Daysail out to a seamount off the coast of Vallarta

I went out for a sail yesterday, just because I wanted to test myself out on the boat for a longer trip, and because I haven't sailed out of the bay for a while.  So I took off and sailed up to a seamount called "el Banco."  Its about 35 miles away from Punta Mita, and the wind was really light in the morning, so I got moving around 10 am.

The wind slowly picked up and got to about 10 kts at 10 am, but varied a bit, from 7 to 11, and I was able to make 7 kts in 9-10 kts of wind, which is pretty respectable.

Slowly the wind came up more to about 14 kts, and that is just at the range where I might need to start reefing, and I was hitting 8 kts now upwind.  The boat is pretty heavy with full ballast tanks, but its all fresh water and so I don't want to dump it.  Also I had my dinghy and anchor and all that.  But still quicker than I've been going before, now that the bottom is clean and painted.  

I caught a dorado when I got to the seamount, and then turned around, and it was around 3:30 pm now.  Then I put up the spinnaker and started back.  It was hard to keep speed and point at Punta Mita, but I turned upwind a little and got some nice speed, hitting 9.7 kts at one point.  

In the light wind, the sea state was really nice and flat, and the boat was gliding along really nicely.  I was really happy with it.  

The Mainsail was working great, and the day passed slowly into evening.  I was a bit offshore as the sun began to set, but the wind started shifting and I could point more at Punta Mita and keep speed.  

As it began to get dark I got ready for a bit of night sailing, and there are some rocks to watch out for on the entrance to Punta mita, so I had everything set up.

It was fun trying to take a few more pictures in the dark, the crescent moon lit up the waters and the sails.

Once it got really dark I looked up and was surprised again by the mainsail.  It has glow in the dark draft lines, and they stayed glowing for 2 hours after dark!

So I got back at about 8 pm, and anchored again.  I never turned on the motor the whole day.  It was about 70 miles of sailing in 10 hours.  

I made a little video about it too.

Haul out

Its been a nice relaxing month since I got down here, with the exception of a hurricane...  But I got my new(er) mainsail up and running and a few test sails with it, here we have the main and the A5 up, rolling along nicely.  

On one of these test sails I had a bunch of folks over, and it went great!  

Here's more folks up on the bow.  I had 12 aboard, and it wasn't too crowded.

But I've been feeling that the boat is decidedly slow.  Mostly I attribute it to the fact that I haven't painted the bottom with anti-fouling paint in a long time.  It was last done 4 years ago, I think.  Brad put really nice fast bottom paint on, and then he hired a diver to rub the paint off the bottom every week, so it was mostly gone by the time I got the boat.  I dove and scrubbed and scraped a bunch and put off hauling out and painting because I always had something else to do, and it would usually take me about an hour to get most of the stuff off.  But the little residue was still there, and it made the boat slower.  

So I finally bit the bullet and hauled out.

Here is Aquila up in the slings.  The first try, they didn't have here centered, and one of the lift points maxed out and the keel wouldn't clear the edge, so they had to re-do it.  I was a bit surprised at how close it was to not being able to be hauled out.  I had about 1 foot of clearance with all the straps at their fully max height.  So they could have put smaller straps on, but then the keel wouldn't have cleared the front strap...

So here was are moving the lift and the keel is about 6 inches off the ground.

And there is me next to the keel, for perspective you can see how tall the bottom is, or rather how deep the keel is.

When I clean the bottom, I sort of stand on the boat upside down and scrape the keel, then climb down the keel a bit to get to the bulb.  Since I float in the salt water I can use it to be upside down.  I also crawl around on the bottom of the boat and use that to help me hold position while scraping.  When I got back this summer, the whole boat was covered with really tough barnacles and oysters, and I had to hack at them really hard to get them to let go.  It took about 8 hours all told, I think.  Hopefully I won't grow oysters anymore.

The pressure wash crew working on the one week growth of grasses and gooseneck barnacles.  Its really quite stunning how quick stuff grows here.  On the way in I could do about 4 knots with the motor running pretty hard.   Amazingly, Despite however much growth there is, I can usually still do half of windspeed with the spinnaker up and the jib for beam reaching.  So the boat is really powerful despite having lots of drag.

