Enough about boat systems for a bit – my brain is tired. A thought about energy efficiency though. . . there’s this really cool thing called a Wonder Bag. We got one recently and Isabel loves it. One of the cooking energy saving devices we have is a pressure cooker – I bought her a Kuhn Rikon about 20 years ago, and we carry spares on board. It’s great, it’s quiet, and it makes cooking many dishes really fast. Combine it with the Wonder Bag, and suddenly you’ve got a slow cooker, and the stews and such taste much better when they’ve had all day to cook and meld and mellow. Order one online, pay a little extra, and some poor family in Africa gets one too. I like that business model.
We’ve just sailed over 2000 miles in 13 days – not a record by any means, but our personal best for highest average speed over this long a run. Currently we’ve averaged 6.6 knots in a large variety of sea state and wind conditions. We both continue to marvel at how well our Seawind 1160 sails in all conditions, but most critically light airs. We’re still doing 4 knots SOG with 6 knots true wind well aft of the beam, apparent wind 90-100 degrees. Right now the true wind has crept up to 12 knots, at about 130 degrees aft of the starboard bow. The seas are pretty flat, and with the apparent wind up around 95 degrees we’re seeing speeds over 7 knots. Lighter winds are real-world cruising conditions, and if you’re boat won’t sail well in those you better bring a lot of diesel. What’s making our boat do so well is the combination of our Zoom mainsail, a tough cruising sail, and our Neil Tasker( Barracouta) screecher, a sail original to the boat. It’s 13 years old now and unfortunately the laminated “performance” fabric is now starting to delaminate, which is a real bummer as we’d like to have this sail available to get to Seattle in a couple months. Generally when laminated sails start to delam, repairs are futile. Turns out that laminated fabrics don’t like hot/humid tropical environments, so what a surprise that our 13 year old sail is dying.
For us this has been an easy passage overall with only a couple of really difficult days, ITCZ was pretty much a non-event, very few squalls on the passage and only 1 with lightning nearby. We’ve been very fortunate, and yes we did monitor the passage weather and resist going until the day we departed. Our pals on Pitu and Easy left at the same time; Pitu a much faster boat seemed to have a pretty easy and quick passage, but Easy got pasted with huge winds and seas, mechanical problems, squalls and flakey winds for days on end. Captain Mike likened the passage to sailing through a mogul field. He knows a bit about that, being a former Olympic snow boarder.
We changed from Raymarine to B&G electronics in 2014, and we’re still delighted with the equipment. Currently we’re sporting a Zeus3 12” chart plotter, and the human factors engineering behind the display interfaces is excellent. The only gripe on the entire system is the blasted Airmar speed wheel device, a DST800 which we added in 2019. It’s impossible to keep the speed wheel working and I’ve concluded calibrating it for a decent range of speeds is an exercise in futility. It seems to have failed completely now, so it may get replaced with a new ultrasonic unit. Or nothing. We have forward scan sonar and that’s been an absolutely worthwhile investment – especially when creeping into shallow anchorages and trying to avoid bommies and such.
Screw performance sails. Tough cruising sails built for long life in the sun, challenging winds and hot/humid environments is the only way to go. Sails are a big financial investment and if they rip on a long passage it’s a pain to repair. We’ll sacrifice a little bit of high end performance any day for the security and reliability of well-designed and built sails. Thank you, Jamie Gifford at Zoom Sails, and you, Neil Tasker at Barracouta in Australia!
Oh, There is a reason it’s called “fishing”, not “catching”. . .
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