Sapphire : new look

Moored in Pittwater, December 08Surfing into Broken Bay

My new No 2 headsail, from Gemmell Sails, Sydney

At the Newcastle Marina

Notice the new pedestal and stainless much larger wheel, and the Targa frame, and just over my head the backstay Insulator!

Communications

To start with I bought a Garmin handheld GPS for coastal navigation. It had a "touchscreen" and was so easy to use: you can scroll to a dashboard with your speed and heading, ETA at next waypoint, time to sunset and other stuff you select for display, theres a compass, a place to store waypoints d routes and of course the charts. GPS is such amazing technology - its only been around for ten years but its impact on navigation at sea is only beaten by the invention of the clock according to Tom Cunliffe, an english yachting guru - and that was how many centuries ago? (accurate knowledge of time, and GMT enables accurate determination of longitude) For the first time ever according to Cunliffe we can say where we are now instead of where we were when we took the sight with the sextant.

Speaking of sextants, I dont own one or know how to use one though I know my father did.Ive read about using one and looked at the tables you make your calculations on and can see what a satisfying thing it must be to use such simple tools and a pencil and paper to work out where you are. But for now I havent attempted to learn celestial navigation, but maybe one day I will. It seems that people who go to the trouble of learning how to use a sextant, and buy one to take just in case, never end up needing to use it - I saw "sextant" on a yachties blog list of things they took which afterwards they decided were a waste of time along with a folding bicycle and a kayak. But others would no doubt swear by all three. So what happens if you cant use a sextaant and your GPS breaks down? Well you break out the spare! And maybe you would have a third one?

Anyhow the handheld screen is really tiny and I thought it would be good to have a bigger unit and screen mounted in the nav station. And I also wanted an AIS display. And I also wanted to have a personal computer for pictures, internet connections, and to be able to send email,and I wanted to be able to download weather faxes or GRIB files. So after looking at the chart plotters at the boat show and reading around, I realised that rather than buying all these things seperately I should be able to integrate all those things together on a PC. I wanted to replace my old VHF with a modern DSC enabled VHF, and seeing as I was going to have to get an HF radio if I was going off shore, it made sense to use it for email and GRIB (weather) files with a special modem I"d read about called a Pactor.

I got in touch with Marc Robinson, a radio man whose name kept cropping up on blogs and forums and at the radio course and safety at sea courses that I attended. By all accounts he was "the man" and indeed he was. He set me up with a beautiful new ICOM HF radio and Pactor III modem, and gave me a personal one on one tutorial explaining how to get the most out of it. The Pactor modem is a slim box that connects to the HF radio and a computer, and converts email into a form that can be sent as a radio signal. Its a slow connection and you can only send and receive text based messages - images and videos and webpages would take weeks to download. But I can get news, weatherfaxes and GRIB files - and will be able to write directly to this blog, for $250 a year (Sailmail is the ISP)-The alternative would be to have a satellite phone but I feel what Ive got will serve me well and is good value .
Marc Robinson also supplied all the cables and bits and pieces needed to have it all up and running, and gave strict instructions about where the insulator should go on the backstay: as low as possible! This is done to minimise the distance from the aerial - which is the backstay- to the tuner, thus minimising signal loss and maximising radio efficiency. I mention this because later when the insulator was being installed, the riggers wanted to put it as high as possible, saying that anyone who could reach above the insulator and touch the backstay while the radio was transmitting would receive a dangerous possibly lethal shock. When I protested saying I had clear instructions from an expert radio man that it was to be low we ended up in a real ding dong - the riggers taking - or at least feigning great offense at this insult to their profession by a mere radio ham! Marc advised that this was an exaggeration, that a small tingle was possible but in any case he advised insulating the first few feet above the insulator with shrinkwrap.I visited the rigger to personally ask that the insulator be set low, as after all I was the one paying and it was my boat. I received a 20 minute lecture on the pitfalls and dangers of wrongly installed aerials and a list of all the big name Sydney boats he personally had installed aerials on - brindabella, skandia, wild oats etc etc - and in no case was the insulator set low. So in the end I could see I was getting nowhere and was about to leave when he announced that in any case it was already done, indicating my backstay coiled up against the opposite wall of the workshop. He was a proud man and had done a lovely job - and to our amazement when the backstay was put back the insulator was nice and low, just where we wanted it!!