So I scraped the bottom really good, then sanded the whole boat really good, then put a coat of primer all over everywhere I could find that needed it, then put 3 good thick coats of Sherwin Williams "Ablative Bottom Paint" that is stuff that the US Navy uses on their boats.  I managed to get 3 gallons of it a while back, and I have high hopes for it.  There is a lot of copper in it, but I added some thinner and then rolled it on and found I had more than I needed.  I ended up with about 1/2 a gallon too much, even after putting on 3 full coats and 4 or 5 on the rudders and other places.  The lift came to get me on the last day and I put three coats on the places that the stands held the boat up, and on the bottom of the keel.  I'm a bit concerned about those, since I didn't have much time to prep those spots, and the paint didn't get much time to dry, but I will dive the boat and see how it ended up later on.  

Since the sail drive is made of Aluminum, I had to put a different kind of paint on that, stuff that doesn't have copper in it.   And then I put surfboard wax on the propeller, instead of buying really expensive paint for it and having it not work.  I've heard people say that waxing the prop is good, or using lanolin, so I'm going to try it.  And I can re-do the wax while in the water.

So I was then ready to go back in the water.  I had done a few other things while being out.  I took off a little metal bracket on the back of the boat that acted as a swim ladder attachment, and I took it off because it was in the way of the dinghy and it was always under water, so it was corroding.  I also installed another thru-hull for my speedo transducer.  One of the first things I did when I bought the boat was to try and figure out what was wrong with the NKE system, and I troubleshot it to the Speedo unit.  It was a simple fix to buy a new one, so I got a paddlewheel unit and when it arrived I tried to install it.  But the stupid thing wouldn't fit in the thru-hull.  It was designed ever so wrongly.  So I tried to modify the thru-hull to make it fit, but that was a big mistake, and I've been paying for it ever since.  The thru-hull leaked.  Then the water getting in the boat was a nuisance and eventually a hazard.  So this time I decided to glue the old one (which, it turns out works just fine and didn't need replacing after all) in its spot and be done with it, and then make a new thru-hull for the new one and I can have both installed and chose which ever one I want whenever I want.  Ha!  the perfect solution!  

When I got set back down in the water I discovered the glued in one was leaking, so I still have some work to do on making it extra water tight.  I think I need to get some of that "rescue tape" or some rubber from a bicycle inner tube and wrap the joint up extra tight.  Since its not coming out, I don't need to worry about making it hard.

 And the final moment!  Aquila descending back to her natural domain.  I'm anchored out now and tomorrow I'll go for a nice test sail to see how fast I can get up to...  

Before I anchored out, I did a bit of a drive around to re-calibrate the speedometer, and in doing this I also cranked the motor up a lot to see how fast I could go.  I hit 7 knots under motor, so that's nice.  I also have full ballast tanks.  Before I was constrained to 4, now its 7.  I think I can cruise at 6 pretty easy.  In terms of sailing, though, I'll have to find that out tomorrow.  

Back In Mexico again!

I made it back to Mexico, and to my beloved Aquila again.  I came down about two weeks ago now, and spent the first few days trying to get the boat ready to leave the marina.  Its so gosh darned hot in the marina and it just burns me up to be there, spending money and roasting in boat hell.  I also think its better for the boat to be cooler.  So I got the sails on and lines on and water tanks filled and bottom cleaned, and...  Well, let me tell you about the bottom cleaning!  I haven't had a new coat of bottom paint in a quite a while now, so something like 4 years for the boat, so there were gobs of gigantic barnacles and oysters on the bottom.  It was quite a task to get them liberated.  I spent a bit of time in the marina working on it, and then took off to get out in clearer water.  Also, after working for a few hours in the marina on the bottom, the very next day I was preparing to leave and I noticed a crocodile floating around in the waters.  Hello!  And a worker who cleans bottoms had been brushed by the very same croc.  I think it was attacking his bubbles or something, but still, it is 9 ft long and very scary.  So I wanted to finish the cleaning out in deeper and clearer water.  So that's what I was doing for a little while, also surfing, but then there was a hurricane and I went back to the marina for two days to hide from it.  The winds were pretty strong, I recorded 46 kts, and there were waves breaking over the breakwater, but I was safe and snug inside.  It also rained a huge amount.  So I tied the boat up like this:

In order to get the most out of the docks and not to bounce around.

