Yacht Arabella

Becalmed in Cowes

2009-08-05T23:45:00.006+01:00

I took some clients and guests racing on a Farr 65 today in Cowes Week, with the ever-reliable OnDeck.

Initially there was a nice westerly breeze, but the Eastern Solent turned into a millpond as the afternoon progressed. Understandably, given the boat we had, we kept moving long after some of the yachts taking part in other races around us had formed involuntary, but cosy, clumps.

Eventually, however, even we had to accept the inevitable and retire. For all that, Cowes Week offered a great day out for a nice bunch of people, including Lloyds TSB, who had kindly taken me along last year but who - for obvious reasons - were not chartering yachts themselves this year.

Third Time Singlehanded

2009-07-31T23:12:00.014+01:00

Well, so much for the "BBQ Summer" that the Met Office promised us. As Positive Weather Solutions put it: "As with 2007 and 2008, the position of the jet stream is unfavourable, and current projections show it may well stay there, meaning, we had our Summer at the end of June and start of July."

So I grabbed what seemed like the first fine day in weeks - or the Friday afternoon at least - and headed out in the hope of beating the next front to come passing through on Friday night.

Not much to say really. It was just a relaxing sail, enjoying my increasing confidence in sailing singlehanded, the spirit of which I've tried to capture in the vid and its soundtrack rather than wittering on about it. You can, incidentally, see the next batch of cloud already building ahead of the looming warm front, as the trip progresses.

One more day's sailing next week - in Cowes Week on Wednesday - then I am off to Italy in search of SWMBO and the bambini...and maybe some reliable sunshine...The long range forecasts say that the weather might improve from late August - fingers crossed.

Conditions: SSE backing E, F3 - F4, mixed cloud and sunshine. Sea state: slight
Distance covered (GPS over ground): 12.4 NM
Total distance covered to date (2009): 124.1 NM
Engine hours: 1.6 (total for 2009: 9.6 hours)

Arabella's Kid Sister

2009-07-15T03:56:00.000+01:00

Chris Waller sent me this great pic of his Pandora International on her first sail of the season, back in April. Arabella's sail number is 535, and as you can see, the sail number on Chris's Pandora is the next in sequence.

RTIR 2009: 50th overall

2009-06-20T23:20:00.012+01:00

Arabella came in 50th overall this year - not as good as her best result of 30th overall in 2007, but if anyone had suggested beforehand that we would manage two top 50 placings in three years, I wouldn't have believed them. We should have done somewhat better, in fact - but that's racing for you.

Above: Some fun ArabellaCam (tm) footage captured us surfing under spinnaker between the Needles and St Catherines Point. To view all Arabella's vids, go to Arabella's Movie Gallery or her new YouTube Channel.

We drifted over the start line on the tide, in no wind at all, but as the breeze filled in, things began to speed up.

Above and below: A civilised start-time for a change, but no wind!

As the GPS track below shows, we picked up the tidal conveyor through Hurst just right, and had a tremendous run round the back of the Island - surfing down the waves under spinnaker at up to 9.4 knots - and rolled over what looked like hundreds of boats.

Above: Rounding the Needles, quite a long way back in the fleet........(image copyright Sailing Scenes, used with permission).

Above and below:...to find rather a lot of boats in front of us....(below image copyright Sailing Scenes, used with permission).

Below:...although thankfully not too far ahead of us...

Above and below: ...and after a few hours of surfing downwind, rather of lot of them now seemed to be behind us :-)

At this point we were beginning to entertain thoughts of a very good result indeed, but it all went wrong for us on the final leg up the Eastern Solent. We found ourselves becalmed in a sea of much, much larger boats squeezing round the easternmost marker post for Ryde Sands. In all the dirty air, our sails flapped uselessly, while the big boats with their taller rigs proceeded to sailed over us, and we went backwards on the tide.

Above and below: The marine car park at the eastern Ryde Sands post (visible centre) and what it cost us in terms of progress.

We wasted an hour like that, first heading out into the main channel to see if we could get clean air but finding that the breeze had died off. Eventually, we got brave and headed back inshore, passing through the marine car park once again. We then tiptoed along the edge of the sands, once touching them and (luckily) tacking back off, until we picked up a favourable eddy right up against the Island shore. With what little wind there was, we and a few other brave souls that had stayed close in managed to pull back some of the places we had lost.

In the circumstances, we decided that getting 50th overall was a better result than we had any right to expect. But we also learned some important lessons which we will try to apply next time:

Arabella sails so much better to windward than before as a result of her new sails. But they can't save her when she is trapped in the dirty air from larger boats. To a point, at least, clean air matters more than a fair tide. After the debacle at Ryde, we learned to cover our windward side, agressively if necessary, by sailing so far inshore that anyone bigger would have been suicidal to follow us. That policy paid good dividends as we worked up the Island shore, recovering some of the tens of places we had lost.

Sailing inshore is not free from risk, but as well as encountering less adverse tide close in against Ryde, we also picked up a favourable eddy close inshore between Norris and the Shrape, while competitors further out were visibly still stemming the tide.

At the relatively late stage at which we tend to reach Ryde, the flood is well established but with a few hours of rise still to go. That does mean we can have two or more metres of tide under us, with which to scrape over the sands. I think that I will recce that area in more detail in the coming months, and see whether the fabled inshore route is viable for Arabella on a rising tide. It would be handy to have that knowledge in our tactical toolkit for next time.

Conditions: NW backing SW, later veering W F1 - F4, mixed cloud and sunshine. Sea state: slight to moderate.
Distance covered (GPS over ground): 76.3 NM
Total distance covered to date (2009): 111.7 NM
Engine hours: 3.9 (total for 2009: 8.0 hours)

Final Preparations

2009-06-19T22:01:00.002+01:00

The last bits of deck gear were installed on Arabella with two days to spare before this year's Round The Island Race...

Above: New halyard winch fitted to the mast.

Above and below: New Harken adjustable genoa track

In addition, a new outhaul had been fitted, which now gave a decent purchase when the time case for hardening it up. With new sails and all these go faster bits on board, and with her interior stripped out, Arabella was starting to look like a proper little racing yacht - if, that is, you were prepared to ignore her twin keels.

Going Pro (as it were)

2009-06-12T14:30:00.003+01:00

Never being one to miss up the chance of playing with a new gadget, I have invested in the new GoPro Wide POV Cam, in the hope of capturing some decent footage of the RTIR.

I've toyed with the idea of using action cams in the past, but have been discouraged by the poor quality video output of the consumer-priced models that were available and unwilling to shell out for professional quality kit. Now that GoPro have brought out reasonably-priced models with 5 megapixel quality and wide angle lenses, however, I thought I'd give it a go.

Match Racing

2009-06-10T23:22:00.012+01:00

More corporate sailing - taking 27 clients and colleagues out on three Beneteau 40.7's with OnDeck Sailing . Training in the morning, and match racing in the afternoon. OnDeck are really good at organising these events and I highly recommend them if you're looking to organise a client day that's a bit different from the norm.

However, it is important to guard against your guests becoming over-tired ;-))

Second Time Singlehanded

2009-06-03T23:02:00.019+01:00

Above: Reefed down and goose-winged in a F5...it has since been pointed out to me that you reef a loose-footed mainsail properly by securing the bunt by tying it around the foot of the sail, not around the boom...

The forecast had predicted cooler, cloudier weather and easterly F3-4 breezes. It got the direction right, at least.

The sun was shining brightly, but of slightly more concern to Arabella and me, having exited the marina swiftly and smoothly, was the fact that no way was this a F3-4. The breeze had strengthened and veered sharply from NE to SE just before lunchtime, while I was still attacking Arabella's coachroof with the orbital polisher. Now, bouncing into an increasingly choppy flood tide with the tillerpilot struggling to hold Arabella's head into the wind, I was seriously wondering whether it had been wise to come out on my own today.

I managed to get the main up, opting for two reefs. As things would turn out, I'd be very glad I had put those reefs in, as the wind briefly touched the top of a F5 - 20 knots - before settling to 17-18 knots and staying there for the rest of the afternoon. Letting out about a third of the genoa, I pulled the kill switch on the outboard and started sailing.

I made a complete pig's ear of my first tack, and the second too. The net gain to windward was zero, although the sails flogged most impressively, if I say so myself.

That was frustrating, but I saw little point in turning back. Granted this was a bit more of a step up than I had intended from the benign conditions of my first singlehanded effort eleven months ago. But I was out now, and if I couldn't get this bloody yacht to windward singlehanded in a steady F5, then I might was well give up all thoughts of independence and go back to pottering round under tuition from the long-suffering Roger. Or put another way, if I could do it, then an awful lot else that the Solent will usually chuck at you would seem that much easier.

I glanced up to my right, at the Southampton VTS control tower. I was making a dick of myself right in front of them. I could just imagine them, watching me through the panoramic control tower window and having a wry chuckle at my antics.

Increasingly frustrated and angry, I had another go, and another, and another. Bit by bit, the tacks improved, the sails were trimmed a little better between tacks and the gain to windward increased. So lost was I in concentration that quite a time passed before I realised a couple of things.

Absently glancing over my shoulder, I saw that Arabella and I had travelled long way upwind, despite the adverse tide. Dock Head had fallen well back into the distance. And those three dinghy racer thingies, which had emerged out of Netley some time earlier, all hiking out, flying spinnakers and capsizing, were no longer rocketing past me as quickly as they had been. Not surprising, with 5.4 knots showing on the log.

I had chosen to sacrifice a bit of pointing in exchange for more speed, as I relentlessly tested my hypothesis that speed would kill off Arabella's leeway, and just as on the previous such occasion, it appeared to be true. I trimmed the sails a little bit more, and watched the log reading climb to 5.7 knots. And stay there.

This was becoming fun, all of a sudden. I put in another tack, refining my technique. I was finding that, without the encumbrance of crew sharing the cockpit, what I lost in helping hands I made up for in other ways. More space to work in, for a start, but other, more subtle gains as well.

Once the bow had passed through the wind and began to pay off, there was a short time - 3 seconds, perhaps - in which the helm could be abandoned, and the genoa sheeted in hard by hand, before Arabella succumbed to the urge to round up . Then, staying on the low side of the boat, I could take the helm with one hand, and the winch-handle with the other. Once the genoa had started to draw on the new tack and Arabella had begun to accelerate, I could gradually sheet on the winch in while luffing gently up , then finally trim the mainsheet to the telltales.

I was trying to apply the principles I had been reading about in the racing and sail trim books, about "going up through the gears" as boatspeed increased following each tack. I was quite sure I was getting the practical application of much of the detail completely wrong, but I got the general principle, and since it suited my approach of sailing for speed first and pointing second, I was happy to apply it.

Combining all of the tasks in a single person was not physically easy in these demanding conditions. But because only one person's central nervous system was involved, the co-ordination between the trimmer and the helm was seamless. The trimmer could trim the sails to the course steered by the helm, or indeed the helm could steer to the sails. And I had stopped looking at the log - I could feel Arabella accelerating, even in small degrees, through the seat of my pants and tweak the course or sail trim accordingly. This was a sensation that I had never previously experienced, only ever read about, but on this day it was palpable.

I glanced at the log anyway, and was rewarded with 5.8 knots for just the briefest of instants, before Arabella fell back into the groove at 5.7 knots again. Upwind. In a F5. With two reefs in. And two keels, come to think of it. Awesome.

I tacked round downwind, goose winged the main and genoa, and headed back for home. And - oh, yes, I nearly forgot - took a picture, the only one I took all day. Too busy sailing, you see!

Conditions: NE veering SE F5, mainly sunny. Sea state: slight.
Distance covered (GPS over ground): 12.1 NM
Total distance covered to date (2009): 35.4 NM
Engine hours: 2.2 (total for 2009: 4.1 hours)

Testing, Testing...

2009-05-30T22:12:00.029+01:00

Above: C. gets to grips with Arabella

Saturday dawned bright and clear. And warm - could it really be that we were going to have a nice, hot summer after the previous two appalling years? I spun by the lock-up early, and picked up a couple of bits that would be needed to sail with, then headed for the marina for a full English while waiting for my brother, C. to turn up. There would be slack water until about 10.15, and I was keen to get away before the flood tide arrived.

My obligatory gadget fix for the week...

Yesterday, before leaving home, I had set up (yet another) bit of technology.

Jon Fewtrell, the author of the PassagePlus software that I used on my MacBook Pro, had alerted me to a rather nifty VNC application, discovered by one of his other users, that allowed the use of iPhone or an iPod Touch as a wireless handheld repeater for a Mac laptop.

If it worked, this would be a Godsend. Each year, on the Round The Island Race, I would find myself perched miserably out on the side deck while our lunatic racing skipper called on me to provide him with real-time tactical information as he hurled Arabella suicidally into the shallows, in an attempt to cheat the tide. Which would be fine, if I wasn't out on the side deck and therefore completely unable to see the chartplotter screen displayed on the laptop. I did have a Garmin 60Csx handheld, which lived in my pocket. I like the Garmin very much, but it only displays vector charts - and as noted elsewhere on this blog, I'm not a fan of them when they are zoomed in on a small screen. It's too difficult to make out the contours and hazards. For close-quarters navigation, I want to see an actual Admiralty chart and that means using raster charts.

My natural propensity for cowardice is matched only by my tendency to worry obsessively at whatever happens to be frightening me at any given time. The need to feel in control of the necessary information while up there on the side deck had driven me to distraction. I'd spent hours, usually in the middle of the night, researching all sorts of ideas, but had only encountered expensive PC-based solutions such as a Toughbook tablet with GPS.

