Asunto
Our life afloat on a boat
Sailing Trips
Sailing, sailing, sailing That’s why we live the life we do, so that we can untie the lines and explore the world in our own backyard. From Sept 2015-October 2016 we sailed with a 2 year old and a baby from Vancouver to Mexico, across to Hawaii, across to Alaska and then down, Read More
Not much to report over the past 24 hours. The autopilot had continued to work well and everyone is catching up on sleep.
I’m on the midnight to 3am shift now and it was a very penetrating cold last night. It felt as if the fog was actually inside the cockpit enclosure. Every surface was soaked to touch and there was nowhere to escape to.
The wind held all night but just kept pushing along the fog with us.
We are having to use the radar more often now. Although I didn’t see any ships on my watch, Kevin had two different AIS targets on his watch but none were close enough to see visually.
Our noon to noon run was pretty good at 143 miles. Since we are out of the really consistent pressure I’m not expecting many big mileage days any more. Anything over 130 miles a day is going to be considered a win if we don’t need to run the engine.
Another day and another 125 miles. The autopilot has been working very well with no complaints from the crew having our fifth crew member back on board.
We had an average afternoon but the winds really started to drop off so I rigged up the pole about 6 pm to stop the sail from flapping. We picked up our SOG to about 4.3 kts which everyone was really happy about as it had been a painfully slow afternoon with the wind at just the wrong angle to get the pile out.
I decided to leave the main furled in all night so we wouldn’t have any problems with back winding but I pulled it out to the second reef point at 6am this morning to help push us along, reduce the roll and get a couple more miles under our belt.
At about 7pm we saw a number of whales spouting on the horizon behind us. The sun was out and their spouts were silhouetted against the evening sun which was pretty cool.
A couple hours later Jed yelled out that there was a spout only 30 yards off our port beam. Kevin and I came out to see it but it never came back as close. Hopefully we will see some more whales as we get closer to land.
As of 6:03 this morning we had exactly 1000 miles to go. The wind looks pretty good for the next couple days so hopefully we will be able to knock off some serious miles while the wind is still consistent.
So we did it, we managed to get the autopilot back together in such a manner that it worked well over the last 24 hours and we are cautiously optimistic we will be ok for the rest of the trip.
There is a small electro magnet clutch on the Raymarine / Autohelm ram that allows the linear drive / motor assembly to free wheel when the ap is not engaged. This clutch and gear assembly is what failed both times the ap has let us down.
Ron and I tore the ram apart and agreed that if we could come up with a non invasive fix (non invasive to the critical non serviceable parts) it would be worth a shot at putting the ram back in with out the clutch.
We were able to drill and mill a key way into one of the serviceable gears, then we inserted a shortened Allen key into the old roll pin hole and the new key way and held everything in place with a hose clamp.
Ron was a great help as after the time in the lazerette removing the ram and the hours below looking and talking about the root cause of the failure and potential fixes, I was feeling a bit queezy and knew I’d have to get back into the laz to rest all the ram.
Ron was able to get the key way and Allen key to fit just right and the hose clamp tightened down beautifully onto some of the existing spline gears. We were both very excited at how well the fix had gone.
I put the ram back together and dove back into the laz to reinstall the ram. After a couple minutes of swearing and cursing it was back in and ready to test out.
I yelled up to Ron to do the honours and when he engaged the autopilot it ran super smooth and quiet.
I watched the wheel and course for a while and everything seemed in order so we cleaned up and put the tools away.
The ram worked perfectly all night and we were all on the look out for strange noises or erratic behaviour, but everything worked out.
We did find out that hand steering with the ram’s linear drive and motor engaged all the time is very difficult and there is a lot of resistance in the system. This fix will work well for off shore passages where the ap is engaged fur days or weeks at a time, however we will need to physically remove the ram when manoeuvring in close quarters while anchoring or docking.
All in all I think we got it and am very happy to have the autopilot back up and running. So happy in fact that I think we will buy a spare ram and keep it on board!
P.S. Our noon to noon run was 150 miles.
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