A tale of woe... Oh and RAIN

Well It's raining outside, and I have antifouling to put on Snow Petrel... Forecast - rain on and off for the rest of the week. I should have put the paint on yesterday morning before the rain started, but I hadn't primed any of the bare metal patches (only some small pinholes 1-2mm diameter) so I did that instead.

So now if I can get the bottom dry enough for one coat of antifouling I will be right. If not well, I'd rather not think about that, be positive, you know.

On the plus side I have taken off the tiller and planed it back and reshaped it. It has always been a bit of a hefty lump of wood. Rather ugly but strong. I have never gotten around to doing anything about it because I want a telescopic fancy aluminium tiller so I have always seen this as a temporary tiller. Anyway I decided I needed to have at least one nice looking thing to cheer me up and I have planed it down to a nice shape and started varnishing it. As soon as I started planing it I realised they did a nice job of laminating the tiller with alternating light and dark strips... WOW it's going to look great. I have put alot more taper into it and it will fit the hand better then the original old lump of wood.

It's amazing what hides under the old grey wood...

I have spent alot of time investigating stray currents because they may be the cause of some of the failure of the base layers of paint. I think that it is mostly due to the old age of the bottom paint and million layers of old antifouling but I want to eliminate any stray currents before I strip all the paint of and start again. It would be heart breaking go to all the trouble of doing this and then find the new paint coming off as well... So if anyone has any tips on a good stray current meter or using a multimeter to find leaks let me know. Some interesting sites on stray currents; this one seems very good, Yacht survey - and I would like to find out more about these meters and if they are any good or just a dressed up multimeter (I have heard one fellow around here swear by them). What other options are out there for testing? I guess my anodes have started working for the first time in 7 years or so so that makes me slightly suspicious. But they still aren't working hard.

I also would like to hear from anyone with information about sandblasting vs. mechanically cleaning with a sander. Or other options such as ultra-high pressure water blasting, soda or dry ice blasting. More research for me before the next slip in six-eight months time...

Anyway the sun is peaking out... time to head down to the boat

Cheers

Ben

BTW what does the rest of the world call coming out of the water, we call it slipping the boat.

More electrical drivel..

Open heart surgery. A terminal problem

You remember how I said electrics may well give you more grief than storms, well here we are, electrical grief, After my deep discharge of my batteries (I don't like to take them under 12v if I can help It). I checked the following day to see what voltage they were at.... !@>! 12.1volts with no load, and full sunlight. I twiddled with the panels, angling them toward the setting sun.. still no change.

Right.. don the Sherlock hat, and think... (ouch). Since I was getting no charge from either of the two panels the problem must be where they join at the regulator. Elementary my dear Watts-in (sorry..). looking closely I noticed the negative wire was loose, and the heat from the loose connection had burnt and melted the connection strip (see the photo). I can only guess that the deeper than normal discharge had resulted in the full charge being pumped in for the first time in a little while, creating too much heat, either that or I had bumped the wires at some point... or more likely a combination of both. Case solved.

Anyway yesterday I fixed it, after all it does the battery no good to sit half charged for any length of time. I cut away the melted plastic and put it all back together. With enormous satisfaction I noticed the smiley face on the screen saying thank you after I faced the panels back into the sun (I shaded them for safety) and turned the batteries back on.

All fixed, note the smiley face!!

While I was at it I checked all the battery cells with the hydrometer (Being very careful not to get any acid in my eyes,skin or on my clothes). Although all the individual cells (6 cell per 12v battery) are all in the red they all floated at about the same level, and needed just a bit of de-mineralised water to top them up. So maybe there is more life in them than I thought. If  I had one cell that was using lots of extra water, and floated much lower than the others it is really bad news (actually a terminal disease, with no effective cure), and this dodgy cell will keep sucking the lifeblood out of any battery connected to it. This is one thing I like about standard batteries, I'm not sure how easy it is to check the heath of an AGM or other sealed battery?

Buoyed by my success I also installed the 800w inverter. Now I feel very pleased with myself... I think regular maintenance might improve my heath as well as the boats.

By coincidence John has just written a good article on batteries here and it talks alot about equalising the batteries, for those of you that don't know about this it means gently overcharging the battery's to break the sulfates off the lead plates. My solar panel regulator supposedly does this every month, but I need a good sunny day. The only point here is to be careful that you don't blow up sensitive electrical gear, because the voltage can go up to 16 volts or so. Also be very careful of battery gas and water levels. For more info about equalisation see here.

I need to work out how to easily isolate one battery for equalisation while using the other one, Guess it will just be abit of fiddling with wires. One other point, my regulator cuts off the load (ie ALL power like lights and GPS etc at about 11.2v), so I have rigged an emergency bypass switch, this also disables all battery monitoring, like charge in and charge out, but could be good in emergencies.