I was of course aware of the traditional way of doing things, involving a board with the requisite chart tacked to it under a film cover, with a shoulder-strap and little hooks to trap onto the lifelines. It was a nice theory to try on an ocean racer, where on each tack you'd simply slide over the coachroof and under the boom as it swung across, with all the time in the world. Racing Arabella bore absolutely no relation to that. Tacking was a frantic, bumpy affair. There was no room to slide under the boom and with the cockpit full of two manic racers doing their thing on the helm and sheet winches, going via that madhouse was not an option. Which left sliding round the front of the mast, dodging the wildly flapping genoa and clinging grimly on as Arabella slid over onto a new, dangerous angle of heel that left no room for errors - and all without the benefit of a harness because the jackstays ran along each side deck, not across the coachroof.

That was not an environment, under any circumstances, in which I would contemplate carrying either a tablet PC or a chartboard slung over my shoulder. Whatever I used either went securely into my jacket pocket or it didn't come out onto the side-deck at all.

All of which made this potential trick with the iPod Touch very attractive, and I wasted no time in giving it a go.

Above: My iPod Touch (resting on the keyboard of my MacBook Pro, lower right) wirelessly screen shares whatever appears on the laptop display. Below: If you find that you have to squint to read the iPod Touch screen, you just zoom in, using the touchscreen.

The VNC software - available for US$24.99 from the Apple iTunes Apps Store or via the link on the software developer's own website at http://www.jaaduvnc.com/ - did something that was really nifty. It didn't merely enable my iPod Touch to screen share what was on the laptop display, like a dumb repeater. It also permitted me to control the laptop, by using the touchscreen controls on the iPod Touch, like a remote mouse.

So PassagePlus charts could be selected, scrolled and zoomed just as they could be on the laptop itself. The laptop could be tucked away under cover, and everything necessary could be done from the side deck using the iPod Touch (protected in a waterproof Aquapac case). All that I now needed to check was that it worked onboard, with the USB GPS and the AIS-2-USB hooked up to the laptop in live navigation mode, such that the yacht's GPS plot and the surrounding AIS targets would also display satisfactorily.

Another useful application for the iPod Touch (or the iPhone), that I had downloaded from the iTunes Apps Store, was AyeTides. This clever little App enabled the iPod Touch to display tidal data and real-time tidal curves for 10,000 locations worldwide. It had two important features from my point of view:

(1) It was a stand-alone application - it didn't require internet access to function, because everything was preloaded into a database stored on the iPod Touch, so tidal data and curves were available any time, all the time.

(2) It carried the tidal data and real-time curves for (among the thousands of other places) Ventnor, Sandown and (crucially) Bembridge and Ryde. Those last two locations were exactly where I had previously encountered the most difficulty in promptly providing tactical information to the helmsman on the Round The Island Race - like when to tack before running aground on Ryde Sands. Armed with the current height of tide on AyeTides and decent, clear, Admiralty charts on the PassagePlus chartplotter (via VNC) on the iPod Touch, I now had all I needed right there to hand on the side deck (remembering of course to double-check the AyeTides predictions for that date and location in the traditional way before the race).

(For the sake of completeness, I should point out that if you already own an iPhone, you do have the option of using the built-in GPS receiver and going for a self-contained solution with iNavX, or simply using iNavX as a repeater for GPSNavX or MacEnc running on your Mac below decks. These programs are the competitors to PassagePlus, and by all accounts are very good. For the reasons stated elsewhere, however, I prefer using Admiralty raster charts (ARCS) in PassagePlus, which dictated my choices here.)

Anyway, with luck, that all seemed sorted, subject to testing it today, and I was now free to obsess about something else - like the fact that my brother, bless him, is the kind of bluewater sailor who is an absolute queen about boats and I hadn't had the opportunity to clean Arabella yet...

And now for a spot of actual sailing...

The anticipated breeze (SE F4-5) hadn't filled in when C. arrived, and there was no current at all in the marina, which made for perfect conditions for testing the new morse-style control for the 6HP Tohatsu outboard. I was really, really hoping that this would solve my previous problems with manoeuvring under power. C. and I rigged the mooring lines as slips, and I stepped aboard and gingerly pushed the control lever into reverse and increased the revs. Obediently, Arabella moved astern. For the first time, from this new position, I noticed that there was a fair amount of propwash coming out to starboard, meaning Arabella would kick to port. That wasn't ideal for the way I wanted to turn. Now that Arabella had some way on, I throttled down and, sure enough, the stern came back into line and then, in response to the tiller, swung nicely round to starboard. Reversing the tiller, I put the control into forward gear and gave it a burst of throttle. Sure enough, Arabella's bow swung round to the right course, and she lay, virtually motionless in the still water, waiting to be told what to do next. Fantastic!

We turned upriver for a change, waiting for the breeze to fill in, and raised the new mainsail. First surprise - the new sail was loose footed. Crikey. That was a bit controversial. I hadn't specified it, I'd just asked Peter Sanders to "give me something a bit racier than the average cruising sail". Not that I was averse to giving it a try, and exploiting the benefits of being to adjust the outhaul easily sounded like fun. I like tinkering with sails. On the downside, it would put the outhaul itself under greater strain and I wasn't too sure of the efficacy of the brake - to be on the safe side, after setting the outhaul not too tight, to give the foot of the sail some belly in these light winds, I made the bitter end of the outhaul off on one of the mast cleats. I'd have to see what the RTIR race crew made of that.

Above: Just about the least flattering shot of the main possible, reefed down and running downwind. (Sorry, too busy sailing to take many shots). I see I've been promoted by the sailmaker from K535 to "GBR535". That's posh.

As the promised breeze started to fill in and reached F3, we unfurled the new genoa. That was a bit more traditional, but I notice the leech shape was more curved than on its predecessor. Interesting.

Next, I switched on the iPod Touch to test whether the VNC software would still work with the laptop hooked up to the GPS and AIS receivers in live navigation mode. Nothing doing. The iPod wouldn't connect to the laptop at all. I smothered a curse and - given the choice between sailing and playing with IT below decks - chucked the iPod back in my bag and went sailing.

Off we went down river, into Southampton Water. Having chosen to set off at low water, we would be stemming the incoming tide, and with the wind now from the ESE, we'd be close-hauled. This was a deliberate choice on my part (well, not the wind direction, obviously) - I was looking to replicate as closely as possible the conditions experienced on a number of occasions last year when Arabella suffered badly from leeway, to see what if anything these new sails were going to do about that.

The answer, in short, was: a lot. In fact the results were little short of spectacular. Arabella was sailing upwind, against the tide, in a rapidly rising breeze that soon filled in to a steady F5. The most obvious gain was in our boatspeed. The newly-calibrated log regularly showed over 5 knots on this trip (our SOG, obviously, was lower) - last year, in similar conditions, we often struggled to beat 4 knots. My hypothesis was that the faster we went, the more we could point upwind without suffering leeway, because we would increase the stall angle on the keels. All the indications were that it worked. Between 50 and 60 degrees off the wind, there was no discernible leeway. There was some really, of course - you can't beat the laws of physics - but it was so small as to be undetectible by the naked eye, using reference points on the shore. Trying to luff up beyond that point did introduce some modest leeway - it was a little hard to tell how much of it was due to the tide, now in full flood, and how much was due to the wind, but it was there, nevertheless.

By now, we should really be reefing down, as Arabella was starting to become overpressed. We were having so much fun, however, that we delayed for a while longer, while I played with the set of the sails. It soon became apparent that hauling in on the outhaul (to flatten the loose foot of the mainsail) was not possible beyond a certain point, at least not by hand. I suspect we could have squeezed just a few more degrees upwind if I could have sorted that, and it did make me wonder if it wasn't worth fitting a small winch to the mast base to assist - it would help with the main halyard too.

Eventually, we had to accept that we couldn't put off reefing anymore, not with the occasional F6 gust coming through. The only other boats out on this moderately busy day that were not reefed were the big racers, and they were starting to look horribly overpressed. Putting in the first reef was straightforward, and we turned onto a broad reach to calm things down and have some lunch.

Above: a spot of calm on the broad reach

On impulse, we ran up into the River Test, through the docks as far as the upper swinging ground. It was being used to swing, as it happened, by Houston Express - a 330-metre Hapag-LLoyd container ship - with the assistance of two tugs. Discretion being the better part of valour, we turned back upwind and began to beat back down to Dock Head.

We were now in the exact same spot where my long-suffering teacher Roger and I had suffered leeway to die for last year. Roger and I had had two reefs in the main that day. This time around, we had only one reef in. There was leeway, but it was noticeably less than on the previous occasion and before long we were back out of the River Test and round into the Itchen for the run home.

The breeze began to fall off, and we sailed calmly upriver, in almost slack water. The perfect opportunity, while C. helmed and worked on his sun tan, to work out why the hell the iPod touch wasn't talking to the laptop. There followed a short period in which the peace of the river was shattered by bursts of cursing from below decks. None the wiser, and bereft of results, I emerged muttering to myself, and we started the engine and dropped the sails.

A spot of carelessness on my part gave us an excuse to practice our shoe overboard procedure and we rounded off the day with half-an-hour's pontoon bashing, playing with the new morse-style control for the outboard. We found that we could reverse into and out of the berth without complications, and use the full width of the lane between the two rows of berths secure in the knowledge that Arabella would stop and spin in her own length.

Above: where we went today

Everything put away, and C. departed, I took a deep breath and got back to grips with the damn iPod. I must be doing something wrong, but I just couldn't figure it out.

Then, like a light going on, I realised what a fool I'd been. In testing at home, the iPod Touch had been connecting to the laptop via my home's wifi network. Of course it couldn't do that here, away from home. It needed a network with which to connect, and I needed to create one, using the Airport card in the laptop as the host. I quickly set up a network called "Arabella", adjusted the iPod's wifi settings to join that network, re-started the VNC server software and sure enough...

I'm slow, but I usually get there in the end.

Above: It works! !
Below: How it looks on the iPod Touch screen.

Conditions: ESE F4-5, mainly sunny. Sea state: slight.
Distance covered (GPS over ground): 23.3 NM
Total distance covered to date (2009): 23.3 NM
Engine hours: 1.9 (total for 2009: 1.9 hours)

Basically Ready

2009-05-29T23:09:00.013+01:00

That was the best description for Arabella when I arrived to rescue her from the tender mercies of the marine trades specialists one bright, sunny Friday evening at the end of May.

Above: Arabella, ready(ish) to go.

Will of Blue Yacht Management had finally got the b*ggers to do their jobs - no mean feat - but my plans for a midweek shakedown sail had been given, quite literally, a rain check when a system swept briefly through, breaking a spell of fine weather with heavy rain and force 7 winds. But that had moved on now, leaving beautiful sunshine and breezy conditions in its wake. On the plus side, the marine tradesmen had won an extra few days to (not quite) finish their work and (almost) put everything back where it was meant to be.

I abandoned the train for a change and took the car down to the coast. Not the ridiculously flash (not to mention obscenely big) new SUV with all the V6 go-faster bits, acquired for a massive discount back in the depths of the motor industry's recessionary despair in February, using some of my ill-gotten earnings from the banking crisis. SWMBO and the bambini had hijacked that and taken it to Italy for the half-term holiday. It seemed to be quite expensive to keep fueled up, if my wife's ever more frequently-texted demands for internet cash transfers was anything to go by. Clearly it was eating into her clothes shopping budget. Instead, I got SWMBO's geriatric VW Golf. As it wheezed down the A3, I could feel the tension of the last few weeks falling away as London fell behind and the rolling countryside of Surrey and Hampshire slipped by in a myriad hues of incandescent green under the glorious sunshine.

I even got to choose the music for a change - normally I have to suffer through High School Musical 23 (or, like, wha'ever) or Barbie Girl - and lost myself in Cat Stevens' Foreigner Suite, part of the soundtrack of my youth. Not that it's aged any better than I have. Cat still sounds like he can't quite make "Cos you taste to me as good as God made honey taste, babe" scan properly. The last five-and-a-half minutes still make me want to cry, though. Back in the 1970s, I thought Foreigner was the dog's proverbials and used to drive my brother nuts by nicking it from his LP collection and playing it on my decrepit mono record player - do you remember those really crappy boxes, with a lift-up lid and a sort of mesh speaker across the front? I read in the paper just recently that Cat, or Yusuf to give him the moniker he prefers nowadays, was claiming that Coldplay's Viva La Vida sounded suspiciously like the closing section of Foreigner Suite. Viva La Vida is easily one the most-played tracks on my iPod - ever since I saw one of the contestants on the Italian version of X Factor (we're a highbrow household, you see) do a cover version live that kicked Coldplay right out into the long grass - and I can kind of see what Yusuf is on about, but honestly I think he's stretching a point.

The last few weeks had been a little nerve-wracking, as work on Arabella seemed to lurch from one period of inactivity to the next, punctuated by occasional attempts by the contractors to meet their (broken) deadlines. Now she was ready to sail, if not quite finished in the everyday sense of that word - anyone who has ever used a boatyard will have learned that marine tradesmen have a less demanding definition of 'finished' than the rest of the world - and I had also got a couple of small jobs done on her myself - in particular re-bedding the forehatch gasket with a fresh layer of sealant in the hope of keeping Arabella's interior dry if we took green water over the foredeck, as we had done in the Round The Island Race last year. My handiwork had passed the hosepipe test - we'd see what happened if conditions this year were like last year's.

Above: My Round The Island race crew weren't going to like this - remote, morse-style controls for the Tohatsu 6HP outboard would make dismounting the engine more tricky. I was hoping this would be the solution that finally enabled me to manoeuvre with confidence under power in marinas - no more fiddling with the outboard's gear lever and throttle while desperately tryng to prevent it from stalling on me? I'd find out on tomorrow's test-sail...

With only three weeks now remaining until this year's RTIR, I'd opted not to fit-out Arabella's interior with all of her normal cruising comforts. I would only have to strip her bare again before the race, or else suffer the annual round of complaints from my once-annual race crew that she was "too heavy with all this crap on board". Arabella might as well stay light for the race. Her cruising kit stayed safely in my lock-up.