Also, while I was at the dock, my "cheap" version of a very expensive sail arrived.  I had a genius plan to get the most expensive kind of sail (and the best kind) but get it used, so it would be less.  The material the sail is made of feels a bit like paper or cardboard, but its made of very fancy carbon and dyneema (spectra) fibers that are very strong.  The way its made is a "table" of sorts that is very adjustable is shaped to the shape the sail will be in, then a machine passes around on the table and lays down fibers in "tapes" of unidirectional fibers and they are all perfectly set where the strength of the sail will need to be.  Then they heat this up and there is a glue that is already in the fibers, making them like cloth soaked in honey, and that glue sticks everything together and bonds it forever.  Its really just like making a fiberglass boat, except the glue is not hard, like the epoxy or resins that they use for that.   Instead it is soft and flexible.

So here is a picture that I found on the internet of the sail that I got.  I got the sail used from a warehouse in florida, and a boat called Decision, a Carkeek 40, had made the sail new and then raced with it for a while, and then for some reason decided to sell the sail.  The Florida warehouse then sold the sail to me.  It cost $2800, plus shipping and tax, so about $3100.  

Then I had it sent to San Diego, to the North Sails sail loft there and they worked on it all summer to make it fit my boat.  The loft cut a bit off the bottom to make it fit the boom angle, and since they had built the previous mainsail for Aquila, they knew the dimensions to make it to.  You will notice that the boom on this Carkeek 40 is higher than on Aquila, because it is for a fully crewed boat (see all the people?)  Also the boom is flat to the water, whereas on Aquila the boom angles up from the mast, and so it needed to be re-cut.  

Here's another shot of it being worked on.  

So during this whole process, I'd been up in Alaska and working away, and in limited communication, and also I'm buying a fairly expensive sail and I haven't yet seen the thing.  So a bit of pressure on me to just relax and throw money.  This is something I'm not good at.  So the sail is "done" and ready to get shipped, and they say the bill is $3600 bucks.  So now I've doubled the amount of investment so far, at about $6700.  I could have bought a brand new sail made of dacron (the white cloth) from china with this kind of money so far.  Now I have to ship it down to mexico.  This is the scary part, because things always just go missing along this kind of a trip.  But with my limited communication, it began and I didn't know how much it would cost or much about the system of how it was going, but finally it arrived!  The day I was leaving the marina it came and I picked it up and motored out to Punta Mita.  The shipping cost me $750.  Then I spent the next few days sewing the some things on the sail.  you will notice in the photo above there is a smooth white line along the left side of the sail, that is the "luff" and it is designed to slide up a slot in the mast for this sail.  Trouble is, I don't have a slot in the mast.  I have a mast track with little cars that slide up and down and they need little connectors sewed to the sail.  So I hand stitched them on while on the boat in the sun and wind and did a kinda crappy job of it, but I think it will work out.  You can see them in the photo below with black patches where I reenforced the sail before stitching it.

So yesterday I finished the sewing and cleaned the bottom really nicely, with the help of a friend of mine, Laura, who has come down to stay for a few days.  So we raised the sail up and set off to see how she performed!   

I did a harbor burn of a friend's boat and he got this picture for me.  Thanks Shane!  And you can see it is a square top sail, but smaller on the top than the old one.  You might also note that the jib is the same kind of sail.  So I now have matching sails, the Jib and the main.  The old mainsail was an older technology called 3DL (as opposed to 3DI) and with the L part of it it means they have the same table and fibers but the fibers are stuck to mylar films, so its like laying fibers down and then putting scotch tape on top of them.  The only problem is the scotch tape falls apart quickly and the sail then becomes the wrong shape and in many pieces.  It "blows up".  Some folks call 3DL as 3 day lifespan.  

So the 3DI product is much much better.  Also the sail is very light.  
I looked into the cost of buying a new 3DI sail, but it would be about 25,000 bucks.  So this one, at $7450 is a bit of a bargain.  