When it came time to get the new VHF we discovered ICOM had just released a DSC VHF with an AIS receiver integrated - so we got that and killed two birds with one stone - an upgraded VHF and an AIS receiver!

All that remained to do was find a Laptop and get a software programme that could handle all this stuff . Following the lead of the guys planning to kayak across the Tasman - James Castrission and Justin Jones (http://www.crossingtheditch.com.au/) I searched ebay and bought a secondhand Panasonic CF18 "Toughbook". These are "ruggedised " laptop computers built to withstand extremes of cold, exposure to water and dust and capable of being dropped from a height and not break! The screen folds flat and is a "Touchscreen".

As for the computer package I found it right here in an Australian package called "Software on Board" aka "SOB". You can get the software and try it out for free and then upgrade to full functionality for about $200. You then have to buy the maps you need from C-Map. These are so called "vector" charts which have masses of stuff embedded in them that you can click on to get more info - including photos of a harbour entrance or an island or marina. The other type of chart is a "Raster" chart which is just like a paper chart - there are no hidden details and scrolling in doesnt reveal new data. The SOB programme is amazing - you can do all the usual GPS things like have a live fix on where you are second by second, readouts of speed and course, you can switch to a perspective view that recreates a view you might get looking up a long harbour, you can load waypoints and routes but it also has the AIS capability with a brilliant onscreen display, and it can take other data streams as well, say from your log and compass. You can activate the lighthouses and harbour beacons in a nighttime setting and they blink and flash exactly as they do in real life. There are inbuilt tide tables for numerous coastal locations and a man overboard button that will provide a route back to the site of the incident. And its designed to work best on a Touchscreen computer so all you have to do most of the time is poke at the screen with your finger. All in all it seems quite wonderful.

So all this is now loaded onto my Toughbook . Ive used the Modem and sent email but Ive only recently loaded SOB.Ive been playing around with it for the last three months but Ive not even seen my boat for two months let alone had a chance to connect it all up and go live. Hopefully that will happen in the next two or three weeks. Watch this space!

Teen Sailors and AIS

Ive been following Jessica Watsons progress for months and made a special point of going to hear her talk at the Sydney Boat Show in July. She was a slightly built girl but she said she was heartened to discover when she met Jesse Martin that he was hardly any bigger. Jesse Martin as Australians should know is the current holder of the record for youngest solo nonstop and unassisted circumnavigation. He was 18 by the time he completed it in 1999 - just 10 years ago -on an identical yacht to Jessica Watsons, an S&S 34. His was called Lionheart (top picture)and thats also the title of his book. The tabloid media have recently been done over by the media campaigns of an American teen, Zac Sunderland, and even more recently that of an English teenager, Mike Perham who both in succession have claimed the record from Jesse, conveniently ignoring the fact that neither sailed nonstop nor unassisted, and they both avoided Cape Horn by sailing through the Panama Canal. What they both did was amazing for sure, but what Jesse did was in another league altogether, particularly as it was done before modern GPS and Satellite communications. Ive just emailed the editor of "Australian Yachting" who repeated the false claim that Jesse's record has been broken. But that is the record that Jessica Watson wants to beat. At the boat show I also met and spoke to Pete Goss a modern yachting legend who sailed solo around the world in the famous Vendee race : he thinks Jess can do it but its a massive challenge and she will become a yachting legend as well if she makes it. However....