Meanwhile, I made sure that everything was ready for tomorrow's test sail. My older brother, C., an experienced blue water cruising yachtsman, had "volunteered" to come out with me and check everything on board Arabella was functional. You might have thought that was a given, but much of Arabella's cabling had been re-routed at the same time as the new locker dividers had been glassed in, as part of my ongoing campaign to ensure we didn't lose all the electrics to an early bath.

At the same time, all the mast cabling connections had been tidied up and simplified so that a master's degree in electronics was no longer required to disconnect and re-connect the masthead cables every time the mast was unstepped. In the circumstances, I'd have been surprised if everything did work first time out.

Above: One item that didn't work out quite the way it was meant to - what I asked for a removable shelf on which the fuel tank would sit, vented overboard, to limit the flow of petrol fumes into the bilges. What I got was a little different. There was in fact an exterior vent, which can't be seen here, but there was also a very large void, as you can see, leading down to - yes, you've guessed it - the bilges. Perhaps I should have tried harder to explain that petrol fumes are heavier than air. Ah well, there's always next year's fitting-out...

Above: Just in case some water does still get in, the battery now lives in a nice deep battery box...

Above: ...and the lifejackets and other essential items live in Overboard waterproof sacks, with windows to enable quick identification of the contents.

As it would turn out, the electronics all worked just fine. But the most important thing of all that C. and I would test the following day had nothing to do with electronics or cabling. After some dithering over the price, I had splashed out on a new mainsail and genoa from Sanders Sails. These would, I hoped, go some way towards curing Arabella's reluctance to point well upwind without giving away a huge amount of leeway. I couldn't do much about her hull shape and keel configuration, but a decent set of sails, properly set, should generate some decent lift and increase boatspeed, which in turn would bring the apparent wind further forward and counteract the tendency of the keels to stall. That was the theory anyway.

I had two more little tricks up my sleeve. One of them was technological and would be unveiled and tested tomorrow. The other one involved some new deck hardware, which I had fallen in love with when sailing OnDeck's First 40.7 the other week, and which I had asked the yard to fit in advance of the Round The Island Race. I wasn't going to hold my breath on that happening, however.

I ran my hand one last time over Arabella's newly-varnished brightwork, and headed off in seach of food, leaving her behind in the cool twilight.

A Grand Day Out

2009-05-20T23:28:00.011+01:00

Those wacky marine tradesmen. They were at it again, the scamps. Arabella wouldn't be ready for yet another week.

Lucky for me therefore that those nice people from OnDeck Sailing laid on a very nice corporate day today. There wasn't a huge amount of wind, which was no fault of theirs, but there are worse ways of spending a working day bobbing around in one of their Beneteau 40.7s

It was tough. But someone had to do it.

Refit progress (sort of)

2009-04-06T20:09:00.020+01:00

Arabella is nearly ready for the new season. Externally, that is. Her interior will take a while longer.

I really should have learned by now that the marine trades operate to their own, geological timescale. But every year I forget just how awful it was the last time around, just how frustrating it is to get them to do their jobs on time, and leave the boat looking clean and, er, improved, at the end of it all. To be fair, I had been lulled into a false sense of security by the relative speed of fitting-out last season.

I've spared you any shots of the state of Arabella's interior generally, so those of a nervous disposition need not look away. Suffice to say that a very significant clean-up will be required at the end, whenevever that might be. I'm not sure how people can work in such a mess. When I moonlighted as a labourer, I was always taught to leave the work area tidy and clean because it actually enhanced the quality of my work. I'm just very glad I took the opportunity this winter to strip the interior of Arabella clean of anything that wasn't bolted down - at least it's safe, clean and dry in storage, away from the unbelievable mess below decks.

I should just point out that the delay was no fault of Blue Yacht Management, who took over the regular maintenance on Arabella when Boatcare UK folded last year. Will French, who formerly worked for Boatcare UK, has set about creating a really good organization that delivers a quality service on time and on budget. It's well worth checking out his site, as his gardiennage package is a seriously good proposition if, like me, you live a distance from your boat and your lifestyle doesn't allow you much time to make the trip down very often. At least you are free, if you so choose, to just go sailing when you do get down to the boat, and this year I was determined to make that my priority.

Even Will's excellent organisational skills, however, couldn't defeat the traditional marine trades attitudes of his sub-contractors on this occasion. He got a suitable discount out of them, which is more than I've ever managed in the past, and in return I agreed to be patient.

Most of the work shown here is intended to tackle the particular issue of water sloshing around inside the lockers. The irony is that Arabella is an exceptionally dry boat. Water has never entered while she is moored. Unfortunately, repeated attempts to prevent water entering via the forehatch while Arabella is under way have only had qualified success.

The new seal that was added to the forehatch in the last round of work has prevented rain and spray from entering, which is an improvement. However, in the testing conditions of last year's Round The Island Race, Arabella took a lot of green water over her bow, and enough of that found its way inside to make life below very unpleasant. That was the only occasion on which water gained ingress all year, but it was enough to make me want to rethink the cabling arrangements and consider adding divisions into the lockers which are open fore and aft.

I've also located one or two spots in which the forehatch seal is not bedded correctly, and I suspect that would have allowed a fair amount of water ingress. I'll be attacking that separately.

Above: As part of the plan to ensure that any water that enters doesn't slop fore and aft along the lockers, new bulkheads have been glassed in to the locker interiors. This one is to port and corresponds to the aft end of the galley. In last year's Round The Island Race, sea water entered via the forehatch, then ran aft through this point and triggered the hydrostatic valves in the lifejackets stored here, causing them to inflate.

Above: all of Arabella's interior cabling has been re-run along the top sides of the interior lockers, hence - I hope - reducing the risk of it taking a bath in the future.

Above and below: another of the new divisions that have been glassed in to the lockers - this one separates the starboard side locker under the saloon berth from the locker under the V-berth in the forecabin. The primary purpose of this division is to prevent any water from running aft to the battery.

Below: Arabella has been antifouled with hard antifoul once again this year, and her topsides have been polished. The rubbing strake has just been oiled, which accounts for its 'nearly-new' look.

I've asked Will to see if he can get the contractors to finish their work and be off the boat by the end of April...I'm not holding my breath, though.

San Francisco (vaguely boaty)

2009-02-26T20:15:00.003Z

I didn't really plan on using this blog in order to show off my holiday snaps, but I thought these were a little more relevant than normal.

I was here for a short business trip and found I had an afternoon to spare. The weather had been dark and drizzly, but miraculously the sun came out and I grabbed a one-hour harbour cruise while I had the opportunity. The pictures don't show how cold the wind was...

Above: These ships come piling in a lot faster than they do in Southampton Water, and generate not inconsiderable wash.

Above: Obligatory gratuitous Alcatraz shot. The red launch is the Harbour Pilot.

Above: The white caps near the yacht are standing waves. The current was gushing out through the bridge and the yacht was moving more laterally than forward - even with a stiff breeze creating leeway in the opposite direction. Later, in Borders Books, I checked out the local cruising guides: the ebb current reaches 6 knots at springs and there is a huge eddy round the Marin Headland (the high ground in the background).

Above: The sea lions took over some disused marina pontoons near the Embacadero some years ago, and became a tourist fixture. So they have been allowed to remain ever since. Not that you'd want to argue with one of them to get your pontoon back...

Above: One way of getting your board out beyond the surfline...

Above and below: Just a few yards from the sea lions, in the lee of Pier 39, and in a very sorry and abandoned state....it caught my eye because it reminded me of Teignmouth Electron, Donald Crowhurst's ill-fated trimaran.

Lesson 4: Bramble Bank

2008-09-29T22:41:00.037+01:00

Above: Approaching Bramble Post. Note that the chimneys in East Cowes, visible mid-left through the shrouds, remain open.

"So what's the plan," asked the long-suffering Roger, as he stepped aboard. It was nearly two months since our last lesson together, which was more than enough for me to have forgotten everything Roger had ever taught me, and the look on his face told me that he knew that perfectly well.

"Let's actually go somewhere," I said. "Let's round the Cape of Calshot and see if There Be Dragons."

Like all pupils since the dawn of time, I knew that it was important to distract Teach before he had the chance to think of a good reason to say no. "But first," I pressed on, "You must admire my new fake wood cabin sole."

Above: Arabella's new cabin sole.

Roger surveyed the Tek-Dek Interior sole that had been fitted at the end of August. I like it - it's a hell of a lot nicer than the grubby (off-)white GRP cabin sole that it now conveniently covers. It clearly did nothing for Roger, who grunted non-committally.

"Come on, then," he said, "Let's set off and see where we get to."

And so we did. A textbook exit from her berth (blimey! I did remember how), and after a compulsory exercise involving nosing up to a pile in the river, hanging off it, raising the mainsail and sailing off, Arabella romped out into Southampton Water on a broad reach and pointed at the horizon.

Although it was almost October, it was a beautiful, warm day. Busy, too. There must have been, oh, at least six or seven yachts in sight the whole way down to Cowes, leaning before the westerly F4 under a blue sky punctuated with clumps of fluffy white cumulus. It was one of those days when sailing is pure joy - a happy boat, working well within her capabilities, on one of her fastest points of sail.

Before long, Arabella was out in the Solent. Warming to his task, Roger taught me as we passed the Calshot north cardinal how, if I kept the two tall chimneys in Cowes open to the south, I could shave the eastern side of Bramble Bank and sail close by the Bramble Post and tide gauge.

In the past, I'd religiously buoy-hopped round the Bramble roundabout, typically favouring the western side close to the main channel, which did mean a bit of a diversion if I was heading for Cowes. Roger's way was more-or-less a straight line route to Cowes, and a great deal shorter and quicker. In no time at all, it seemed, Arabella was gliding past the Post and closing on Cowes Roads.

Above: Bramble Post close up.

With 10 miles behind us, it was time to start heading back and we skimmed round the southern edge of the Bank, turning for home.

It was about that time that we noticed the change in the wind. It had strengthened a little, pushing 20 knots, but that wasn't the real problem. 20 knot winds held little fear for Arabella's crew after the conditions that had predominated throughout the summer. No, the real problem was that it had veered north-westerly. Most of our return journey was going to be into the teeth of the wind - a point of sail on which Arabella is not, shall we say, at her best.

Above: Arabella's clockwise loop around the Bramble, followed by the beginning of the long zig-zag home..

Roger and I looked at each other briefly and in silence. The expression on Roger's face was interesting as he replayed in his mind the conversation that had resulted in him getting stuck way out here. If he'd had his way, he could have been pottering round the upper reaches of Southampton Water within a few minutes of the marina. He sighed, and pulled out his cellphone to let her indoors know that he'd be home later than planned, while we resigned ourselves to a long, and increasingly chilly, tacking session back home against the remains of the spring ebb, as the late September sun began to set.

Conditions: W backing NW F4-5, mainly sunny. Sea state: smooth.
Distance covered (GPS over ground): 23.8 NM
Total distance covered to date (2008): 122.6 NM
Engine hours: 1.9 (total for 2008: 10.7 hours)

[This blog entry was posted two weeks after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The banking world in the US and Europe was in the process of imploding, although at this precise date, much that would soon become public remained generally unknown and unrealised. One of my clients was among the European institutions that collapsed one week after this blog entry, owing billions to savers and counterparties, necessitating an emergency government bailout and initiating many months of litigation, asset liquidation and crisis management. This collapse, and the workload that it created, wiped out any possibility that I would go sailing again before spring 2009. Arabella was hurriedly mothballed , and I arranged for a further round of work on Arabella to be started by a new yard company, to ensure that my enforced break from sailing was not entirely wasted.]

Mac chartplotter: adding AIS

2008-08-09T22:21:00.035+01:00

A few posts back, I described how I had added chartplotting capability to my MacBook Pro with PassagePlus software. As I mentioned then, the plan was to take advantage, at some later point, of the AIS functionality in PassagePlus. Recently, I was able to move the project forward, and I tested it for the first time today. Here’s how I got on.

ABOUT AIS

If you’re reading this, you probably already know what the Automatic Identification System is. However, if you’d appreciate a primer, then THIS SITE is a good place to start.

The key takeaway is that AIS signals broadcast by commercial shipping, and some navigational aids, can be picked up by a receiver with a standard VHF antenna. These signals, which go out at intervals of every 2 to 10 seconds, contain basic – but very useful - information about the broadcasting vessel, including:

• the name, description and MMSI of the vessel
• its navigational status – for example whether it is at anchor, under way, etc
• its position, speed, heading and course over ground (COG)

Once received via a normal VHF antenna and processed by an AIS receiver, this information can be fed to a chartplotter via NMEA and plotted on a chartplotter screen, where it can be combined with the chart image (and the radar image, if radar is available). As a result, AIS constitutes a valuable aid to navigation and collision avoidance.

There is some debate over just how valuable an aid it is. AIS is most certainly not a substitute for radar, not least because not all vessels broadcast AIS signals: the legal requirement, under SOLAS, is for vessels with gross tonnage of 300 or more tons, and all passenger ships regardless of size, to have AIS transmitters fitted. That leaves quite a large number of smaller vessels, as well as fishing and leisure craft, that are not obligated to – and mostly don't – carry AIS transmitters. Moreover, even those vessels that do have transmitters may for a variety of reasons not broadcast at all times.

My personal belief is that, at some future time, most if not all craft will be required to carry and use AIS transmitters of at least a rudimentary variety. It's the logical approach to take for the kind of Nanny State we live in. Until Big Brother arrives, though, anything that helps to alert a small craft to large traffic approaching is a Good Thing in my view, and – not possessing radar - I am all in favour of taking advantage of AIS, even if it isn’t foolproof.