A note on battery safety, having seen an exploded battery.. not a good look and very dangerous (not to mention the cost!), don't over charge them and be very careful of the hydrogen gas released when charging hard. It goes up (lighter than air), and it goes BANG...so ventilate well and always use insulated tools, (or at least wrap lots of insulating tape around the handles) to prevent a dead short if you drop it or are otherwise clumsy like me, Oh and don't wear metal Jewellery. Also Battery acid is nasty stuff, wear safety goggles. Oh yeah.. and they are bloody heavy.

The point of all this waffle is that batteries and charging is a big deal, you need to understand your system, and the simpler it is the easier it will be to maintain, fix and understand. This is why I do not have a fridge or freezer, the continued draw would totally overwhelm my system, and I would be forced to run the engine to compensate, and then I would need a smart regulator for my alternator, then extra batteries, then more fuel... well you get the idea.

Cheers

Ben

PS I am working on Storm Tactics part 2, but with my one finger typing it is rather slow going..

Snow petrel battery power

Two solar panels getting iced up.. Not much charge going in..

Yesterday at lunch break my fellow builders and I discussed batteries and solar panels and the like. We talked about using wind, solar and the other option of trailing a water generator. At this point I should come clean and reveal that my fellow builders are all sailors as well. My dad (head honcho) with NZ maid, two of my brothers with assorted boats like the Proa (see the videos page.. Top left), And another friend who is rebuilding and living aboard a 34 footer.

Living aboard a boat for any length of time (away from the marina) quickly shows that power in a battery is your lifeblood. And there are plenty of vampire like appliances to suck this lifeblood away, If you are silly enough let them get anywhere near your batteries.

I used to manage quite well with one 40 watt solar panel, It kept the basic lights running and the radio playing, or occasional bit of watching a small LCD TV. But things could get a bit desperate on cloudy weeks, and I reckon the 50% discharges haven't done my batteries any good.

I had a wind generator (an Air Marine) on the last boat, but found that athough it worked well in (Windy) Wellington and did OK at sea, It was not as good as the solar panels at running a base load, I either had no power or far to much, In general the average good anchorage was too gusty to get any useful power. The 40watt solar panel was a huge improvement, trickling in a good reliable charge most days. With my small two battery system I cannot store the huge amount of power that the wind generator puts out in any decent wind, So after a couple of hours of charge the wind generator was switched off for peace and quiet.

So if I spend the money on another wind generator it will probably be something like the Rutland 504 which puts out a pitiful amount of power but is small, quiet, safe and works well in strong winds. Most of the bigger ones have to be shut down for safety in gale force conditions, right when the solar panels are often under cloud, and when you don't need any power issues. Saying that, in some places like the trade winds or with a good reliable sea breeze wind generators may make more sense?

My father uses a tow generator at sea and loves it. It powers the autopilot and the small fridge, and works well whenever the boat is moving. This was our backup for the trip to Antarctica, but we didn't need to use it because the solar panels provided plenty of power. Obviously the tow generator only works at sea, and not at anchor.

The system that works for me now is two 40 watt panels on tilting mounts and with a top quality regulator/battery monitor and two combined starting/house 70 amp hour batteries. The batteries are standard wet cell lead acid, They are not sealed, so I can  top up the fluid and check them with a hydrometer every so often (actually not often enough). They are cheap and seem to last well even given considerable abuse (I nearly boiled them dry last year), They are stuffed now, after 6 years, and are only on life support due to the solar panels. This is a good innings (I think three years is about average) and I feel I have got my moneys worth out of them. At this stage the jury is still out on the sealed AGM and Gel cells. I think I will just use cheap standard batteries again, the modern charge regulators pulse charge them, equalize them occasionally and generally keep the batteries much happier than in the past, extending their life considerably.

If you look at this link It will give you some idea of just how hard it is to run a large complex boat electrically. I avoid alot of these problems by being a power control freak, and by having minimal power draw, no fridge/freezer, no wanky wind and boat speed instruments (can draw more than you think), no big chartplotter, and a windvane rather than autopilot, It Is a good feeling to know I can cut my needs down to just one small light and a book.

I have a third 40 watt panel to install, and I will probably put in a standalone engine start battery, With this in place and new house batteries I should have plenty of power for my computer.. With Modern LED lighting I may even have some power to spare..

Sextants and GPS Take II

After all The Iphone stupidity I now have my Big 800w inverter dodgily clipped onto the batteries . Its happily running my computer, But like a vampire it is slurping the life blood from my old pair of geriatric batteries (I can tell it's enjoying the feast because the fan is buzzing away happily). The voltage is rapidly dropping from 12.2v down toward the 12.0v mark... But if I type real fast I may just get this post finished before the interior lights begin to fade.  The joys of being on a mooring.

Now back to the Sextant issue, I now finally have a photo to add.

see I told you it was a Beauty, A Freiburger, never been used. It's a very close relative to the Russian SNO-T sextant (The T stands for tropical apparently). I know this because My friend also lent me a very interesting book called "The Nautical Sextant" that gives in-depth details of the inner workings of every sextant since Sir Isaac Newton first thought of the concept. It will keep me awake again tonight if the batteries hold out long enough...