As everyone probably knows, a couple of weeks ago Jess was lucky to survive a collision with a chinese bulk carrier on her first night at sea on her boat Ellas Pink Lady. She was leaving Queensland for Sydney from where she was planning to start her solo nonstop unassisted circumnavigation. Speculation was rife as to how it could have happened because her Team didnt release any detail of the incident, except to say she was down below when it happened. My view was there had to have been a failure of her AIS (Automatic Identification System)- or else it wasnt turned on - or else if it had warned her, she had freaked out and done something crazy like turning towards the ship instead of away from it. This latter possibility seemed the least likely to me, because having seen her she didnt seem the panicky type. I figured she must have been asleep and slept through the warning, but in todays papers theyre reporting a safety instrument (and I presume it must be her AIS) wasnt turned on, and she had dozed off! What an horrendous and terrifying wake up that must have been, waking to the thumping of a ships engines just in time to crash into the hull of the thing which would have been towering above her boat like a massive sheer steel cliff! And then to go bouncing and scraping down the side of it, her rig crashing over the side, powerless to do anything except hope like hell the boat wouldnt go under! She was unbelievably lucky! So thats what happens if you dont have your AIS turned on. On the other hand in this months Australian Cruising Helmsman - which I can never put down till Ive read it from cover to cover - theres an article written by a guy who is convinced he was saved from that same fate by his AIS, which of course WAS turned on. In his encounter with a ship, a collision was avoided because he used the information that is received by the AIS to talk directly to the bridge of the freighter using his VHF radio - he turned to port, they turned to starboard and he avoided being rammed by a few seconds!

Stories like these convinced me ages ago that an AIS receiver was an essential item of safety gear. All ships over 300 tons are required to have an AIS transponder, an electronic device which causes a VHF radio signal to be emitted from the ship as often as every 3 seconds that contains all sorts of identifying and dynamic information about the ship such as its heading and speed.

With the right sort of software this information can then be displayed on your chartplotter, along with calculations about how likely each vessel is to collide with yours. Parameters that you determine can then trigger alarms to warn you. This warning function used to be the sole domain of radar but for me AIS renders radar less than essential, so for now Ive decided not to get Radar. Next Blog I will reveal how I integrate VHF and HF Radio, GPS, AIS and email in the new nav Station on Sapphire. Its not all up and running yet but should be very soon.

The Targa and everything else

The only other big item of equipment I got was a dinghy and an outboard motor for it. As with everything else compromises have to be made - the ideal I think would be a hard dinghy but that would have to be stowed on deck, so I got a "roll up" one. This means it has to be dragged up on deck at the destination and inflated with a footpump and then launched over the side from the foredeck. I thought about getting a derrick to lift it out of the water at the stern but there was already enough "stuff" back thre and in anycase you wouldnt want to leave it there heading across the Tasman. I found I could inflate and launch it in about 40 minutes by myself using a halyard to lift it up over the life lines. And then its a nervous manoevre to get the outboard that lives on the pushpit and transfer it onto the transom of the inflatable. But then youre off!

I still have the little fibreglass dinghy that on occasion has been stored on the foredeck. It cost $450 and I mainly use it to get out to the boat on the mooring in Sydney Harbour. Its paddlocked to a tree on the beach most of the time.

I have also bought an RFD 4 person liferaft. Its in a valise and stored below deck, the intention being to drag it out if its ever needed. The problem with that, and I only relaised this once I got it, is that its really heavy and difficult to drag around even with the boat on a mooring so Ive decided when it gets its first annual service next month I will ask them to repack into a case and I'll get it stowed on deck just in front of the solar panel - which is just in front of the dodger.

That solar panel is supposed to just maintain the battery from going flat when the boat isnt in use. I had no way of knowing if it was working - though I guess it must have been because the only time the battery went flat betwen trips was when I forgot to turn off the electrical switch - the Big Red one that isolates the batteries! And I didnt know what was happening to the batteries when things were "On" and "Off" or how well charged they were at any given moment so I was interested to read in a yachting mag one day there are battery monitors that can give you all that info. I got in touch with a guy called John, a marine elctrician and he came over to Sapphire one day and we had a long chat about all the electrical stuff that needed sorting out - basically it was everything! John did an amazing amount of work on the boat and it took for ever but in the end I had a beautiful new nav Station with a lovely switchboard with a Xantrex battery monitor, a "cigarrette lighter" thing to plug in stuff that needed power- say like my mobile phone- a new battery charger (to properly recharge the batteries from shore power), a proper connection for shore power to the boat, an inverter - which converts battery voltage (12volts, DC ) to 240 volts AC so you can plug in a toaster or a microwave say - this was all VERY foreign and new to me - a new VHF and an HF Radio and tuner with the backstay converted to the aerial,an inbuilt Koden GPS and a new in built marine stereo music player/AM/FM Radio. You can see the new nav station beside me in this photo:

As for the "Targa", this was a new term to me - its a frame that is erected over the cockpit with an awning and often other bits and pices hanging off it, such as a derrick to hoist the tender out of the water, or a Radar or a wind generator. My interest was in using it to support additional solar panels. John put me in touch with Laurence at Marine Stainless, who visited the boat while John and Adam were working on her one friday afternoon and, well to cut a long story short, Laurence built a wonderful stainless steel targa and fitted not solar panels but a wind generator. He also supplied and fitted a new pedestal and bigger wheel, new Rocna anchors and chain,new Raymarine autopilot to replace the worn out one that broke down a couple of times, new bilge pumps, a modern raw water filter - for engine cooling - and various other useful little things that Laurence could see would be good for the boat - for example an LED cockpit light fitted to the targa. Laurence was one of those energetic enthusiastic and charismatic types who just loves the sea and yachts and I benefitted hugely from his experience and his eagerness to help me out. He confessed later on that he and John had been trying to decide whether or not I was ever going to really go sailing or was I just going to fit the boat out and talk about it - in the end they decided I really was serious, and so thats when Laurence decided he would give me as much help as I could stand!

At the end of all this we had missed our deadline to go on our first real ocean voyage, a 414 nautical mile journey to Lord Howe island that we had been planning for months, but at least Sapphire by now was very much closer to being a genuine blue water cruiser, a "Pocket Cruiser" as Laurence called her. Approaching Lord Howe at Dawn

Parachute Anchor

I read a couple of good books on Storm tactics. One was a classic work on storm tactics "Adlard Coles Heavy Weather Sailing" , and the other the "Storm Tactics Handbook"by Lyn and Larry Pardey. They were both gripping reading because they contained numerous accounts of sailors in all varieties of yacht battling to survive frightful storms, and detailed discussions of the various tactics that can be used. I found the Pardeys writing very persuasive - they advocate heaving- to and using a parachute anchor rather than trying to run before the storm. Running before the storm can enable you to actively steer the boat to safety if its within reach and thus avoid the killer breaking waves which can roll the boat and wreck everything. However this requires great skill and more than anything great strength and stamina to stay out there in the elements for a long time if shelter is days away. But it might be feasible if youre on a racing yacht with a fit and highly experienced crew who can share helming duties. But that will never apply to me and Sapphire.

On the other hand heaving- to means you are somewhat at the mercy of the waves - or so you would think - but in fact with a parachute anchor deployed the boat is held in its most seaworthy posture, facing the oncoming sea. Not only that, by slowing the boat almost to a standstill, the storm will have sooner passed you by than if you run with it. Meanwhile you conserve your strength and sanity below. Whats so persuasive about the Pardeys recommendations is that they have actually tested all their theories in serious storms - they discuss for example measuring the rate of drift when heaving -to with and without a parachute anchor in winds of 75-80 KNOTS !

I decided it would make sense to get a parachute anchor, and ordered it from Alby McCracken at Para-Anchors Australia : This from their website:

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A Matter of Survival

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Read this as if your life depended on it!!!