AIS HARDWARE

AIS transmitters – strictly, transponders - come in two flavours:

• Class A: legally required for use on SOLAS Chapter V vessels.
• Class B: lower cost transponders for leisure and non-SOLAS vessels.

If you were going to fit a transponder to your average yacht, therefore, it would be Class B and such models are, at the time of writing, filtering through to the leisure market. There is some disagreement over whether doing so is desirable, however. It has been pointed out by more than a few people that a Solent full of yachts, all feverishly broadcasting their AIS details on a sunny Sunday, would so clutter the receiving chartplotter image as to make the exercise worthless, and indeed encourage the watch officer on a large vessel simply to switch on the filter that excludes all Class B signals. That said, out to sea, where traffic is less dense, there is much more of a case for a small boat having a Class B transponder, perhaps as an adjunct to a Sea-Me active radar reflector.

To add to the confusion, there are two AIS channels, also called "A" and "B". (In fact that's sufficiently confusing that I had to rewrite this blog entry after someone was kind enough to point out that in my first effort, I'd mixed my channels up with my classes). The two frequencies used are Marine ch 87 and ch 88. Using two channels doubles the available bandwidth. Vessels transmit their AIS messages quite frequently, and a complex management system allocates the bandwidth between them. Regularly scheduled AIS messages are transmitted alternately between the two channels - each AIS station can only transmit on one channel at a time.

The assertion made by people who understand AIS better than I do is that it’s worth shopping around for a receiver that can monitor both channel A and channel B without undue difficulty. The reason for that appears to be that a unit that only monitors one channel effectively "misses" half the signals. That doesn't mean that monitoring a single channel alone will result in half the surrounding vessels being completely missed. It means that only around half of their signals will be received - in practice, the AIS data appearing on the linked display will be updating somewhat less frequently than would be the case if both channels were monitored simultaneously. This is possibly not such a big deal for much of the time, but it could be vital in a close quarters situation and/or where vessels are moving at high speed.

Arabella rarely strays outside the Solent, so my own search for equipment focused on what, I imagine, most leisure sailors would opt for at this stage – a receiver rather than a transponder.

A receiver by itself is of little use without some way of displaying the information that it processes. One option is to have a self-contained unit that includes a small, basic display, like the (rather misleadingly named) NASA AIS “Radar” pictured below.

I already have one of these fitted to Arabella but I have my doubts about it. First, its tiny little screen isn’t the easiest to read, and it takes awhile to interpret the symbols in such a way as to figure out the bearing and position of each threatening behemoth as it bears down on your own fragile little boat - not something I'd like to put to the test in real life. Second, if you want to monitor transmissions on both channel A and channel B, you need to set the unit to read each channel on an alternating basis. That's a compromise that may to some extent impact on the unit's effectiveness, as hinted above - and I return to that topic later in this post. For all that, speaking strictly personally I do think it’s good to have the NASA unit on board in the absence of anything else. Whether or not it "misses" half the signals and updates less frequently that it should, it ought to at least alert you if there's something big out there. But there are better ways of displaying the data to an unskilled user like me.

Above: screenshot (taken from NASA's website) of a typical scene viewed on the AIS "Radar" display.

The best way, of course, is to have a chartplotter screen on which the AIS data is displayed as an overlay on top of the chart. That way, you can see at a glance where the broadcasting vessel is relative to your own boat. For this reason, AIS “engines” have become popular – small ‘black boxes’ that receive the AIS signal via the VHF antenna, then process the signal into NMEA data and feed it to a chartplotter. Quite a variety of these engines are available on the market, including one by NASA, another by EasyAIS, a hideously expensive one by Raymarine, and so on.

MY AIS CHOICE

Arabella doesn’t possess a dedicated chartplotter. Instead I rely on a laptop – my MacBook Pro – loaded with PassagePlus software and a plug-in BU-353 Cable GPS which connects (and is powered) via a USB cable to the computer’s USB port. A key feature of this set-up is that the laptop/chartplotter/GPS constitute a self-contained unit, neither interfaced with the rest of Arabella’s electronics nor powered directly from the ship's battery. This creates a degree of redundancy; if Arabella’s onboard system fails, the laptop system can operate as normal, and vice versa. (And being an inveterate coward, I have a handheld GPS chartplotter stuffed in my pocket as a backup, too. It wouldn’t do to get lost in Southampton Water, now would it?).

Ideally what I wanted therefore, in the interest of consistency with these principles, was:

• an AIS engine;
• that plugged into the side of my MacBook Pro;
• worked on a Mac without undue drama; and
• received its signal from the same (dedicated) VHF antenna as the existing NASA unit;
• but wasn’t interfaced with the onboard electronics; and
• didn’t need to rely on the ship’s battery for power, but instead drew it from the laptop’s battery.

My research revealed only one unit that met all of these criteria: the Comar AIS-2-USB. Quite a few units, with the help of a USB-to-serial cable and proprietary software drivers, could be made to work with a Mac. But only the Comar AIS-2-USB plugged straight into the USB port and drew its power the same way, making it truly portable and truly plug-and-play in the same way as the BU-353 GPS.

Above: Comar AIS-2-USB

Another attractive feature of the Comar unit was the fact that it could genuinely monitor both A and B channels at once. Rather than 'cheating' by having a single receiver switching alternately back and forth between channels, the Comar contained two AIS receivers - monitoring and decoding both AIS channels simultaneously.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

My biggest concern was whether the Comar unit was Mac-compatible. An enquiry with Comar themselves revealed that they were not really geared to deal with Mac users. They felt pretty sure everything would work fine and kindly sent me a link from which to download the requisite FTDI driver. When I did download it, however, it came out as gobbledegook - actually an IT professional would have known what to do with it, but it was no good expecting me to make any sense of it.

At that point, Jonathan Fewtrell, the author of PassagePlus, came riding to the rescue. Understandably curious to see for himself whether the Comar unit was compatible with his software, Jonathan did some digging around and discovered that FTDI in fact produced two categories of driver - one called VCP and the other D2XX. The one to which I had been referred to by Comar was the D2XX one. Like me, Jonathan found this was not user-friendly, and recognised that was because it was designed to run as a dynamic library. The VCP driver, he suspected, was more likely to work. It was designed to run as a virtual COM port, which even I knew made sense for USB plug-in hardware. The link for downloading it was HERE.

The VCP driver installed itself without drama on my MacBook. However, even Jonathan couldn't be sure that the unit would be compatible with his software until someone had a go with it. Deciding to chance it, I ordered the Comar AIS-2-USB unit.

Above: Assuming it all worked, this was what AIS would look like, running PassagePlus on my MacBook. (Image taken from PassagePlus website, click HERE for an explanation).

Meanwhile, I still needed to sort out the VHF antenna, whatever AIS unit I ended up buying. Arabella already had a VHF antenna - a Metz Manta 6 mounted on her pushpit - that was dedicated to the existing NASA AIS Radar. It therefore made sense, in my particular case, to exploit that capability.

Sharing a VHF antenna between certain items of hardware - a VHF transceiver and an AIS receiver, say - can be problematic and the use of electronic splitters is necessary in such cases, but controversial. I didn't have to get involved in that argument, fortunately. All I wanted to do was have two receivers share the antenna. Everyone I spoke to agreed that this simply required a classic VHF cable connector/splitter, much like the one you use to run aerial cable to more than one TV or video at home, so that the main antenna cable could be divided, with one spur running to the existing NASA unit to port and the other running to the laptop mounting position to starboard of Arabella's companionway. That was a straightforward job, at least, and quickly done.

CONNECTIONS

Once the Comar AIS-2-USB unit arrived, all I had to do was connect the VHF antenna cable to one socket, and the (supplied) USB cable to the other, then plug the other end of the USB cable into the port on my MacBook. The unit immediately switched on (drawing its power from the laptop), as indicated by a green LCD on the side of the unit. Within a few seconds, two red LCDs on the side of the unit also began to flash, indicating that the unit was receiving signals on both channel A and channel B.

DID IT WORK?

Yes, first time - and very impressively, too.

The plan had been to try out the system for the first time while out sailing, but the English climate conjured up October's weather in August, so the AIS was put to an unfair test while I sheltered below decks from driving rain and high winds, and Arabella stayed safely at her marina berth.

I say "unfair" because the pushpit-mounted Metz antenna reaches barely 2 metres above Arabella's waterline and, in the marina, is surrounded by a forest of masts. The situation is helped not at all by fact that at low water - as at the time of this test - the top of the antenna is well below the top of the marina's banked sides. To all intents and purposes, the antenna has zero line of sight. All of which made the outcome of the test, to my inexperienced eye, that much more impressive.

The large scale screenshot below shows, more or less, the extent of the range at which the system picked up AIS transmissions. (Note: you can view larger versions of all of these images by clicking on them).

Arabella's position at the time of the test is shown by the red symbol, with the pop-up information box, at the top of the chart. As you can see, AIS transmissions were detected all the way down Southampton Water and across the Solent - even picking up the Red Funnel ferry at its berth in Cowes some 8 nautical miles distant. In addition, the system showed a vessel entering Portsmouth Harbour, to the east, and a Bahamian cargo vessel making its way down the Western Solent, off the Beaulieu River.

The next two screen caps are even more extraordinary. AIS transmissions were detected from the Needles base station - nearly 17 nautical miles distant, while the Bahamian vessel was tracked succesfully as it proceeded further down the Western Solent...

...and here is the system really showing-off by capturing the signal from a Coastguard SAR helicopter flying south-east just off Ryde in the Eastern Solent.

Meanwhile, it was a busy day in Southampton Docks. To emphasise, none of what is shown here was within line of sight of the AIS antenna. Yet PassagePlus was faithfully plotting the tracks of moving vessels (blue lines) and predicting their courses and positions for the next 5 minutes (grey dotted lines) without difficulty.

While I sat there playing with the software, a class B signal suddenly appeared, moving up river towards Arabella's marina. I popped my head out of the hatch just in time to see a yacht motoring past and continuing upriver. Back on screen, I watched it turn into a neighbouring marina and moor up, as shown below. (The designation "AIS Type 36" indicates that this is a sailing vessel).

An interesting feature of this (class B) signal was that it updated less frequently than the class A signals - about once every minute or so. Class B transponders transmit less frequently than Class A transponders, and in addition they are programmed to wait for sufficient available bandwith (after the nearby Class A transmissions have taken their share) before transmitting - in other words, if a Class B unit is about to transmit and detects that there is insufficient bandwidth, it aborts the attempt and tries again after a predetermined interval.

Not being an expert in marine electronics, I can't be sure, but it seemed to me that this had significant implications for the NASA AIS "Radar", which I was watching side by side with the laptop for comparative purposes. As I mentioned earlier, I have the NASA unit set up in such a way that it monitors channel A and channel B alternately. The accompanying product literature does not state at what intervals the unit alternates between the two channels. But - from the fact that the NASA unit failed to detect this yacht's signal at all over a period of approximately 10 minutes - my pet theory was that the unit wasn't scanning the relevant channel at any time when the yacht's transponder was transmitting. It therefore appears possible for an alternating unit, like the NASA, to "miss" the less frequent class B signals altogether because they are not transmitted on either channel at a time when it's scanning that channel. If that's correct, the problem is not likely to extend to class A signals simply because they are transmitted far more frequently.

The Comar/PassagePlus combo also whipped the NASA unit in another significant respect - range. You'd think that range was a function of the height and efficiency of the antenna, but it seems to me that the quality of the AIS "engine" may also play a role. At no point during this test did the NASA unit display any signals outside a range of 2 nautical miles - regardless of how much I adjusted its threshold level - whereas the Comar/PassagePlus system displayed signals as far away as 16 NM, the bulk of them falling in a radius of 8 NM.

Previously, I had tended to excuse the NASA's modest range as the inevitable result of fitting a good antenna at a very low height, but the Comar unit demonstrated with some certainty that that was a fallacy. It would have been interesting to see how much additional range could be obtained by connecting the Comar unit to a masthead antenna - I suspected the result would be pretty awesome - but I was more than satisfied with things as they were, on the basis of this initial test.

How the other half lives

2008-08-08T21:17:00.012+01:00

Not in my wildest dreams could I describe myself as an obvious denizen of "Britain's Premier Yachting Regatta". But I can sail, sort of, and I ended up crewing on a yacht entered at Cowes Week anyway, as a guest of those awfully nice people at Lloyds TSB Commercial Finance, who had chartered three boats for the occasion.

Better still, it was the final day, the one with the fireworks display in the evening, and hospitality in Cowes was thrown in. And I'd never been before. So I was prepared to cast my principles aside - never difficult for a lawyer - and indulge myself in some serious corporate entertainment.

The only thing that slightly worried me was the exaggerated impression that Lloyds TSB had formed of my credentials as racing crew, based on the fact that somebody had told someone else that I'd once come 30th overall in the RTIR. Which conveniently overlooked my ignominious retirement this year - the only other time I'd entered Arabella in the race.

Ah well, it was too late now. I would just have to bluff it. A hurried review of some yacht racing textbooks left me none the wiser, but gave me a large vocabulary of racing slang and terms. I understood paying tack, lift, pressure and left shift. I wasn't too sure what some of other phrases were on about, and I suspected I'd unwittingly picked up some inappropriate Americanisms from the US-centric racing books I'd managed to get hold of.

I needn't have worried. I had a wonderful time.

We were delivered by high-speed rib from Southampton to Cowes Yacht Haven, which was a wicked experience. It got better: I had no idea what sort of boats we were going to be racing until the rib pulled up alongside the entire Clipper fleet and deposited us aboard.

These are the 68-footers that competed in the Clipper Round The World Race 2007-08. I'd never been on anything as big or as fast as this before, and it was an extraordinary experience to crew on one of these wonderful yachts as the entire fleet competed in a genuine race.

