction ring loop onto the alpine loop, run a second sheet from each sail clew through that low friction ring then aft to a winch, and Robert’s your dad’s brother! Easy peasy. The simbo setup will get us a little bit more than one third of the true wind speed and once it’s set up, it’s virtually maintenance free. Leave one time to write blog posts.

If the wind is anywhere aft of perhaps 90 degrees apparent and under around 18 knots AND it’s daytime we can fly the Parasailor. Jimmy Cornell brags about them, but I bet he gets a commission on each one sold. It’s a high tech looking symmetrical spinnaker with a super cool ram air canopy vent/airfoil thing aligned with the horizon. Not quite set it and forget it, but the airfoil does help keep it inflated when the wind direction changes significantly and we’re scrambling to re-trim. It’s happy once the wind is around 8 knots true, and we boogaloo when the true wind is in the low to high teens. Above that the control loads begin to get pretty high and we start to chicken out. I’m sure we’ll get more comfortable with it as time passes. It used to be Thad’s sail, so it’s been great that he’s had some fun flying it. He’ll have more fun today, as the wind has gotten so deep we’re actually a little off course to keep our VMG (velocity made good) up until Mr. Sun makes an appearance. We have a policy of not flying the Parasailor at night, but in the right conditions, and when sooooooo close to the finish line, we just might reconsider. Only if everyone agrees to leap out of bed at the first sign of trouble. By now Jamie is rolling his eyes. . .

So there it is, that’s how we make JollyDogs go. If the wind gets down to around 5 -6 knots on the beam we can putter along at around 3 knots, but we’re not the most patient souls and we do have diesels (one and a spare, I like to think). More about auxillary propulsion another time.