Mother Nature is unforgiving. For ultimate survival at sea Para-Anchors Australia manufactures a range of sea surface anchors to suit all ocean going vessels.
*Proven Heavy Weather Defence
*Knockdown Protection for Conventional Sailboats
*CapsizeProtection for Multihulls and Powerboats
*Damage Control for Disabled Powercraft
*Aid to Search and Rescue
*Many Sizes to Fit all Sea Going Vessels
*High Tensile Strength - All Nylon Fabric
*Easy to Stow, Easy to Deploy, Easy to Retrieve
*A parachute sea anchor is the ONLY device available that is capable of holding your bow to the wind, allowing you the safest and most comfortable position to ride out any storm. What you see here is from the left hand edge, the last bit of heavy duty rode - the thick white cord- ending at its attachment to a sturdy metal swivel which has the yellow bag for the parachute. Then you have all the lines radiating out from the swivel to the periphery of the 'chute. From the apex of the chute a fine white retrieval line is connected to a large buoy and a smaller float. The idea is that to retrieve the anchor you pull the chute on board first using the retrieval floats.

When I ordered my parachute anchor Alby McCracken reminded me to get it all set up on the boat before setting sail. What he suggested was attaching the bitter end of the rode at the bow and then leading the rode back to the cockpit, using thin cable ties to hold it to the lifelines. When needed you attach the parachute to the rode from the safety of the cockpit then launch it over the windward side again from the cockpit. The rode will gradually pay out till the last bit gets pulled free of the cable ties and there you are, the parachute is coming off the bow. In the photo below you can see the lines running along the outside of the port lifeline, up to their attachments to 2 heavy newly installed cleats at the bow .You will also notice the inner forestay clipped to the port chainplate.

I plan to test out launching and retrieving the paraanchor some day soon. I also need to think of chafe protection for the para anchor lines where they pass across the toe rail - and I might experiement with the Pardeys view that if the bow is pointing about 50 degrees off the wind the boat will handle the sea more safely and more comfotably. They do this with a bridle coming off the rode and back to the yacht.

Inner Forestay and Storm Sails

This is the tang, a stainless fitting that the inner forestay attaches to at deck level. The plate sits flush with the deck and the long flat shaft is attached through the deck to the bulkhead below.
Below you can see how the Tang is attached to the bulkhead ..

And below you can see the forestay in place. The mast was taken down for a complete overhaul of the standing rigging at the same time as the forestay was attached to the mast, along with the running backstays.
The last pic shows the brand new Storm jib made for me by Gemmell Sails in Sydney.

When the sail is off, the forestay can be unclipped from the tang and attached out of the way to the chain plate on the port or starboard side. Otherwise to tack you have to roll up the headsail, change course and then unroll it on the other side of the forestay. Despite Sydney Rigging recommending a mechanical lever like the Highfield lever to attach the stay to the tang, I ended up with a pulley system for tensioning the stay. I only discovered this opnce the mast was back on and Sapphire delivered back to her mooring. I've seen some nice levers in a Ronstan catalogue that I might yet use to replace those pulleys but I plan to have the inner forestay and storm jib set up well in advance of even the slightest suggestion of bad weather coming, and might even try having it there permanently bagged on for long voyages. I dont have a photo of the trysail track on the mast or of the trysail up to post on the blog but its all been done and tested. The other thing they did was install a couple of blocks on the boom to set me up with a second reefing line.

Storm Tactics

A storm at sea is something every sailor fears. So far all Ive experienced in that regard have been brief squalls - once we saw the wind reach 36 knots - and a couple of times when winds were rising steadily towards 28 or 30 knots, along with a rising sea through a day sail along the coast.My anxiety level slowly rose with the windspeed but we reefed sail - sometimes later than we should have and at other times when it turned out to be unnecessary - but thats the learning curve, and everything turned out fine. Someone who had done masses of ocean voyaging calculted the amount of time they sailed in really bad weather was, from memory less than 5% of the time, and I recall reading a Blog following a yacht doing a complete circumnavigtaion during which they didnt experience ANY seriously adverse weather - you can check for yourself on bumfuzzle.com - the boat was a cat sailed by a young american couple who've now sold the cat and bought a Combi Van! It was a fun blog to read nut now theyve sold the boat and are having a baby! The point is that unless youre in the Southern Ocean you might not have to deal with storms very often, but you absolutely must know how to prepare and respond and have the right equipment for a storm if you do, and lots of this is covered in the Safety at Sea course. There also lots of books and stacks of websites and message Boards and the like where opinions and options and experiences are discussed endlessly.