Even better, I got to be the staysail trimmer onboard Western Australia, working in the snake pit under the watchful eye of Austin, one of the fleet's three engineers, and picked up a load of helpful tips on sail trim that I'll be able to put to good use on Arabella.

The result? Ahem, moving swiftly on, after the race ended we got the full VIP treatment at the tented village before strolling through a packed, vibrant Cowes to the Royal London Yacht Club for dinner and the best view that money can buy of the Red Arrows display and the fireworks.

A really fantastic day out. I'm already plotting what I have to do to get invited back for next year!

Lesson 3: River Test and Eling

2008-07-24T23:00:00.089+01:00

The day of my third lesson turned out beautifully sunny and warm, but with strong SE and ESE breezes building - rather than gusting - from F4 to F6 while we were out, it also made for some challenging sailing. One thing that I learned today was that it wouldn't be wise to be too cocky about my capabilities following my first singlehanded outing a week or so earlier. More productively, some important pennies finally dropped about sail trim, attack angles and leeway in moderate to strong breezes.

Above: How to sail 22 miles without going anywhere in particular. The battery ran out on the laptop on the way home, and I couldn't be bothered to change it, hence the triangle marking our 'last known position'. Screenshot taken from PassagePlus software (click the image for larger view).

Under the watchful eye of the long-suffering Roger, Arabella and I made a textbook exit from her berth - I finally seem to be getting better at doing that - and motored down river and out into a decidedly choppy Southampton Water. The sea state was puzzling. It looked like wind against tide, but the wind and tide were aligned. We concluded that, with the F4-5 wind blowing pretty much straight up Southampton Water, there was a sufficient fetch to generate the chop.

The conditions wouldn't have made singlehanding easy at all, at least not at my level of (in)experience. The tillerpilot, on which I had relied so heavily last time out, struggled to hold Arabella's head to the wind, now increasing to a steady F5, as I raised the main and put the first reef in. I wouldn't have been very confident had it not been for Roger in the cockpit, ready to take control if the tillerpilot lost the plot. The key seemed to be to increase the revs on the outboard, giving Arabella sufficient forward motion into the wind and chop to allow the rudder to bite; too little, and her bow was simply blown off the wind. Equally, applying sufficient power to generate some forward drive made for a bumpy ride as she gamely tried to force her way through the chop and white horses. It wasn't much fun handling the lines up at the mast while Arabella did a passable imitation of a bucking bronco.

Above: "The tillerpilot...struggled to hold Arabella's head to wind as I raised the main..." Screenshot taken from PassagePlus software.

With Arabella's sails eventually set and the outboard switched off, we headed a little way down Southampton Water. Other than the fact that the waves were smaller, the conditions were a carbon copy of those that had prompted the decision to retire from the RTIR a month earlier. Arabella simply didn't like sailing into the teeth of a stiff breeze. As the main chart above shows, we did make progress, but it was hard won and we had to sail well off the wind, with each tack gaining only a modest amount of ground. And there was leeway to die for - we were pointing much higher into the SE breeze than our ground track suggests.

The only consolation was that it wasn't all Arabella's fault. Others were having similar problems. Once again, we were out almost by ourselves on a beautiful day, continuing to give the lie to the myth about the overcrowded Solent. There were just a few other yachts out. They included a Contessa 26 and another seventies yacht of indeterminate make, both crewed two-up, which had left the river at the same time as us. Not unexpectedly, the Contessa appeared to make less leeway than we did - although she didn't walk away from us either - but eventually she gave up, dropped her sails and continued off down Southampton Water under power. Meanwhile the other yacht surrendered after a couple of tacks and turned back for home.

Roger, as usual, had other ideas.

"Have you been up the River Test yet?", he asked. I hadn't, so we tacked round and ran before the wind up into the Test. It was fascinating. A trip through the heart of a busy port, with commercial shipping - including the 176m Grande Italia, below - coming and going continually, yet with loads of room to sail and keep out of the way.

Roger explained that he used this area on the school boats quite often, especially in frustrating weather conditions, as it is reasonably sheltered but, with drying patches, small boat moorings and plenty of large shipping, challenging enough to present plenty of teaching opportunities.

But the best was still to come. As we rounded a gentle curve to the left, a wide open reach of the river opened out, with the container port to starboard and unspoiled woodland to port. The wind fell off a little, to 12 or 13 knots apparent, and we sailed comfortably along, with the place all to ourselves.

"Right," said Roger, pointing at the chart. "Let's do a little pilotage. Off to port up ahead, there's a drying creek that leads up to Eling Harbour. Let's get the sails down and go and have a look."

Above: Chart detail showing Eling Channel. Interestingly, the GPS plot looks to be a little off - we were definitely closer to the wall on the final (south-westerly) entrance into the harbour, to avoid the shallow patch to port on the way in. Screenshot taken from PassagePlus software (click the image for larger view).

Studying the chart, I saw that the creek, marked by posts, dried to 0.1m and ran through mudbanks that dried to between 2m and 3m on average. It seemed straightfoward, and with high water about an hour ahead, and a tide of nearly 4m, we'd have more than enough depth on a rising tide to go in safely. The beginning of the channel was clear enough to see, with a port and starboard post showing the way. Thereafter, starboard posts described a curve around to the entrance into the harbour.

Believe it or not - and East Coast sailors will be smirking at this point - it was the first time that I had ever entered a drying creek, so the experience was invaluable. I regularly used the height of tide to calculate how far in I could work to the shore, but I'd never previously gone into a creek that had the temerity to vanish at low water. Hugging the starboard posts, I turned smartly into the harbour entrance and kept close to the wall to the right, avoiding the 3-4m drying patch that seemed to fill the left of the narrow channel inbound. The harbour was disarmingly pretty, and I was amazed that I could have been sailing in this area for so so long without knowing about it. Stupidly, I'd left my camera in Italy back at the weekend when visiting SWMBO and the bambini - who have parked themselves there for the whole summer - but the stock shot below probably does a better job than I could of capturing the look and feel of the place.

Above: Eling Harbour at low water. The entrance channel is along the wall beneath the containers, far right background. (Library shot from Flickr, used under commons licence. Copyright Joe Dunkley)

We entered the harbour far enough to have a nose around, and admired the scene. This close to high water, plenty of people were on their moored yachts, while tourists wandered up and down the waterfront, and an air of colourful hustle and bustle prevailed. A fascinating little place that's well worth a visit - you can find out more HERE.

However, time and tide wait for no man, as the old saying goes. We needed to be on our way if we wanted to get back home before the ebb set in. Reversing our course, we headed back out into the River Test. The wind here had backed ESE and was now a sustained 22-25 knots - in other words, pushing towards the top end of F6 territory - which was not exactly what either of us had been hoping for, given that we would be beating back down to the mouth of the river.

Above: Looking ESE out from the Eling Channel to the River Test. Care is needed to not become confused by the sequence of posts. Working from the right, follow the first two green posts, then exit between the left-hand green and the red posts. (Library shot from Flickr, used under commons licence. Copyright Chalkie Colour Circle.)

Roger suggested - given the fun I 'd had raising the mainsail earlier, while trying to use the tillerpilot to hold Arabella's head to wind - that an alternative might be to pick up a convenient mooring buoy under power, raise the sail there, and then sail off. We headed for the moorings shown in the picture above (where the small yacht can be seen moored, beyond the second starboard marker post), and I attempted to manoeuvre Arabella in order to bring her alongside a buoy, level with her cockpit, where I could reach it.

I had no joy at all making an upwind approach to the buoy in forward gear. The wind blew off the bow continually. By turning Arabella around and approaching in reverse, however, all went smoothly. I had already prepared a mooring line leading from the samson post on the foredeck, out through the bow fairlead and aft outside everything to the cockpit. Grabbing the buoy as it came level with the cockpit, I led the mooring line through the eye spliced to the heavy line attached to it, then walked forward to the foredeck and hauled in.

Shortly, Arabella was moored by the heavy line to the buoy and lying docilely head to wind, while I hauled up the mainsail. It was then easy to cast off the mooring and - at least in this deserted river, with plenty of room all around - to walk back to the cockpit as Arabella fell back downwind, trim the main and put her onto a reach while unfurling a portion of the genoa to get her sailing properly.

With the breeze as strong as it was, getting back down the Test was hard work. Despite that, we persisted. The frequent gusts came in handy, providing lift and enabling us to point up a bit on most tacks, but leeway was still an issue.

Stronger winds and chop certainly show up the principal weakness of a small twin-keeler. The leeway is manageable, but you do need to be aware of it and to plan your sailing accordingly. If the wind is coming from even slightly to left or right of the rhumbline to your destination, then there will always be a paying tack that will get you there reasonably quickly. If you have to sail right into the teeth of anything from the middle of a F4 upwards, however, be prepared for a long trip, with each tack making relatively modest gains to windward.

One of the things I've never found intuitively obvious about leeway is that it increases the closer to the wind you sail. In other words, leeway is greater when sailing close-hauled than when sailing on a beam reach. On an intellectual level, the best explanation I've found for that is that when the boat heels more, as it will when close-hauled, not only do the keels lose some of their grip on the water, but the effective sail area presented to the wind is reduced, slowing the boat down. And slowing down in turn further increases leeway, because the 'lift' generated by the keels depends for its existence upon boatspeed. No boatspeed, no lift. Whereas, by sailing further off the wind, the sheets can be eased (increasing speed) and heel reduced (increasing the 'bite' of, and lift generated by, the keels), with the result that leeway is minimised.

Above: That a keel produces lift always confused me. After all, unlike an aircraft wing, a keel is symmetrical. Logically it has to be, or the boat would only sail well on one tack. The above diagram, taken from a very interesting website, finally helped me to figure it out. The keel is symmetrical, but its angle of attack is not in line with the direction in which the boat is travelling. The boat's sideways, crabbing motion creates an offset angle. The keel therefore emulates the effect of a classic, asymmetrical wing, in the sense that the water has to travel further around one side of it - the upwind side - than it does around the other. The water travelling around the upwind side has to travel faster than the water on the downwind side and, according to Bernoulli's Principle, the resultant pressure differential constitutes lift. Without needing to be a physicist, it's also easy to see from this diagram that, as the boat (and therefore the keel) is turned more and more to windward, the keel's angle of attack relative to the flow of water will increase to the point at which it 'stalls' in much the same way as an aircraft wing can be made to do. By analogy with an aircraft wing, the slower the boatspeed, the smaller the stall angle will be - the less the boat needs to be pointed up to windward to cause the keel to stall.

Chop and short or breaking waves also increase leeway, partly because they physically push a boat downwind when they slap against her hull and partly because, to the extent they stop or reduce boatspeed, that reduction in speed also contributes to leeway for the reasons just described.

Roger and I experimented with unfurling alternately more and less genoa, and changing the sheet leads accordingly. In these winds, however, unfurling more than about half of the genoa gave diminishing returns. Arabella heeled very impressively and stuck her lee deck underwater, but went absolutely no faster - if anything, she slowed down - and suffered huge leeway. Putting our weight out to windward, racing-style, might have helped to the extent that it brought Arabella more upright.

Whatever, it was gradually becoming clearer to me what the source of Arabella's difficulties in this year's RTIR had been. I couldn't be sure how much of a practical effect all this science malarkey really had. But Arabella's upwind performance could use all the help it could get, no matter how marginal.

The more I played, the more I was making mental connections between otherwise unrelated experiences. I had discovered on my first singlehanded trip that if I went out on to the starboard deck (inducing starboard heel), Arabella turned smartly to port, and vice versa. Now, of course, I could see that if Arabella heeled before the wind, she would inevitably produce weather helm (wanting to turn upwind), with inevitable consequences in terms of leeway. So all the science boiled down to a simple rule of thumb: more heel = more weather helm and more leeway.

The same rule of thumb meant that exploiting the lift generated by gusts - what the racers call "bullets of pressure" - to steal a few yards to windward was something to be done with moderation. Steer up into the gust too enthusiastically, and you'd increase heel, slow the boat, and risk losing through leeway as much ground as you gained via the little burst of lift.

I'd learned some valuable lessons today - not all of which sank in until after I got on the late train home and had an enforced two hours in which to mull them over - about how Arabella behaved in stronger winds and chop, and about developing a helming and trimming strategy to cope with such conditions. I didn't yet feel ready to go out alone in such conditions, but at least my experience and knowledge was building up, layer by layer.

Above: Where we went today - the Google Earth version

A further bonus was that, once Arabella lay safely back at her pontoon, Roger had the courage to do something I had so far chickened out of. He unscrewed the Airmar through-hull paddlewheel transducer for the ST60+ speed instrument, which had become fouled once again, so that I could clean it. It turned out that the through-hull fitting has a small flap inside, which closes once the transducer unit is fully unscrewed and removed, so the fountain of sea water which I was fearfully expecting never materialised. A sponge and bucket was all that was needed to clean up the modest amount of water that entered. After shaking out all the little marine creepie crawlies, and ensuring the paddlewheel span freely, I removed the temporary bung, replaced the transducer and screwed back the retaining cap without drama. Another annoying little personal demon had been exorcised.

Little by little, I was getting better at this game. It was only a shame that, on this day of hot sunshine and strong breezes, I'd foolishly neglected to consider skin protection. My lobster-pink face gave my fellow passengers plenty to gawp at on the train back to London. First task when I got home was to help myself to copious quantities of the face cream that Luisa conveniently forgot to pack when departing for Italy. It was one of those horrendously expensive beauty products that make you resent using them, given that you're effectively smearing large sums of money all over your face. But I do feel visibly younger now, as well as a little bit wiser.

Conditions: SE backing ESE, F4 building steadily to F6, mainly sunny. Sea state: short chop.
Distance covered (GPS over ground): 21.8 NM
Total distance covered to date (2008): 98.8 NM
Engine hours: 2.1 (total for 2008: 9.8 hours)

First time singlehanded

2008-07-13T23:48:00.093+01:00

This weekend, I finally managed my first singlehanded trip out in Arabella. The Jester Challenge it wasn't, but it was a major step forward for me and a huge confidence booster.

