Day 377, Year 1: New Auto Pilot Arrives—Hurray
Date: Monday, October 30, 2006
Weather: Beautiful Weather Continues
Location: Nuku’alofa, Tongatapu Group, Tonga
It is absolutely beautiful here today. The water here in the harbor is a light aquamarine and as I look out over the seawall, the water is a bright turquoise in every direction as far as I can see. There are little white caps out there and the wind is blowing gently. It is the kind of day that beckons one to sea. As I watched Hanoah leave the harbor and put up the main sail, I wanted to follow. But that will have to wait for another day.
We are absolutely thrilled that our new auto pilot arrived exactly as promised. That’s a first. I think I like the kiwis already. Mark has been working all afternoon installing the new system. He explained to me that installing a new system like this is like playing a really challenging computer game. He loves it. Of course, he just told me that the installation is going well except that the auto pilot has us going north when we are headed south. Oops! I guess he had better keep working on this.
For the technical minded, I will explain what we ordered and received. The part that broke was the drive unit. We burned out the motor by not having all of the settings properly adjusted.. But rather than just replace that, we wanted a whole new system and we wanted to have the old system as a back-up. As I have said in an earlier log, the company in New Zealand was not able to get just a new motor to us this quickly, so we will be going with the new system and no drive unit back-up. What we did receive was a RayMarine Type 2 Linear Drive with a short arm and an S3 Corepack that is the new computer that drives the system, a new compass, and a new rotary-style rudder reference unit. What we could not afford was a unit with a built-in gyro which allows the computer software to intelligently monitor the boat’s movement. Since we didn’t do such a great job of this, I think we need the computer that can do it for us. This can be added later for only an additional $500. Yikes!
We heard from Doug and Sylvie on Windcastle this morning and they have decided to come to Nuku’alofa. We are thrilled. George and Barbara of Gdansk, another boat that we have been with often on this trip, are coming as well. We all travel at about the same speed, so this will give us a core group for the passage to New Zealand. There are so many other boats coming in here right now that I am sure we will have even more company, but it is nice to have a core group with which to plan and check-in as the passage progresses. Bob McDavitt, the weather guru from New Zealand, issued his weekly “BobGram” last night. He had some interesting things to say about this weather, but my favorite is his disclaimer: “Weather is a mix of pattern and chaos. The following ideas come from the patterned world of weather maps, so please fine-tune to your place.” So basically weather people are predicting from patterned models, but the weather out here has more of the chaos than the pattern! Anyway, he did have some information that I found interesting. He explained that all is settling down now in the Southwest Pacific as we move into a quiet phase of the Madden-Julian Oscillation (http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap12/mjo.html for those of you interested in that much detail.). But the interesting part to me was that if the oscillation repeats then we will have another “burst of tropical activity” (meaning another cyclone) in late November or early December. Of course, another one could be beginning to form right now, so the models might not be right this time. However, I do hope they are as McDavitt’s prediction gives us plenty of time to get to New Zealand. But if we do have another cyclone in this part of the world, the weather people are ready as have the next names on the cyclone list. Those forming east of 160E will be YANI, ZITA and ARTHUR, and those forming west of 160E (near Australia) will be NELSON, ODETTE and PIERRE. McDavitt went on to explain that the cyclone that just ended, XAVIER, formed soon after some near equatorial westerly winds turned up after being tossed out of Asia by the Monsoon. These winds normally arrive around the middle of December, and he is saying that their early arrival is significant. Typical for this sailing season as everything has arrived early and with more of a punch than predicted.
>From what McDavitt said in his weathergram and from our other weather data, it looks like we should be able to leave here on November 4 arriving in Minerva Reef on November 6 just as a very windy period there is ending. We can then head to New Zealand and arrive around November 11 or 12. This misses another front crossing the Northland of New Zealand on November 8 or 9. Of course, all of this changes daily, so this is just the beginning thinking for our passage. We’ll keep you posted on changes, but so far, it is looking good.
Mark just asked me to do a trial with the auto pilot and it looks like he has us headed in the right direction and everything seems to be working beautifully. We are now ready for a sea trial calibration of it which we will do on Wednesday when we move from this harbor over to Pangaimotu. Tomorrow will be provisioning day, AGAIN, and then we will be ready to go when the weather allows.
The other thing I would like to mention today has to do with technology. Last night when we had Roger and Judy from Hanoah over for dinner, Windbird’s dependence on technology became starkly clear. Roger and Judy sail on a 32-foot boat with no refrigeration, no computer, and no SSB radio. They have no outgoing communication with the outside world on their boat. They can receive radio on their short-wave receiver, but they cannot send. Then there is Windbird with three computers and daily postings to a website. Yesterday I was upset that our wireless internet connection on the boat didn’t allow a free-flowing conversation on Skype with our daughter Heather. We wanted to “see” her via her video cam to see how that pregnant little belly of hers is growing. We couldn’t see yesterday, but today we went into the internet café and we did see. She is definitely pregnant! The communication was still not perfect, but I know we are very lucky to even have the opportunity for such communications. Seeing someone while talking to them on a computer was only a dream a few years ago.
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| 061030 Day 377 Tonga, Nuku'alofa–Auto Pilot Arrives |