Essentially as conditions detriorate and wind force increases, you have to prepare the boat in advance - such things as clearing the decks, stowing and making secure every movable item below, getting food, and then progressively reduce sail, change to storm sails and then bare poles if necessary.You need to think of ways to slow the boat down if sailing even under bare poles, and if it all becomes impossibly bad because of exhaustion or the state of the sea,you can stop the boat by heaving to with or without a sea anchor, or lie a-hull. This is how I understand what the books and Gerry Fitzgerald tell me. So what this all means is you have to be able to reef the sail, you have to have storm sails and you have to have a drogue or sea anchor.

On Sapphire you could take in a single reef and roll up the headsail. There was also a trysail but no track to pull it up on. So I decided she needed a second reefing line put on and a track for the trysail. Everything I read suggested you also needed a specific storm jib rather than just a partly rolled in headsail, and furthermore it should be on its own inner forestay - which Sapphire did not have. The reason for having a storm jib on an inner forestay is that when its in use it brings the "centre of effort" further aft toward the "centre of lateral resistance" - these terms refer to theoretical points at which the sail acts on the boat, and the boat interacts with the resistance of the sea - and by being closer together, the boat is more stable. Or something.

The thing about an inner forestay is that if you fit one - preferably removeable by the use of a "Highfield lever" - you will also need "running backstays" to support the mast at the point where the inner forestay will attach. It took me quite a while to work all this out and find out exactly what running backstays were, but I guessed I must be on the right track when the guy at Sydney Rigging that I emailed asking for a quote wrote back agreeing with my plans and offering to meet me and do the work. After meeting me on the boat one friday afternoon he told me they would make a tang first and I would have to get Adam to fit it before they could do the rest of the work. And I thought "What the hell is a tang?"

My Hydrovane Video

On the Hydrovane website they claim that people have almost no problems making the Hydrovane work right from the very start. I was sceptical. The very first time I set it up I picked a bad moment - just as I locked off the wheel a Coastguard boat came thundering up from nowhere and I freaked so switched back to hand steering, but once it had gone and the wash had died away I tried again and to my utter amazement it just worked, exactly like they predicted. I was overjoyed and amazed.And I still think the Hydrovane is the most marvellous bit of equipment on the boat. There is a learning curve though, because there are settings which you can vary and I am still in the process of learning and working out what settings work best in what conditions.So heres a video I took with my ordinary Canon digital camera in March 2009 when I was returning to Sydney from Port Stephens. The wind and sea were from behind and I rolled away the headsail because running wing on wing without a Pole is a drag - and something I havent learned to do yet - but boat speed was hardly affected. 6 knots is a respectable speed for Sapphire.

Steering Gear

One of the first big decisons I made was about self steering gear. Its a classic example of how I had to work out what works best for Sapphire and for me and what I wanted to do with her. After much reading and research on the net it was apparent that firstly if I was going to go cruising, self steering gear was vital. Secondly I learned that Self steering gear is either powered by electricity or by the wind, and the former appear to be the most popular, for example in the ARC (The famous Atlantic Rally for Cruisers) and on all the new boats exhibited on the net, in yachting mags and at the Boat Show.

So I was pleased that Sapphire already has a wheel mounted electric autopilot, and its remarkably efficient and easy to use: when the boat is on the course you want simply pull down a lever to lock the pilots motor onto a sort of ring gear on the wheel and then push a button that turns the motor on. The motor is controlled from a unit that responds to changes in heading detected by its own compass and turns the wheel in little increments this way and that to maintain course. If you decide to alter your course by a few degrees push another button! Very easy but I could only take so much of the noise of the little motor mounted on the binnacle beside the wheel whirring this way and that.