The forecasts for Sunday had promised a much-needed break in the weather, but after a fine start to the morning, the clouds rolled in again.

I wasn't too bothered. I needed to clean up the mess left behind after our abortive attempt at the Round The Island Race two weeks earlier, and there were a host of other little jobs that needed to be seen to. I emptied Arabella's contents out onto the marina pontoon - it never fails to amaze me just how much stuff gets shoehorned into such a small boat - and got stuck in with a vengeance.

Note to self: ban potato crisps for next year's race. You wouldn't believe the places I found them in.

The forecasts said it shouldn't rain, so of course it did, in the mid-afternoon. By that time, I had managed to remove from Arabella's interior all of the powdery silt that had been left behind by the Solent mud-waters that found their way below decks during the race. And removed the dried salt spots. From the headlining. And managed to reload all of her kit back on board, but not before undertaking some drastic dejunking and consigning certain items to the marina skip.

Sheltering in the dry, below decks, I considered my options. Last night, I'd kind of, sort of, convinced myself that if the weather was kind, I might have a go at singlehanding today. But in the cold light of morning I'd had an attack of cold feet - or was that realism? I'd never yet managed to get through a lesson with Roger without cocking something up - usually something pretty basic - and now I thought I was capable of going out alone? There had been times when merely reversing Arabella out of her berth had been difficult - and she is a very small boat.

The uninspiring weather conveniently added another reason not to go. I probably ought to have called it a day then and gone home, but the rain relented, though the dark clouds remained overhead. Reminding myself that life doesn't often give me the chance to come down to the boat, and I should make the most of it, I stuck around and attacked the next item on the to-do list - how to get the lead right on the genoa furling line. That took a while, fiddling around with various lead angles, but finally I had it cracked, I thought, and suddenly it was 6.00pm and the sun came out.

Peering up, surprised, I saw that there was actually quite a lot of sunshine. A big patch of blue sky was sweeping in from the west, punctuated only by light cloud.

Damn. I was all out of excuses. Now I would have to go. I couldn't face jumping on the train back to London in fair weather, having not having at least tried. I'd never be able to live with myself. The tide was flooding, and there were maybe two hours to go until "first" high water, perhaps another hour or so of the stand - which was less pronounced on neaps - by which time it would be dark anyway. The wind was falling off as evening came on. I could get maybe three hours out on the water, in near-perfect beginner's conditions.

If I dithered any longer, time would run out and I wouldn't go. Forcing myself to act, I started the outboard, got togged up in lifejacket and harness. Removed the sail cover, unhooked the bungees from the halyards. Dug out one of the two tillerpilots. Switched on the instuments, hooked up the laptop, fired up the chartplotting software and activated the attached GPS. Went back out onto the pontoon, slipped the bow line from the dock, threw it on board. Holding Arabella to the pontoon, walked aft and did the same with the stern line.

Arabella was free. The tidal current running through the pontoons was pulling her gently but inexorably out of her berth. All I was doing now was keeping her close to the finger berth as she backed out, nothing more. If I didn't go with her, she would still be leaving. I stayed put on the end of the pontoon, keeping Arabella lined up. Too late it occurred to me that, with the current taking her like this, I could have - should have - used a slip line as a spring off the starboard quarter to help her swing around.

I stepped aboard, shifted the outboard into reverse. We had to get some sternway through the water if I wanted the rudder to bite so that we could swing round between the rows of berths. But I had already left it too late. Arabella politely but firmly declined to turn the way I wanted her to and continued heading for the boats berthed across the way.

Not good. With tiller still hard over, I clunked the outboard into forward gear. Arabella obediently began to swing, but of course, in forward gear, she swung the wrong way, pointing into - not out of - the lane to the river between the two lines of berths.

Further note to self: in future, try not to forget to put the tiller across when switching gear. Another beginner's mistake. Still, I'd settle for what I'd been given. Clunking the engine back into reverse, and increasing the revs, I got some stern way on and just kept on reversing Arabella all the way out into the river.

And that was really the worst moment of it all. After that, everything went fine, as the utterly boring movie below shows. Mind, it's boring for you, because nothing exciting happens. It wasn't boring for me - my heart was in my mouth for much of the time.

(to view all Arabella's vids, go to Arabella's Movie Gallery)

About a half-an-hour in, I finally unclenched my but-hocks and starting enjoying myself. In the process, I found out a few useful things through trial and error.

Once out in the river, it turned out not to be feasible to do what Roger had taught me on my last lesson, which was to sort out the fenders, lines and mainsail just bobbing around outside the marina. The reason for that was that the wind and the flood tide were aligned, and Arabella wanted to drift upriver at a rate that was too fast for comfort. Clearly, Roger's technique needed less wind, less tide or - ideally - for the two to be in opposition.

Instead, I headed off down river to see what I could do with the Tiller-Tamer. Using it to lock off the tiller was a solution of sorts, but as on previous occasions, Arabella wandered off track pretty rapidly once her balance was upset, for example as soon as I left the cockpit to collect in the fenders. The direction in which she headed correlated inversely to which side I stepped up on to - every time I went up on to the starboard deck, for example, she'd head off to port. This tendency was manageable, but annoying, and I wasn't sure how I could risk enough time to go up to the foredeck and recover the forward mooring line, even if I could attack the fenders one at a time before heading back to the tiller to restore Arabella's course.

Above: My new best friend - the Tillerpilot. In fact, I'm so fond of it, I secured it to the pushpit with a spare piece of cord...just in case. The image also shows the Tiller-Tamer fitted to the tiller.

It may be that the balance of a small boat like Arabella is simply too easily upset for the Tiller-Tamer to be of much help, and it may work better on a larger boat. As far as Arabella is concerned, however, it really requires that you stay in the cockpit so that you can tend to it - good for locking off the tiller while you tidy up lines or grab the flask of coffee, say, but not much else.

Frustrated by that, I turned my attention to the tillerpilot. I'd rigged it before leaving, assuming that at some point I would use it, but uncertain just how much. The tillerpilot was a revelation. At the cost of some battery drain, it was utterly unflappable. Provided I kept an eye out for traffic and watched where Arabella was heading, the tillerpilot kept Arabella to the required course no matter how much I wandered around the deck. It was easy to gather in the fenders and lines, and then to raise the mainsail, as we motored gently down river. By the time we reached Southampton Water, we were ready to sail.

It was as good as deserted. Yet again. It always is when I go out. For all I knew, it might have been the maritime equivalent of the M25 out here earlier on, but at 7.15pm on an acceptably pleasant Sunday evening, with the sun already low in the sky, everyone had gone home and left the whole place to me. I had a private practice area of more square miles than I could possibly need.

I put Arabella onto a reach and unfurled the genoa. With the breeze only reaching F3 at most, I unfurled it all, even if that was not strictly sensible on my first singlehanded sail. Arabella accelerated smoothly to 4 knots or so, and I cut the engine before reconnecting the tillerpilot so that I could start trimming the sails. At this angle of attack, the sheets could be eased for speed. That suited me just fine. I had absolutely zero desire to go sailing Arabella around on her ear on my first time out alone. My stomach was just about returning to its normal place, and I forced myself to put out of my mind all the iterations I would have to deal with later on and to relax, concentrate on what I was doing right now. I'd done my thinking ahead, just as the books say you must, and prepared everything I could for singlehanding. There was nothing further I could do right now, except enjoy the moment.

Above and below: Look - no hands! The orange lines, by the way, are just to stop the outboard from vibrating itself to port or starboard.

In these light breezes, the tillerpilot continued to be a Godsend. I'm not sure whether I'd have been quite so relaxed about surrendering control to it in stronger winds, but for now I made good use of it. At one point, with virtually no traffic in sight except for a large container vessel inbound in the main channel, well off to the right, I even went and sat on the foredeck and just drank in the scene, as Arabella sailed steadily and serenely on by herself.

If the tillerpilot was now my new best friend, the laptop/chartplotter came a very close second. Admittedly I was sailing in familiar waters, but our course took us over some shallow patches. With the laptop I could see at a glance where I was, what the charted depth was, and add the expected height of tide to that with a quick mental calculation, and do all that from the helm. I had the charts out on the nav table below decks, as a backup, but I doubt that I would have been able to handle much paper chartwork, as well as singlehanding, at least not at my stage of development. It would have been easier to head out into deeper water beside the main shipping channel instead, and simply buoy-hop. With the aid of the chartplotter, however, I could keep well inshore and stay out of trouble and anyone else's way. The only traffic that came anywhere near me was a solitary dinghy heading in to shore at Netley.

Above: My other best friend - the laptop chartplotter saves frantic dashes to the nav station and makes pilotage easy. Note how we just shaved the side of the drying patch.

Above: where I went today. Screenshot taken from PassagePlus software (click the image for larger view).

I glanced at the time. It wasn't far off 8.00pm. High tide was at 8.15pm, and by 9.00pm it would be almost dark. Ideally I wanted just enough gloaming to see by as I made my way back up the river. As it was, it was already time to switch on the masthead tri-light. I should be heading back.

I disconnected the tillerpilot, and executed my first-ever singlehanded tack. In such light airs, the manoeuvre went smoothly, and I was able to trim in the genoa sheet by hand, without resorting to the winch. Staying put in the cockpit, I found the Tiller-Tamer more useful than it had been earlier, as I could lock off the tiller, trim the genoa, then release the tiller and steer by hand to get the best performance out of Arabella. I didn't want to be hanging around now.

Above: Where I went today - the Google Earth tour version (to find out how to do this on a budget, see the note at the end of this post)

The wind was falling off, but by sailing more proactively and working the gentle gusts for speed rather than pointing up, I arrived back at the entrance to the river very quickly. My earlier tinkering with the genoa furling line paid off now, and the foresail furled away easily. Under main alone, Arabella ghosted into the river and I got the engine started and glanced over my shoulder.

I had been keeping an eye on Icap Leopard for the last ten minutes or so, as she came barrelling up Southampton Water under full sail, catching Arabella hand over fist; now she overtook us under power, making for Ocean Village. About ten crew, in smart black matching outfits, were busying themselves tidying Leopard's mainsail and lines while I worked at Arabella's mast, stowing the main and coiling away. I gave them a nonchalant wave - seasoned, veteran, solo sailor that I was. They in turn ignored me totally.

As Arabella putt-putted back up river, the sun finally set. Even the industrialised lower reaches of the Itchen can look nice in conditions like this, and I let the tillerpilot take the strain while I grabbed a coffee from the flask and admired the display. Then, after sorting out the fenders and lines, I rigged a midships spring leading aft outside everything to the cockpit, with a large loop tied in the end with a bowline. Fingers crossed, that would stop Arabella when we came alongside her finger berth.

Berthing singlehanded seems to be the one thing I have been able to execute without trouble so far, and so it turned out to be tonight. Once we had entered between the two rows of berths, I put the outboard into neutral, swung the tiller and Arabella turned obediently into her slot. I dropped the loop of the spring over the end cleat on the pontoon as it came abeam, put the outboard into forward gear and locked the tiller hard over towards the dock. Arabella came to a perfect halt and stayed there while I sorted out the other mooring lines. It was 9.35pm, almost exactly three hours after I had set out.

I tidied up Arabella quickly in the darkness before running for the last train back to London. It was the horrible slow one, the stopping service that collects the waifs and strays from all the little stations. I could see it was going to take till the small hours for me to get back.

The three hours spent out on the water had been worth every minute of the train ride home. I'd barely covered seven miles singlehanded, in the most benign conditions imaginable. At best it was the first step on a very long road, something that other boatowners might think nothing of doing. But the point was that I had taken that step. It was a taste of total freedom and independence; it was like a drug. I was already craving the next fix.

Conditions: WSW F2-3 Sunny intervals. Sea state smooth.
Distance covered (GPS over ground): 6.9 NM
Total distance covered to date (2008): 77 NM
Engine hours: 1.5 (total for 2008: 7.7 hours)

Techie Postscript - Google Earth Movie: If you want to create a Google Earth movie like the one shown in this post , there are a number of options.

First, Google Earth Pro has a movie capture facility - if, that is, you don't mind forking out US$400 for the licence to upgrade to Google Earth Pro. No, that's not a typo.

Back in the real world, the quick and cheap way to do it (on a Mac, at any rate) is as follows:

download the basic level version of Google Earth for free from HERE

invest US$20 (about £10 at today's exchange rate) in IShowU, which can be downloaded from HERE

open both programs and, in Google Earth, create a "tour" that corresponds to the route that you sailed - check out Google Earth's help file for details on how to do this. It's a bit fiddly the first time, but very easy once you've figured it out. The tour can then be played automatically onscreen and, using IShowU, you can capture it in variety of formats, such as Quicktime or MPEG4.

You can practice it for free, using the trial version of IShowU, before you invest your tenner in registering the software.

The image quality of the streaming version that Blogger displays here is a bit squint-inducing, but that's Blogger's fault. I'm neither a YouTube user nor well-acquainted with video codecs, but Dylan Winter seems to be doing something similar to the Google Earth tour in his Keep Turning Left movies, and the quality of the streaming video there is somewhat better than here on Blogger.

The original version created by IShowU is large, sharp and high quality, with no pixellation. It looks professional and can be saved to your desktop, or imported and played in Quicktime. You can use Quicktime Pro to edit it. Alternatively you can import it as a clip directly into iMovie (it works with both iMovieHD and iMovie 08), where you can edit it and add a voice commentary - a nice finishing touch if you like to produce quality movies of your sailing.

