Well worth a read: An interesting blog by our friends, circumnavigators and frequent commentors on AAC, David and Judy, who are in Greenland with their family on Danza, their beautifully prepared and just plain beautiful steel ketch.
In the last post we wrote about the very poor service life that we have been getting from AGM batteries on Morgan’s Cloud—typically just a year or so.
Justin Gobar at Lifeline, who provided us with new batteries, is advising us on how to care for them. Put broadly, there are four ways that will yield different lifetimes based on daily 50% deep cycles:
Deserted on a Sunday
Many yachtsmen who have visited the Rias of Galicia have remarked that they resemble the sea lochs of Scotland (but without the rain or the midges!). And they do, although they are far busier than Scotland, not just in terms of population and boat traffic, but also because of one of the cornerstones of the local economy – fishing, and, most specifically, fish farming.
About eight years ago, we switched to Absorbed Glass Mat (AGM) batteries on Morgan’s Cloud, to get the following benefits over traditional liquid filled lead acid batteries:
Long gone are the days when sailors could drift with the wind and the tide, without worrying about the demands of bureaucracy. It’s now a rare country that doesn’t impose limits on how long foreign sailors can stay, with the added requirement in some jurisdictions (the U.S. for example) to phone in whenever you move to a new harbour.
This may be a little off topic, but then again many voyaging sailors are, like me, also avid photographers, so here goes.
I just got back from an intensive one week travel photography workshop taught by Bob Krist, who is one of the best and most prolific travel photographers around.
One of our new snubbing lines and hook, with a standard hook for comparison
During our time in the Rias of Galicia we’ve enjoyed many comfortable nights at anchor. But as is the case in any area surrounded by hills we’ve had plenty of wind at times, rolling down off those same hills, or funnelling down the valleys. We had one memorable night where despite the fact that we had some shelter, the gusts were blasting ferociously around a small promontory to windward, obviously due to a curious land effect. And although we were well sheltered from any sea, some of the gusts were fierce enough to send Pelerin swinging around her anchor.
Back in March, when we were crossing the US/Canada border heading for Maine to start the re-power project on Morgan’s Cloud, a US Homeland Security officer asked the usual questions about what the purpose of our visit was. After I explained that we were replacing the engine in our boat, he asked how long we would be in the US? My answer was greeted with a look of incredulity and “THREE MONTHS?”. Clearly the officer had never owned an offshore sailboat.
The way we came up with the three month estimate was to list everything that had to be done, assign reasonable times to each task, total them up, and then double the result—pretty accurate as it turned out.
Here is a captioned photo essay on what we were doing all that time.
I have, with a few short breaks, lived either on, or within a stone’s throw, of salt water all my life. My earliest childhood memories are of commuting by boat from a small island where we lived to a larger island called Bermuda.
I have spent the majority of the last twenty years voyaging on the ocean. Or in fact one ocean: the North Atlantic. An 0cean that I feel a special and deep connection to, even though it has contrived to scare me witless on several occasions and make me both uncomfortable and/or seasick on countless others.
I feel a deep and visceral horror about the oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, together with dread about the long term effects on the ocean I love and the animals that live in it.
Question: Do you have a rope cutter? I ask because we are thinking of fitting an Ambassador Stripper (stainless) to a new build alloy [aluminum] yacht with an alloy sterntube, and we wonder if it is possible to get the two to live happily together.