Now, how does it sail?  Because its so light it performs very well, and because its a 3D sail it doesn't stretch in funny ways, so as the wind increases, the sail stays the same shape.  I've noticed this with the jib at least that it works very well in strong or light winds and I don't need to adjust things to keep one side of it from flapping.  On a dacron sail I usually have to adjust the leech line as the wind gets stronger, because the sail stretches differently in different directions and that causes distortion.  

I've only had it out for one run, but we went 11 kts in not a lot of wind and I had a lot of water in the ballast tanks and the anchor on and the dinghy.  So I was very heavy, but the boat was zooming along.  

So this video is taken by laura as we headed out to sea.

This next one was taken by Corey who was on his boat when we sailed by, and so its a bit calmer.  But look at the sail shape I have!  

Sail twist is important and I'm still learning a lot about it, but if you look at a propeller on a airplane or boat, or even the wing of a jet, and you will see the root (the part closest to the hub of the prop or the part closest to the body of the jet) has a more aggressive "angle of attack" than the tip of the wing.  So the root generates more lift than the tip.  In a propeller the tip is also moving faster, so you need to reduce the drag on the tip as well, making it have a flatter angle.  In sailing, its important to take the wind that flows over the sail and turn it, to change the direction of the wind, which you could call accelerating the wind, which makes for an equal and opposite reaction of accelerating the boat.  To do this, the top of the sail sees more wind, so needs less angle, but also it is important to try to "bring the wind down" the sail so the top of the sail is catching the wind a little bit, but then that pulls the wind downwards and the root (or bottom of the sail) is powered up as well.  This is what sail twist does.  To get it right is an art form and I'm working on that.  But you can see it in the video above that I have some twist.  also some in the jib.  

Glacier Bay Canoe Trip

I just got back from a canoe trip to Glacier Bay!  I did one last year at this time and its becoming an annual thing, I think.  We have a nice little canoe, a 15 ft aluminum "Mokercraft" that looks suspiciously like a smokercraft 15, but if you look at the plastic tag on it, you can tell that it is different.  Its an old dumpy thing, but it fits two people and a bunch of gear.  We used buckets for hauling gear around and keeping it relatively dry, and also bear cans to keep the bears out from the food.  We got 10 bear cans because we brought so much food.  It actually works out well to store the food in a few places on the boat in the cans, and we can pack two rows of four across and then have two extras in the front and back, so 10 works out quite well.  

The beginning of a trip is always hectic, so we got moving and took a flight from Juneau to Gustavus, then hopped on the bus that takes folks to the Glacier Bay Lodge and then did all the things the rangers make you do in order to get a backcountry permit, and packed up everything, and then took off paddling.  I had heard that my friends on Laysan, who I met in Hawaii in 2012, were in the bay and we paddled to try to meet them and get a ride up bay.  It turned out quite nicely.  The first thing we did was the most risky, because the weather can turn rough very quickly, but since we had nice weather to start we crossed the bay at a fairly narrow point.  There is a lot of current that flows there, at Sitakaday Narrows, and we ended up going 9 kts according to my GPS on my phone.  It was starting to get kinda late by the time we got in to shore, but we managed to find a nice whale and a moose before landing.  Then we went for a little walk and I found some nice plants I couldn't recognise.... 

And a fungus, I believe...

Anyways, we set off the next morning to try and catch up with Laysan.  The weather was turning for the worse, but there wasn't much wind.

We found a bear as we paddled along, a nice Black Bear.  

And then as it began to rain, we got to the Laysan and they welcomed us aboard and had heat and we stayed the night on their diesel duck boat.  Its a very sturdy boat about 49 ft long and it has sails if you want to sail it, but it is mostly a motor boat.  Its also steel and very nice inside.  So we dried off and the next day they drove us north up to Reid Inlet, where I had known the Wilderness Discoverer was going to be in the afternoon.  I figured I could try to get a ride further up bay with them, to the end of the bay.  So we arrived at Reid Inlet and went for a little walk while we waited for the Wilderness Discoverer (the WND) to get done with afternoon operations, and we went up to the Reid Glacier.

It had been raining a ton all night and day and the water flowing under the glacier was coming out furiously.  The rivers surged and spat ice out and nearly caught us up as we went close to investigate, but we ran away before the flooding could get us.  It was wild and crazy, as a glacier should be.