If posting a copy to Blogger, good results can obtained by using iMovie 08 and exporting (via the Share menu) as a Small (480 x 360) or Medium (640 x 480) movie in MPEG 4 format. The Google Earth tour shown in the above post was exported in Small; that shown in the next post (Lesson 3) was exported in Medium. I think Medium works lightly better. In addition, iMovie 08 tends to 'wash out' colour slightly, so it's not a bad idea to increase the color saturation by a small amount before exporting.

RTIR '08: not our year

2008-06-28T23:06:00.025+01:00

Arabella retired less than two hours after starting this year's RTIR. After struggling to claw our way to windward and falling further and further back in the fleet, and with a stream of distress broadcasts emanating from the fleet in front of us as it encountered reasonably challenging conditions at the Needles and St Catherines Point, we chose to cut our losses and pulled into Yarmouth to wait for the tide to turn.

Above: It was nice of them to send Oceana to see us off from Southampton so early in the morning.

With F4-5, gusting F6, and wind against tide conditions, Arabella made a good start but we were soon struggling with short, sharp waves that continually halted forward progress. The waves were not especially big, but we took a significant amount of water over the top and much of it found its way below decks, especially via the forehatch, which will certainly need (yet) another looking at.

It was difficult to put into words, but we could all sense that Arabella was struggling - not with the conditions generally, but with being relentlessly driven as close to windward as she would point. If she was allowed to fall off the wind a little, Arabella would sail comfortably and fast - and stay dry - but that was no way to win our class, and although we caught some of the weaker members of the class before us, a much larger number of our own class were pulling relentlessly ahead.

Above: Our track down the West Solent, up to the point where I disconnected and stowed the laptop to preserve it from the ever-increasing amounts of water entering the cabin. We took the decision to retire soon afterwards. Screenshot taken from PassagePlus software (click the image for larger view).

In addition, in that early stage of the race, a continual stream of distress broadcasts came from the main body of the fleet ahead of us, with boats dismasted and men overboard (11 people went into the water on the day).

As Newtown came abreast, I nipped below decks to see what if anything could be done about the ingress of water. It wasn't particularly alarming, but in a small boat like Arabella, there aren't that many dry places left to stow things once their usual homes get soaked. One of the lifejackets had self-inflated, which would make it difficult if not impossible to use if needed - not a problem in itself as we had four on board and only three people, but we wouldn't want to be losing any more if we could help it. To be on the safe side, I also disconnected the laptop and stowed it somewhere waterproof, no sense in losing that too, given that a reasonable amount of water was shipping through the companionway having traveled the entire length of the coach roof.

The part of me that was still being analytical - as opposed to hanging on grimly so as not to be flung bodily up and down the cabin - noted that sea water entering via this route had also entered the locker where the battery was stowed securely. It hadn't reached a level high enough to do any harm yet, but it was swilling round the base of the battery and clearly, with this degree of motion, the risk was that it slopped up and shorted the connections. That was going to need seeing to, as well as the forehatch.

As Yarmouth Pier came into view, there was a hurried consultation. This was clearly not going to be our day, the racing conditions at least were borderline for Arabella, and many long and unrewarding hours lay ahead. We could press on, and risk damaging the boat, or we could dive into Yarmouth and wait out the tide for an easy, downwind return to Southampton. It wasn't a difficult call, and before long, Arabella was tucked up snugly on the walk-on pontoons at Yarmouth while we availed ourselves of the hospitality of the George.

Above and below: Snugged-up and drying out in Yarmouth Harbour.

A variety of retirees came into Yarmouth while we relaxed and dried ourselves out. Saddest of all was a little red Sonata that had been dismasted. More than anything, that helped to persuade us that pulling out was the right call for us at least. Arabella can be a tough, speedy little thing, but she needs the right conditions, and pounding to windward is not her forte. That afternoon, as the flood tide, now with the wind gusting up to 26 knots, created smoother if rolly conditions, Arabella went on to demonstrate what she is capable of, with some superb downwind surfing on a speedy trip back home.

Not our year in the race, then, but the sleigh ride home gave us some of the fastest and most exhilarating sailing yet under hot sunshine and cobalt skies. And the West Solent was almost entirely deserted. Again. Wonderful.

Conditions: SW F5-6 Heavy overcast early, sunny later. Sea state moderate, occasionally rough
Distance covered (GPS over ground): 37.9 NM
Total distance covered to date (2008): 70.16 NM
Engine hours: 2.5 (total for 2008: 6.2)

Another lesson

2008-06-18T22:00:00.012+01:00

The forecast had steadily improved as the date for my next lesson with Roger drew near. The threat of rain disappeared on the preceding day, and there was even a suggestion that there might be sunny spells. This being England in June, the latter turned out to be wrong, but I was happy to settle for merely dry.

The only worrying aspect to the forecasts - and worryingly consistent they were, too - was the threat of winds gusting to 38 knots. By the morning of the day itself, the Met Office "Marinecall" forecast was even threatening F7 by midnight.

Which was all a bit worrying given that we were due to cast off at 1530...

I reached the marina an hour or so early, expecting to find the tide in full ebb. But the tide remained obdurately high, no doubt as a result of the low pressure and the strong winds blowing up the river from Southampton Water. The marina was, as ever in strong winds, an unnerving place to be, halyards frapping and the wind whistling through the rigging.

Roger arrived dead on time, at which point the water level had changed not at all, and we opted to get going quickly before the ebb suddenly realised it hadn't started and decided to pour out in the one-and-a-half hours that the tide tables said it had left to do so. Pretty clearly we were going to need to reef down. I suggested putting one reef in the mainsail; Roger recommended two, and as it turned out, his was the right call.

The immediate objective was for me to leave the marina singlehanded, and then to gather in the mooring lines and fenders alone while keeping Arabella under control. In stark contrast to the last time I had tried this, I executed a clean exit from the berth, using a spring from the end of the finger pontoon to my starboard quarter to help swing Arabella around and then, helped by the wind, motoring out into an empty river.

The ebb had set in here, with a vengeance, and wind over tide conditions created a steep, short chop. I was all set to motor down to Southampton Water before leaving the helm to attend to the warps and fenders, but Roger stopped me. "Why don't you do it here?", he asked, "Just motor out into the middle of the river, knock the engine into neutral, and see what she does?"

That hadn't occurred to me. I did as Roger suggested and, to my surprise, Arabella more-or-less held station, her stern at 45 degress to the wind, which gently nudged her against the fast-flowing spring ebb. Eventually, she would run out of "sea" room, but not before I'd had more than enough time to sort out the warps and fenders, which I proceeded to do.

"You might as well get the main up, then," called Roger from the cockpit, "Let off the mainsheet and get the sail up, she'll weathercock into the wind gently."

I did as Roger suggested, and sure enough, so did Arabella.

"Okay," said Roger, "So, let's take stock - you're now all ready to motor off down river, and you've got everything done not fifty yards from your marina berth. I'm not suggesting you'd want to short-tack down the river on your own in these conditions, but on a calmer day with the wind from the right direction, you could be unfurling the genoa right now and sailing off."

As usual, he was right. We decided that was enough pretend singlehanding for a bit, and unfurled the genoa anyway, and short-tacked our way down river and out onto Southampton Water. Arabella's rigging had - finally - been adjusted by the on-site riggers at the marina. There was a noticeable improvement in her pointing and powering ability, even with two reefs in the main.

Once we were safely past an out-of-control fleet of kids in Laser Pico's, shepherded with increasing desperation by a teacher in a rib whilst being blown this way and that by F6 gusts, I suggested a coffee.

"How are you going to do that singlehanded, then?", countered Roger. Creative to the core, I suggested handing him the tiller, but it turned out the correct answer was to heave to. A very long time ago, I'd been taught on some RYA course or other how to do this, by in essence tacking but leaving the genoa sheeted in, so that it backed, then putting the tiller to leeward. I was also dimly aware that heaving-to was a good technique for long-keeled yachts, but not for fin-keelers, and I had no idea what a twin-keeler like Arabella would do. Still, nothing ventured nothing gained. I did as Roger suggested, and as Arabella hove to with surprising ease in the gusting winds, gently forereaching at a fraction of a knot.

Above: Heaving-to (image "borrowed" from http://www.sailtrain.co.uk - hopefully they won't mind in return for the free link)

Once recaffeinated, it was off for an exhilarating sail down to Hamble and back, before goosewinging our way upriver to the marina and another successful docking singlehanded at about 2030.

The news got even better about halfway through, when the log impeller, which had steadfastly refused to free itself last time out, suddenly whirred into life and gave us a speed reading.

This was the third midweek day that I had been out sailing in four weeks. To be fair, the weather hadn't been perfect on any of them, and today certainly, anyone sat undecided in a marina would have been understandably deterred from going out by the sound of the wind howling through the all that rigging. But across those three days, I had seen a total of fifteen yachts out, as well as a smattering of dinghies. Amazing. It was nearly midsummer, and we had the Solent all to ourselves.

Conditions: WSW F5-6. Heavy overcast. Sea state slight, some chop.
Distance covered (GPS over ground): 13.4 NM
Total distance covered to date (2008): 32.26 NM
Engine hours: 0.5 (total for 2008: 3.7)

Practice for the Round The Island Race

2008-06-12T23:32:00.021+01:00

With about a fortnight to go before this year's race, I went out with another member of our three man race crew (our giant-slaying line up remains unchanged from last year's race) to try out the new spinnaker from Sanders Sails.

Above: To view all Arabella's vids, click HERE.

I have a bit of a hang-up about spinnakers, having seen some years ago what they do when they're allowed to take control. But I also had to bear in mind the wishes of Arabella's racing crew, who had become pretty frustrated on the RTIR last year - when conditions demanded a spinnaker and I was only able to offer a cruising chute. On the basis that a spinnaker might get used, at most, a couple of times per year, I had now splashed out on a full radial racing jobbie, made to order in 0.75 0z. premium nylon.

Before we could go off and play with our new toy, of course, I had to have one my now-customary encounters with what passes for 'customer care' among the businesses on site at Arabella's marina. The now-defunct boatyard company had supplied the spinnaker pole without a bridle. A brief visit to the riggers elicited much sucking of teeth when we asked if they could rig up a wire bridle for us in the next couple of hours. Maybe next week, they said, or else there was another rigging company just outside the marina gates. Anyway, they said, a tiny little pole like that didn't need a bridle, we should just lead the uphaul and downhaul lines to one end of it. I wondered about asking how they thought we could gybe the pole end-to-end with a set-up like that, but in the end decided that I probably wouldn't get a sensible reply. I did make a mental note to look into the riggers just off-site, though...

In the end we rigged the bridle ourselves, using the least stretchy lines we could find, and some metal rings bought from the chandlery at about 4 times the price they probably should have cost, and - some hours later than planned - off we set.

It was one of those days when the weather can't seem to settle, with periods of hot sunshine punctuating longer spells of heavy cloud and light rain. On the way out we passed a singlehander making his way back in. He grimaced as we came abreast. "Gusty," was all he said. He wasn't wrong. Some of the clouds were low and dark, creating wind conditions that were not only gusty, but fluky as well, as if the wind couldn't decide which side of north it wanted to come in on.

In the circumstances, we picked our moment to fly the spinnaker with some care. A reasonably sizeable patch of blue sky opened up overhead, and we took our chance as the breeze fell off and settled more or less northerly.

It was fortunate that, in the process of working out dockside how to rig the spinnaker and pole, we had already set up the sheet, guy and a Heath Robinson-esque adjustable downhaul for the pole, so we were all set to go when the opportunity presented itself. Sanders Sails had provided a launch bag, which also helped the process of setting the sail up for launching somewhat. The best place for it appeared to be on the leeward deck, amidships, clipped to the guardrail.

Following the skipper-elect's instructions, I managed to hoist the sail without undue drama, while he trimmed from the cockpit.

We only managed a short run with spinnaker up, due to the changeable conditions, but it was long enough for me to grasp the basics and it did wonders for my confidence with this sail, which I find a bit fearsome. I still wouldn't say I was a fan, exactly, but I did get that bit more comfortable. Perhaps more importantly, Arabella put in a serious turn of speed, even with a breeze of only F2, at that particular moment, filling the spinnaker.

Above and below: Ready to launch from amidships.

All too soon, even before we had the chance to practice gybing the pole at sea rather than dockside, it was time to drop the spinnaker as the next wave of clouds rolled in and the wind began to build once more. Again, following the slipper-elect's instructions, I stood in the companionway, released the spinnaker halyard to run freely and, as quickly as possible, gathered in the billowing nylon on the sheet, under the mainsail, pushing it down into Arabella's cabin where it could be repacked. Then it was up on to the foredeck to unrig and stow the pole, as the genoa was unfurled and we turned and headed back for home.

Below: As with the practice run for the race last year, so it was again this year - the log impeller has become fouled barely four weeks after going back into the water, hence the row of big fat zeros on the instrument head. At least the Mac Chartplotter was working.

We enjoyed a fantastic beat back up Southampton Water. On the helm, I kept Arabella sailing on her ear, keeping her port bow dipped well under, in the hope that the turbulence might free up the log impeller, which appeared to be fouled again. All in vain, unfortunately.

With a rising wind and a fair tide to help us on our way, we fairly flew back to Dock Head, before short-tacking upriver to the marina and a well-earned pint.

Below: Where we went today. Screenshots taken from PassagePlus software (click each image for larger view).

Conditions: N, NW and NE F2-5. Mixed sunshine, cloud and rain, some thunder. Sea state slight.
Distance covered (GPS over ground): 13.7 NM
Total distance covered to date (2008): 18.86 NM
Engine hours: 0.6 (total for 2008: 3.2)

Laptop Navigation - with a Mac?

2008-06-12T22:30:00.003+01:00

Earlier in the year, while the (now demised) yard was busy sort-of-but-not-quite finishing off the few loose ends on Arabella, I embarked on a new project: creating a laptop computer-based GPS/Chartplotter system with the capability to receive and overlay AIS data at a later date. There were one or two difficulties to overcome. I own a Mac laptop. And I needed to work to a budget - ideally about £250 or so.

