Journey: How was that little trip from Galapagos to Marquesas?

[Della and Dave]

Hey Wayne: how did it go?  I saw Dana's post in Galley Wench Tales,  Very sorry to hear about Nirvana Now. 

[SVJourney]

The crossing pretty much sucked.  Must be the El Nino this year as the trade winds just weren't there.  Not only that but the South Atlantic Current was flowing backwards for the first week and wasn't there at all after that.  Our first day was -6 miles!

We wanted to wait for better winds but the Ecuadorian government comes out to boats at the expiration of their visas and FORCES them to leave.  Weather is not a reason to stay to them.

We were also unable to buy fuel there so we only had 20 gallons to motor on.

So the crossing ended up taking 32 days.  And we weren't the only ones.  Only the people who had lots of fuel onboard made any kind of good time at all.  

We had some big problems with the boat.  I had 3 drives for the Raymarine wheel pilot, 2 of them brand new.  They all burned up.  I managed to make a fourth one out of parts from those three and limped the last 700 miles into Hiva Oa.  We have ordered a new CPT which is waiting for us in Nuku Hiva and are hoping to get better service out of it.

Add that to 4 sail blowouts, (MUCH thanks to Allan on Incommunicado for the spare main sail!) and the engine died from 32 days of stirring up the fuel with the bottom of the tank (we had to get towed into the harbor at Hiva Oa) and it was the most challenging passage we have ever had to date.

Dana plans to write more about the passage on the blog.  She hasn't done much writing as we haven't had much internet and we've been trying desperately to increase the fun-to-suck ratio.  Nice part is that this place is amazing!  We've had our eyes blown out again and again on just how stunning the scenery is.

[Della and Dave]

Thanks for all the good info, sorry it sucked.  We are hoping to follow in your wake in a few years, so it is at least fun to follow you vicariously, your input on  fuel, sails, auto pilot could really help setting up Polaris to cruise.  I assume based on your experience, bring along more fuel and cleaning the tank and having the fuel polished would be advisable if you were to do it again?  I am a little surprised the filters and Racor didn't catch the stuff. 

I am curious about the sail blowouts, were they tired sails, or did you get caught with too much canvas up? 

Our Raymarine autopilot is also on the fritz, and I think it's the drive, but so far it doesn't matter much because we haven't done that much long distance stuff, so haven't tried to sort it's issues out yet.  We could get a new drive, but it sounds like that might be throwing good money after bad.  The CPT looks good on the web site, but no capability to sail off a wind sex driven course or a GPS input, at least without someone like Pete hacking it.  I wonder if a CPT autopilot drive with a Raymarine brain would make a good Frankenpilot?   

Looking forward to reading more of Dana's posts.  Good luck on the fun-to-suck ratio improvement. 

[PeteW]

Wow what  passage that must have been. Three sail blowouts and 2 autopilot burnouts. I'm thinking there's a connection. Then no motor. I'll bet that sucked big time. So glad you made it in.

The sailboat rental fleet in my marina had most of their sails blow out in 2 years of nonstop use. That is agreement with what I've read regarding how long a Dacron sail should last. In 2-3 seasons the shape is gone and then its all down hill from there. To fight UV degradation at lower latitudes my sail maker insisted on high mass warp yarn Dacron sail cloth. 8.2 OZ or something metric like that.

Not sure if  the Raymarine St4000 autopilot has current limiting on the motor drive. To keep the motor from burning out I think you are relying on the a combination of the clutch popping out and the inline fuse/circuit breaker (12 amp). However not having sufficient gauge 12V wire feeding the unit can lead to motor stalling and then burnout. I'd want to see AWG 12 minimum all the way to the battery. Mine is wired with AWG 10.  Definitely something to look at when you install the new drive from CPT.

But I think we can all agree that the ST4000 wheel drive is simply not strong enough on the 365. I know people that have done that trip and they would not attempt it without a Monitor wind vane. The harder it blows the better it steers.

[SVJourney]

Pete,
re the st4000, it does have current limiting and thermal protection.  The problem wasn't with the motors, the problem is the steel ball bearings in the plastic races and the small plastic geared gear box just don't hold up.  Two of the blow outs were due to autopilot commanded jibes.  At the end we turned the sensitivity on the autopilot as low as it would go to reduce wear, this also lost us time as the boat wandered back and forth and meant that our sail sets were a compromise to allow for the wandering course.
And yeah, the autopilot, although we did cruise successfully for 2 years with it, is not strong enough for our boats.  I would not recommend them as anything else than something to use for day or weekend sailing.
I did wire the whole way to the autopilot with 12Ga, its only 12 feet of wire run to the 10amp breaker on the panel, so I feel pretty good about not having any voltage drop.

The sail blowouts were due to old thread, we should have had them completely restitched before we left. The Dacron is still stiff, not soft like a bed sheet. We did take them all to a sailmaker in Jacksonville before we left but he said they were "fine".  Shoulda listened to my gut and did it anyways.  The sails got most of their wear on this trip by slapping as we drifted along.  Good news is that I managed to hand stitch most of the problems at sea and found a good resource in Nuku Hiva to repair our main, so we are now back up to speed.

D & D,
As for having an autopilot that would trim to wind or GPS track, the Raymarine we had SAID it would do that, the capability was there, but it didn't work for a damn. We tried it a few times and never used it again as the autopilot would make huge corrections when it got off track.  Nothing like cruising along on a run and having your autopilot decide it needed to turn 45 degrees to get back on track.  Until Raymarine improves their algorithms, these are useless features.

Don't despair on your prospective crossing though.  This was a very weird year.  Not typical at all.  Dirk from Evening Ebb did it last year and said that they did almost all of it on just a reefed mainsail.

Having a clean tank woulda saved us the engine problem.  Having just 5 gallons swishing around for a month musta stirred up all the gunk from the bottom of the tank.  The Racor saved the engine, but even after I changed the filter the remaining fuel was just brown.  I ended up draining all remaining fuel, filling the tank and polishing through the Racor with an electric pump for a few hours before I was satisfied enough to leave the safety of Hiva Oa for more remote locations.

If we had tanked in the Galapagos the 50 gals it would have made a huge difference.  Most of the small amount of fuel we had was needed for battery charging as our panels are not enough to power the whole boat on extended passage with the instruments and autopilot drawing current.  I would recommend jerry cans. (and perhaps a bladder tank?) There are no fuel docks here so you will need the Jerry cans to fuel your boat anyways.  This in spite of the hatred I have for fuel cans on deck. ( I only carry one on deck as an emergency fuel source, and I stupidly poured that into the tank instead of using it direct from the can just before the filter clogged!)