A more important draw back with these devices, especially when mounted on smaller yachts, is their use of electricity. Large yachts, say over about 50 feet, seem to carry masses of battery power, and have huge motors to keep them charged or else plenty of space for solar cells to do the same thing, but smaller yachts have space and size limitations which to a greater or lesser extent restrict their capacity to support electrically powered devices of all kinds. And that includes autopilots which on an ocean passage might well be operating 24/7. I wanted to keep my dependance on battery power to a minimum, and the noise bugged me as well so I decided to investigate wind powered self steering gear - not that I was going to do away with the autopilot! It was brilliant for use in the harbour or for short intervals between frequent tacks and also when the wind speed was zero!

I was surprised at the variety and the number of different types. Basically the wind is used to either turn an auxilliary independent rudder or else to turn the boats own rudder via a variety of cables, ingenious mecanical levers and trim tabs, sometimes assisted by additional paddles that harness the power of the water. All these systems need to be strong and powerful but able to function in light as well as strong wind.
I eventually decided to purchase a Hydrovane. This is an auxilliary rudder that is completely independent of the boats usual steering gear, and therefore can double as a backup should there ever be a failure. That was one feature that I liked about it. Another thing I liked about it was its remarkable simplicity. If you look at the diagrams of most of the competitors there are lots more linkages and hinges and mechanical bits and pieces, not to mention big frames attached to the stern of the boat - I felt Hydrovanes elegant simplicity was one of its strengths. The Hydrovane has the least number of moving parts and theyre all made of solid "316" stainless steel. I liked the Cape Horn device for similar reasons but decided against it because its not independent of the existing steering gear. I also liked the history of the Hydrovane,and the "family" nature of the business, the fact that a single engineer in Nottingham England - Geoff Town - has built every single one of them in the 36 years theyve been in business. And finally, the most important reason was that I loved the bright red wind vane, fantastically bold and visible. The major downside was its cost, about $7000 imported from England. When I finally made my decision and pressed send on the email to order it, I felt I had crossed the rubicon of my solo sailing adventure - now I was really committed.

The Hydrovane people were great. They kept me informed and up to date with my order which arrived in a few weeks in 5 sturdy timber boxes. For a number of weeks they lay open on the lounge room floor and I periodically would pick up the bits and marvel at the lovely finish and amazing engineering. I read and re read the instructions on how to attach it to the boat and how to make it work after that, and drew up a summary sheet and printed off some photos . Next, not being any sort of handyman myself I had to find a good shipwright to make the installation, and to do various other chores that were going to be needed. Adam Best at Balmain, was recommended to me by Peter Barker from the Balmain Cruising Club. Peter is currently on a solo circumnavigation in stages, at present nearly half way round on the US East Coast, and I spoke to him after attending a fascinating talk he gave about the first part of his journey. So I met Adam and gave him my notes and the instructions printed off the website and a couple of months later, when he had the time , the Hydrovane was installed.

The unit is attached to the stern by two sturdy brackets. Here (above) you can see the lower one has been mounted after the stern ladder has been removed .In the pics below you can see the solid nylon(!) rudder with a coat of antifoul, and in the next pic the whole unit attached except for the Windvane which goes on top.

Looking at that shot of the two rudders provides a good opportunity to describe how the Hydrovane works.Essentialy what you do is get the boat moving along nicely in the direction you want to go and fiddle around with the sheets until you get to that spot where all youre doing is making small movements of your wheel to keep the boat on track. You then lock your steering wheel - or tiller - at that spot and sometimes even without a Vane of any sort a good boat thats sweetly balanced will just track along. So then you activate the Hydrovane to take over the job of making those (usually) small movements using the auxilliary rudder. This is done by pulling out a couple of pins and then lining up the Vane so its leading edge is facing directly into the wind, wherever it may be coming from - to do that you just pull one way or the other on a loop of cord that goes from a tiny block that you can attach anywhere nearby thats convenient, around a cog on the device. Once its lined up you slide a sort of gear leaver along to put the thing into gear and thats it. Little adjustments can be made with the cord as needed.

This Youtube video is a promo for a documentary about a solo sailor going arond the world and via Cape Horn the "wrong" way ie east to west, nothing to do with Hydrovane but in the background you get glimpses of it working away through all manner of weather. Amazing bit of engineering!