Simon Says Byee
Catmojo
Matt
Fri 19 Jun 2020 08:43
lanzarote wpt = 28.49.203 13.55.507
Last full day sailing, and Simon Says "Bye" with his latest and last forecast inbound text. Big thanks to Simon for his weather info en route, his supportive texts, and his patience with me changing the start date and mixing up east and west. Maybe we'll meet up sometime later in the season and/or maybe when he's doing a transatlantic circuit like he vaguely threatened to do? We'll see.
I have slowed the boat to close into dry land at opf after daybreak tomorrow on Saturday 20th. Mainly the idea is that this should be safer, and I suppose worst case will be that we get sunnier video of the boat slamming into some rocks. But I think we'll be okay, seriously.
Obviously I am not at all sure what actual time we arrive Lanzarote, due to the undamped Raymarine ETA algoritm, which hardly justifies such a fancy description.
Speed= distance/time, so time=distance/speed - so to calculate the ETA you use the DTW =distance to waypoint and divide by speed towards the waypoint which gives Time To Go, and when added to current time gives an ETA.
Thing is though, instead of any smoothing of speed over the last (say) five or ten minutes, and/or allowing manual adjustment... Raymarine uses instantaneous speed over ground- our SOG. Or maybe the instantaneous VMG but whatever - Duh! Using instantaneous current SOG means the fancy Raymarine nav system displays our ETA as 3:08, 7:38,13:07, 09:14, 08:44 which all turn up and more, as fast you can read them on this page. No car-based satnav system is this crummy. They must KNOW it's not much good and hope nobody will say anything, it seems that bad? Or maybe they really don't know that it's needed and how to calculate it usefully?
Either way I oughta go and see them at Raymarine, especially the software bods. I'll make an appointment and then ring them up dozens of times whilst driving there to tell them I'll be 2 hours late, no wait!- 45minutes early. Oops, I mean 1hours and 10 minutes late, see? Hah!
I worked with programmy types in another life and they can be a slippery lot. If I did talk with them it could easily be a load of "Yes obviously we'd love to do that but the stack architecture can't handle it" and "certainly worth thinking about for the next version" tosh, as though VMG and ETA that uses smoothed not instaneous SOG is a luxury, when in fact it's like selling cars which don't have a built-in radio as a standard feature. So it oughta be there already, last year or even before that. Very poor effort. If they got paid last year, these features should Be There Already!
Anyhoo, not to worry. We got more nice messages from René in SXM who gave us the rules of Farkle and we'll have a go at that.
Oh and right on cue the Raymarine autopilot went on holiday and took us in a circle thinking that our SOG is 1 knot, which surely can't be true. Someone else's watch but I better stay up to steer while we Turn it of then on again twice .... and we're back on. I steered by compass and the stars for a few minutes, I think compass more accurate but the autopilot is pretty good... usually.
Next the topping lift has just chafed through - it's all go- and its braiding is coming down the mast. Hm. The topping lift holds the boom up when the sail is down. The sail will hold the boom up as normal until we're at anchor but we'll rig the spinnaker lines as backup in daylioght Friday. Busy night with things falling apart after a good beating on a transat.
The topping lift line was quite old but I must admit I took some mast weight on it a few hours ago, to brace the boom end between mainsheet, stretchy octoplait preventer and the topping lift. So Hum, I won't do that again unless someone says it's a really good idea but you likely smashed something as it should really be ok, OR it's a bad idea anyway and Oh tsk fancy not knowing that, and hardly surprised etc.
Anyway, the topping lift is shredded and since I already carefully explained to crew earlier in the trip how it acts as safety, I quite reasonably now had to re-reassure the now quite savvy crew that er Meh, it's not THAT vital really, because the 2nd reef line, sail and main halyard will hold up the boom, which if it DID fall down is limited by the metal bars of the cockpit cover so won't decapitate anyone, so no need to fret. Especially in the morning when we rig the spi lines, and later at anchor we'll have a go at replacing the topping lift with nice new line.
Yes, we have loads of lines and spare lines, one of them acquired due to mistakenly buying a main halyard long enough to go up and down the mast to pull the sail up, when it should have been up and down three times dammit due to the pulley thing, so that's a very long spare line, and easily long enough, but there's others, perhaps the Dyneema bit tougher.
This morning Ampi is at the helm jiving away to some music oblivious, but she greets me with big smile - and apparently it's a pancake day again today. And Fajitas Friday too!