Thursday 28th January
Awelina of Sweden
James Collier
Thu 28 Jan 2016 15:06
Another moonlit night at sea saw us experimenting with and using the Hydrovane wind steering system. It took some fiddling before Awelina and the system agreed on a direction more-or-less matching our destination. Even so it does require watching; about once an hour a big wave will push us off course to the point where our weather helm changes so much that that the small rudder on the Hydrovane cannot recover the original course and we have to go and help it for a while by hand-steering with the main rudder. However we suppose that the more we use it the better it will be.
The motive is to save power from the drain of using the electric autopilot. With all the lights, systems and the helm running at night, not to mention the fridge, the drain on our batteries is about 9 amps of which the autopilot is more than half. This means that we have to run the generator for a couple of hours every morning which we'd rather avoid if possible. The steering proved itself overnight, with one reef in the main, and the generator was only employed this morning for a short while to top up levels. Also seen this am was a large catamaran crossing our course. Spinnaker flying her along at 9 knots according to AIS. We think they are heading to the Caribbean. Yesterday a 30m super-yacht called 'Varsovie' came within a couple of hundred meters, bound for St Maarten.
The wind is now a good force 5 or 6 and we are running under the jib alone. We have also deployed the towed generator; essentially a small propeller on 20m of string that rotates as we drag it through the water attached to an alternator mounted on the taff-rail. It makes about 3A more than we use, which slowly tops up our batteries.
Fiona has been working hard with petrol and rags on the tar stains from Bessie May. We have to get it off the fenders and the starboard side of the boat. The fenders clean up is underway using yet another old toothbrush and lots of elbow grease. James has been keeping his hand in with the sextant and trying to find atlantic radio nets on the HF radio - so far without success. We have also been trying to do a radio check with a young couple, Elisabeth and James, aboard yacht Jacaranda currently in Tazacorte. Hello both: if you read this we have tried every day at 2pm on the agreed frequencies, nothing heard yet but we will keep trying for the next few days. We're also listening on 14.305MHz at 08:30.
490 miles to go.