Then we hopped aboard the WND and they fed us dinner and took us up to Margerie Glacier, which is the northernmost point in the bay.  As they stopped to give their folks a look at the ice, we hopped out the back and paddled off into the sunset.  Here's a picture of them looking at the glacier

Then we found a spot to camp and pulled up everything and set up the tents.  In the background of this photo is a valley and that's where the glacier comes down, but there is a moraine blocking the view of it directly.  We could still hear it plenty though.  

The next day we went for a walk up the Grand Pacific Glacier, which is adjacent to Margerie, and we found some neat holes and places where water flows up and down.

And a few nice crevasses.  The glacier is covered with landslide material, or Moraine material, or stuff that the glacier is transporting down.  Its a conveyor belt of erosion and the glacier brings stuff down.  Sometimes the stuff is in the bottom and it gets ground up and turns to dust and mud, and sometimes its just sitting on top and isn't rounded at all by the motion.

So we continued along until we found the top of the rise and looked further up.  Then we discovered something very important.  The glacier we had been walking on top of was not the Grand Pacific Glacier.  It was the Ferris Glacier!  In this case, the Ferris comes down from the side and runs into the Grand Pacific, and is a tributary to it.  But looking up in the distance we could see there was a gap in the ice, and the grand pacific no longer connected.  How can you have a tributary if the main flow doesn't connect anymore?  

So that was the biggest revelation of the trip for us.  We jumped for joy.

On our way back we came across a stream that flowed under the glacier, and it is amazing to watch it just go in and down, making a cave or a tunnel.

That night we made a nice little fire and roasted things in triumph.  Truth be told, it was a long day of hiking and we were tired.

The next day we decided to spend aboard the canoe and investigating the Margerie glacier, so off we set.

There is a little island that just formed this year and is right in front of the glacier, and we went ashore to look, but it was a very dangerous spot because any ice calving would send a big wave over the island, so we quickly ran away.

But we spent most of the day in the sunshine sitting in the boat and watching ice fall off into the water.  The glacier was very active, probably because of the big rainfall a few days before.

I climbed up the cliff on the south side of the glacier and got a picture overlooking the face.  it is about 200 ft tall.

That night was a beautiful sunset and here's another picture of the camp site with the Ferris Glacier behind us.

And we had another fire so we could eat up all the corn and sausages we had brought.

The next day we devoted to the other side of the valley.  We paddled across the face of the Ferris Glacier, which is not very impressive, just a big pile of dirt, and then walked around on the outflow plain of the river that comes from between the ferris and grand pacific glaciers, so its a decently large river.  It was sunny again, so we took a nap with the beautiful Margerie and valleys behind us.

That night the glacier calved a huge amount and we had to fight our way through the ice to get out and work our way down Tarr Inlet.  We made camp on Russel Island, which is where John Muir camped in 1879 when the glacier was further forward, but not on the same spot.  We also found an old Oystercatcher nest with an egg in it still.   The egg was bad, but neat to see.  

The inside of Russel Island is called Russel Cut, and it is a spot where usually there are animals, so we went over to look.  We found a bear, and nice views.  Its a spot I had camped at in 2009 with Danny on Altair and so we were happy to go back to look again.

Then the next day we went to Lamplugh Glacier and camped right in front of the face.  Its my favorite glacier in the bay because you can walk around right in front of it.  I got to explore a bit more than I usually do when I am working.

And we hiked up the ridge to get a better look.

And a better look still...

Then we caught a ride with the WND back down to Bartlett Cove and I met a man who was carving a totem pole and watched that for a bit.  It was really neat watching him work.

I did a few kite shots for higher elevation stuff.  This is overlooking the Margerie Glacier from above

A nd here is looking at our camp site

and closer..

This one is looking to the north at where the Grand Pacific glacier terminates

Here is a higher view above Marge

And Marge again

Marge from another angle.

And Lamplugh from the ridge

And looking up the valley at lamplugh

So the trip was a success.  I am leaving the canoe there for the winter and hopefully will do another trip next year.  Its challenging to canoe around, but the rewards are very good, and I think its the best way to spend a lot of time at a tidewater glacier because you don't have to worry about your boat getting hit by ice.  

I've got a few more weeks up here before I go back down to Mexico for the winter, but this summer has been very good.