Early November found us in Beaufort, N.C., preparing to head south to the U.S. Virgin Islands. We hoped the offshore passage to St. Thomas would take about 10 days. We were aboard Echo, a 32-foot Marc Louis Rifflart-designed catamaran. By modern standards she was heavy and slow, but her comfortable accommodations and strength made for a good voyaging boat. Echo had already been across the Atlantic to South America and then up the east coast of North America to Canada. Since my wife and I had purchased her on Lake Champlain, we had replaced her anchoring gear, installed a Bimini over the cockpit, replaced the outboard auxiliary (after the old one died in Delaware Bay), replaced the roller-furling jib, loaded her up with several tons of voyaging gear and long-term…
Solar panels seem like the perfect solution to producing electricity on board a boat. They have no moving parts, make no noise, and the power is free. Like most things in life, however, solar panels represent a series of trade-offs. And even though sunlight is free, the purchase price of solar panels, plus installation costs, can represent a sizable up-front expense that must be factored into any cost equation. The advantages of solar panels can be demonstrated by recounting the exploits of one voyaging boat. A few years ago my wife and I were anchored in Charlotte Amalie in the U.S. Virgin Islands, having just completed a rough offshore passage from North Carolina. A beautiful double-ended voyaging sailboat tacked into the crowded anchorage and dropped anchor nearby. At first I…
Any sailor who has hunched over a single sideband radio while struggling to tune in station November Mike November (NMN) to get the voice forecast — especially with the boat bouncing as the weather builds — understands the appeal of an automatic receiver that receives a text version of forecasts and navigational warnings. In a nutshell, that's what Navigational Telex (Navtex) does. Navtex receivers with LCD screens, like the ICS Nav6 from Northern Airborne Technology, display current messages and store previous messages in memory so they can be recalled if necessary. Worldwide broadcasts on the main frequency are in English, while an alternative frequency allows for more localized, national forecasts and urgent marine safety warnings in local languages. And because the system is one of the primary components of the…
In this age of the ubiquitous autopilot, the question might be raised: Why would a voyager be interested in a wind-vane self-steering unit? The answer is as simple as the reason why many people voyage in the first place self-reliance. Many of us hand over control of our voyaging homes to mysterious black boxes driving motors and hydraulic rams inside equally mysterious black cases, while sensing the correct magnetic direction to steer via hidden compass. There is tremendous appeal to simply setting a course on a dial or keypad and then sitting back while the electrons do all the work. When everything is working right, there is nothing finer. However, anything that relies on electricity in a saltwater environment will fail at some time or another. It is usually not…
To the editor: The recent article by John Kettlewell on Iridium satphones ("Data via satphone," Issue No. 155, July/August 2006) reminded me of our experience with service providers in the South Pacific. One of the Iridium providers mentioned AST and UUPlus. We used UUPlus across the Pacific from Panama to New Zealand with excellent results. We let UUPlus lapse and we ran out of minutes on the Iridium just as we arrived in New Zealand. Eight months later we were getting ready to leave New Zealand for Australia via New Caledonia. I purchased minutes from a provider in Wellington, New Zealand, and when I got the SIMM card, we also received a disc with the AST e-mail system on it. I decided to use AST and got it working using…
I am writing because I am impressed, not only with John Kettlewell's article on drogue deployment ("Learn by doing," Issue No. 92, September/October 1998), but with the quality of articles you publish in general. My first reaction to Mr. Kettlewell's article was horror! The conditions portrayed in the article are not the type in which one should be learning to do anything safety related. Then I started asking questions of myself: Have I ever taken the time to practice setting a sea anchor or drogue? Have I ensured that such devices are readily accessible? Nobody anticipates the need for such devices, so we pack them away in the depths of our lockers. Mr. Kettlewell presumably read the instruction pamphlet ahead of time (reading instruction manuals is something too few people…