We discussed my sextant today at work over lunch (I worked as a builders labourer today) and we compared it to a GPS, Most of my fellow builders reckoned they wouldn't cross an ocean without a sextant and almanac, but aside from the rather remote possibility that all the satellites might fall out of the sky.. Or a lightning bolt might fry all 4 GPS units we would have replacing the sextant. No one could come up with a realistic scenario that didn't involve some sort of doomsday apocalyptic situation requiring the sextant.

That being said, I wouldn't cross a reasonable chunk of water without a sextant, maybe for superstitious reasons as much as anything else, I mean it is really tempting mr fate isn't it. There is also more to the sextant than just a backup, somehow carrying one makes you feel more independent, you are not relying on high tech satellites to get you from A to B. You could do it on your own if you wanted to. The satellites become just a convenience, not a necessity. For me at least that is one of the things I like about being at sea, a feeling of self reliance.

The other thing about carrying a sextant is that it links you to the seaman past, to Cook, to Columbus, and even in some ways to the amazing Polynesian navigators, they all had to navigate using the stars, sun and moon. You are a part of a tradition, and it feels right.

The last 1000 NM of the trip from Tasmania to Chile was done using Celestial Navigation only (except Dave who had the odd secret GPS peak for safety). The landfall was the most exciting ever, knowing we had found our position and navigated by the sun and stars. This is something every sailor should feel at least once.

Anyway the vampire has sucked the life blood down to 11.8 volts so if I don't stop soon I will kill the batteries for good. Since you've missed a few photo's I will give you two today, I have finally found a use for Snotty the sextant, It makes a great mouse table, and every thing on a boat needs two uses ...

Cheers

Ben

Ps If you can think of a plausible reason for 4 waterproof, isolated GPS units (including one in a Faraday cage) to simultaneously die, for more than a couple of days, I would very impressed. (note this is a hypothetical situation)

Edit 15/2/11 After discussion with Chris at Brilliant star see here for more details and also the comments on this post. It seems we have our answer, there is a remote possibility a large enough solar flare could compromise the GPS, Galileo, glonass and irridium satellites and radio for long enough to make carrying a sextant across an ocean a good idea?

From the geology.com website they suggested that normal flares would only reduce the accuracy by 50 meters or so, not a big deal if you are navigating defensively. And they mentioned an 11 year solar flare peak 2013…

However the chances of an large enough solar event to wipeout these systems for any significant period seems remote, And it would also cause chaos ashore, so it falls into my doomsday apocalyptic situation. By coincidence today has the largest event this solar cycle according to (see I am turning into a journalist..) these guys

BUT I will still carry a sextant... And I will also keep an eye on the space weather and also be aware that a strong aurora and poor radio propagation may also indicate reductions in gps accuracy.

A Big thanks to Chris onboard Brilliant Star for the Info

for further info see

The 500 year flare.. NOAA
NOAA flare scales

Iphones and Idiots

Had a premature posting problem, so now you know I have an Iphone, and I am also not very good at driving it.. So yes I come clean, I am one of those Latte drinking (actually a flat white) Iphone types.
So today due to being on the boat with a flat computer battery I thought I would try to email in a post about my lovely new sextant. But while halfway through composing my masterpiece of modern literature, my far to fat forefinger acidentally tapped the far to small screen in the spot called send.. so off went my half finished post into the interweb with that stupid iphone signature that I nomally delete..
Anyway the thing doesn't support flash or something so It won't let me go back in and edit the post on my site, hence this longwinded explanation, but anyway you can still answer my question in the last post, what to you think, are sextants like tits on a bull? (ie useless)
While on the subject of phones, for us power starved cruisers this little phone is a marvel, internet at your fingertips, draws next to nothing powerwise. Stores songs and brilliant sailing podcasts from Furledsails.com (you can look them up) And it also stores charts, for $15 (Navionics) I have the whole of Australia stored on It. (it even updates them for me!) Its now a pocketsized chartplotter (It has a built in GPS). Absolutley amazing.... now if only those screens were bigger.

Cheers from Snow Petrel

PS I'm sure the other brand smartphones are just as good, and infact the 3G part of this phone has died so its reception is pretty bad out of town. And in my defense mine is a crappy old 8 meg 3G not the way cooler 3gs or iphone 4, but if anyone from apple is reading this I do accept sponsership...

Sextant and Tits on Bulls

I just bought a Sextant today, I had absolutly no intention of getting one, It just sort of happened.

I brushed the cobwebs off the hatch of Snowpetrel and shook the cockroaches out of the sails, then sailed across to Bruny Island for BBQ. The next day I popped in to see a mate who showed me a sextant he had aquired in a garage sale. I checked it and adjusted out the slight errors, and just held it, unlike my old plastic davis mk 15 this had a "Real" sextant feel, so much like the sextants I learnt to use on the ships. Anyway I bought it.. 500 bucks for a virtually new Freiberger with a lovely wooden case. Why are they so expensive asked karen? 500 bucks I could have bought about 4 GPS units, which would do the same job quicker, more accurately...etc.

So are sextants about as much use as tits on a bull? should they be resigned to antique stores with the walker log?
Sent from my iPhone