I've mentioned before on this blog how much I'd love a fixed chartplotter. The problems, however, were many. Perhaps the most clear-cut was cost: even with the heavy discounting that was going on in early 2008, getting anything like a decent screen size involved spending more money than I now had left to play with.

Then there was the question of integration - I was fed up to the back teeth with Raymarine, whose instruments are actually quite good but who didn't appear to give a XXXX about compatibility, whether backwards with their older product or with third party equipment. I just couldn't face another round of problems with integrating more instruments, I wanted a standalone solution.

In addition, most fixed plotters came with a range of functions that looked wonderful in the advertising blurb but which I could only imagine would either never be used or would enslave their owners to disproportionate amounts of time spent onboard in front of a glowing screen; not my idea of boating fun - in contrast, I wanted something simple as well as cheap. Finally, one might well argue that all that cash spent on a chartplotter was OTT on a yacht whose owner's greatest sailing ambition so far had been to make it Round The Island in one piece and in broad daylight.

In short, I wanted a chartplotter like I'd want, say, a Ferrari. But no way did I need one, and still less could I justify the expense. In any case, Arabella already proudly possessed not one, but two handheld chartplotters - a Garmin 60Csx running Bluecharts and a Raymarine RC400 running Navionics Gold charts. Both worked perfectly well and usually spent their lives clipped to holders on the pulpit rail or stuffed in a jacket pocket, while being referred to occasionally. My only complaints about them were, firstly, that they had tiny little displays which occasionally required the user to squint myopically to make out exactly what was happening onscreen and, second, that trying to use them for fairly basic functions like figuring out a distance and bearing to a given point, or extracting a compass course to steer, was more difficult than it should be simply because of the fiddly little buttons and endless menus. On last year's RTI race, for example, we called the tide all wrong on the final leg because it simply wasn't that easy to extract the streams from the tidal 'diamonds' provided in either set of charts, and the obvious step of displaying streams onscreen or at least factoring them into a given course to steer didn't appear to have occurred to the designers of either the Garmin or the RC400.

Chart plotters use cartridges loaded with proprietary vector charts, like theNavionics and Bluecharts mentioned above. Although some people love vector charts, I can't help getting paranoid about what's being hidden from me in order to avoid clutter at different levels of zoom.

Above: screen shots of vector charts displayed on a PC screen (right) and a common or garden chartplottter (left).

I can accept vector charts as a fact of life on handheld plotters. If nothing else, the ability to declutter means that the chart remains legible even on a very small screen. However, I much prefer raster charts - scanned copies of real paper charts. Personally, when it comes to paper charts, I am a traditionalist and choose the Admiralty Charts produced by UKHO. These charts are available in digital form, as rasters, via ARCS.

Aside from the fact that few dedicated chartplotters currently display raster charts, the cost of the hardware, at the time of writing, is high even for an entry-level model. I would happily go for a basic model if it was just a matter of accepting that it had limited functionality, but unfortunately in the chartplotter world, "entry-level" is a euphemism for "tiny screen". In order to get a screen even remotely large enough to just glance at now and then, from the helm say, the sterling cost runs easily into high three figures.

On the other hand, if you already own a PC, and especially a laptop or notebook computer, you already have access to a decent-sized screen and a load of processing power. Moreover, PCs are well-served by software products that display raster charts and GPS data (and AIS, and GRIBs, and a host of other inputs if you want them). So it's entirely feasible to create a set-up that (a) has a big picture of (b) a 'real' chart, showing (c) your position on it.

My budget for this exercise was £250, barely enough to cover the cost of an individual vector chart cartridge, depending on the brand. That budget was somewhat arbitrary, but with the big bills of Arabella's refit behind me, the objective was to find a (cheapskate) way of using my existing laptop for chartplotting - preferably without having to interface it with the onboard instruments, and simply using a plug-and-play GPS antenna - at a capital cost that was remotely commensurate with Arabella's market value of, um, not very much.

There was one immediate snag. My laptop is a MacBook Pro. A wondrous piece of kit, but not one with an embarrassment of riches when it comes to finding compatible navigation software or compatible GPS units.

My list of things to sort out at the planning stage therefore boiled down to the following:

locate Mac-compatible nav/chartplotting software for raster charts

locate Mac-compatible GPS receiver

figure out how to handle the laptop's power demand

work out how to mount the laptop securely below decks, if possible in such a way that the screen could be visible from the cockpit

Mac-compatible software

Essentially, at consumer level, Mac nav software comes down to two-and-a-half choices. In one corner you will find GPSNavX and its bigger brother MacENC. They represent one-and-a-half of the options. The alternative is PassagePlus. All of these products envisage that you will plug a GPS into your Mac in order to convert it to a real-time chartplotter, and also provide the option to connect up an AIS receiver in order to display ships' AIS information directly on the chart screen.

None of these products are especially complex or sophisticated to use by comparison with the equivalent PC software. The GPSNavX/McENC pairing have been around longer, have been developed further and therefore offer more features than PassagePlus. That also means they are tougher to get to grips with.

GPSNavX displays only raster charts. Its bigger and more powerful sibling MacENC can display vector charts if required. PassagePlus displays only raster charts - in fact it was originally developed as a means of enabling Mac users to display Admiralty ARCS raster charts. Which is how, as I searched for a way of using ARCS charts, I came to stumble across it.

At various times, I had downloaded and played with demo versions of GPSNavX and PassagePlus. I'd be the first to acknowledge that GPSNavX has lots more features and is undoubtedly the technically more advanced program. But (a) it doesn't work with Admiralty charts and (b) this is just personal, but I didn't like it as much as PassagePlus.

The thing about PassagePlus is this: it's just so darned simple and intuitive. When you start it up, a slick, professional-looking interface appears - that just doesn't do very much. Within 10 minutes, I sussed out all that it could do and how to make it do it. Now for the power user, I'm sure that's all very boring and amateurish. But for a simple yachtie, this program is a dream. Here's what it does:

display chart

display GPS position of your boat on chart (if GPS is connected)

display related data, e.g. COG, SOG, DTW, etc

display AIS data as an overlay on the chart (if AIS receiver is connected)

import/create and store waypoints

import/create and store routes

show track (assuming GPS is connected), save it, export it (for printing, etc)

show bearing and distance between two points on chart

use it for dead reckoning and three-point fixes without a GPS

shapes a course to steer allowing for leeway and tide

projects your position forward based on your current course and speed

automatically creates a log - like the page in a log book - of where you were and when (assuming GPS is connected)

and that's it, basically

I am not remotely embarrassed to say that this list covers everything, if not more, that I ever do or want to do with regard to navigation. It doesn't overlay GRIB files or anything clever like that, and nor do I want it to. It just does what used to get done on the chart table at the nav station, only electronically.

Being simple and having lots of big buttons, PassagePlus is also incredibly quick in use. Just point, click, and you're done. No fumbling with complex commands or menus. No split screens. No head-up or North-up decisions. Point, click and you've got the answer.

Above: PassagePlus in DR mode, showing track and estimated position. The software 'tracks' the boat as if the GPS was connected, except that it is doing so on the basis of course steered, speed and leeway as input by the user, and taking into account tidal set from the diamonds on the Admiralty chart. Below: Setting a magnetic course to steer in PassagePlus - click on chart, then drag and click to where you want to go. (Images from PassagePlus website).

Whoever developed PassagePlus has put a lot of thought and care into it. It isn't basic merely because it's cheap (it costs around £35 - but then so does GPSNavX, which has loads more features). It's basic by design, and as a design it elevates being basic to an art form. It's basic but classy. And I love it to bits. If you have a Mac and you're wondering whether to try using Nav software, do have a go with it. You can download a free demo copy, and sample charts to play with, by going here.

Mac-compatible GPS

Macs being Macs, they don't necessarily make it easy to connect to a GPS receiver. Of the major handheld brands, Garmin are probably the most Mac-friendly and do at least have an active policy of developing Mac-compatible hardware and software. They still have a way to go though, and if you intend to connect a Garmin to your Mac, as at the time of writing, you will still need a serial-to-USB adaptor and, depending on the age and type of your GPS unit, additional software loaded on your Mac.

In my case, I wanted the laptop chartplotter to operate as a standalone unit below decks and to keep using the Garmin handheld out in the cockpit. The issue was then to find a separate GPS receiver that would definitely-not-maybe work with a Mac, out of the box. The shortest of Google searches revealed one receiver that was consistently recommended in a raft of reviews, not to mention extremely good value: the GlobalSat BU-353. This is a WAAS enabled, waterproof design with a magnet to make mounting easier, and a 5 foot cable which meant it could be left on the cabin roof while still being connected to the laptop below.

Above: GlobalSat BU-353 USB waterproof GPS receiver.

Critically, the BU-353 is built specifically for the Mac and comes with a USB conector and the serial-to-USB convertor is actually built into the unit - so it really is just plug-and-play. At £33.00 it was a steal, and when I got it home and plugged it into my MacBook, the BU-353 worked first time, finding a fix very quickly from a cold start. Consistent with the simplicity of the PassagePlus software, it took me three minutes to figure out how to set up the software to receive the signal from the BU353 and almost before I knew it, there was my position, plotted accurately on the screen.

Power supply and consumption

Ah, yes. Not my specialist subject. I had to hit the books again, but this is where I ended up. (By the way, before you trust what I say on this topic, you might want to review the disclaimer in this earlier post about onboard power).

Assuming I was actually sailing somewhere when using the laptop as a chartplotter, then pretty clearly I'd need to feed it some electricity. And the obvious source of that power was the 115A ship's battery. Laptops like DC power, which is good, because once Arabella sets sail, DC is all that's on offer from the onboard electrical system.

My MacBook Pro was rated at 18V DC, 4.6A maximum. That gave a wattage of 83W (Watts = Amps x Volts). The power cable for the MacBook was rated for up to 85W, however, and that's the number I used for the purposes of my calculations, which erred on the side of caution. I have no problem with being delighted to find I have a bit more power than I thought I had; the reverse, however, does not apply.

Now the rated DC consumption of 85W, 4.6A was at 18V DC, but Arabella's system is 12V nominal. It was necessary to twist the basic formula around to get Amps = Watts/Volts, in order to see what a difference that made. It gave a result of 7 A (85W/12V). Quite a lot more power consumption than the 4.6A mentioned above.

The best result I could hope for would be to run the laptop straight from Arabella's 12V (cigar) socket, perhaps using one of those airline seat socket "Enpower" cables with a 20mm (cigarette lighter sized) adaptor plug on the end. Apple did produce and sell such an item. However it had been tested by many other people and found not to work except in, um well, airline seat sockets. In fact, Apple carried a cautionary notice on their website to inform buyers of this inconvenient fact, and stop them buying the cable for any other purpose. That was a shame as I already owned that cable and was hoping to shave a bit off the budget by relying on it, but after testing it I could confirm that Apple were quite right. The Enpower cable didn't work in car and/or boat 12v sockets.

The reasons for this were obscure but I saw the theory advanced that the MacBook required at least 16V DC before it would even think about doing anything. That was safely within airline/Enpower voltage parameters but pretty clearly not within those of the typical boat's 12V system. My battery, for example, never exceeded 12.8V when 100% charged, and I'd never watched the meter especially carefully when the shorepower was connected and the charger was switched on, but I had seen it go as high 14.6V in such circumstances. (There is another theory, which is that more recent Mac laptops contain sophisticated circuitry that detects when the 'wrong' power cable is being used and, in order to protect the computer, prevents it from functioning).

If I wasn't committed to a Mac, I could shop around for alternative (non OEM) suppliers of 12V cables. However, the "Magsafe" tip that connected the power cable to the MacBook's power socket was proprietary to Apple and had not been licensed to aftermarket manufacturers. So there was no alternative provider.

Unless, that is, one turned instead to an inverter. An inverter converts 12V DC power to 240V AC power and has a normal 240V socket in the side, which meant I could just plug in the MacBook using its normal power cable.

Kensington made an "Ultra Portable Power Inverter 150", which was recommended by Apple (useful as a starting point for arguing about who's to blame if the inverter blows up your sole laptop), so that's what I went out and bought for £50. As the name suggests, it's small, light and rated up to 150W, which gives a considerable margin of safety over the MacBook's maximum 85W. Moreover, because the inverter outputs power via a conventional three pin AC socket, you can also plug in lots of other items, such as mobile phones, battery chargers and so on, using their normal charging cables.

Above: Kensington Ultra Portable Inverter 150 (UK models have a standard British 3-pin 240V socket built into the 'black box', instead of the version shown here).

Inverters themselves consume relatively little power, so in essence an inverter's power consumption depends on what's been hooked up to it. If you use an inverter to power a microwave on board, clearly there's going to be a pretty big draw on the battery bank. A laptop in contrast is more modest - in fact 7A as mentioned above, in the case of my laptop.

So far, so good. However, there is a 'but'. All that converting from DC to AC and back again to DC (via the laptop's own power adaptor) does have the effect, naturally enough, of introducing some inefficiencies into the process. It's unusual for an inverter to beat 90% efficiency. In addition all that cable the power has to run through adds to the loss in efficiency - as a rule of thumb, that's another 10% wasted. These inefficiencies can be dealt with, for calculation purposes, by adding both their percentages to the wattage of the appliance that is connected. In the case of my MacBook that meant adding 20% in total to the rated 85W, making 102W. On the application of the above formula, that produced a draw of 8.5A - an increase of 1.5A over the estimated draw via a direct (DC-DC) cable.

(Interestingly, a well-used rule of thumb states that for every 100W of power output, an inverter draws 10A from your 12V battery - which in the case of my MacBook gave the same result: 8.5A).

Having established that powering the laptop via an inverter plugged into the 12V socket resulted in a draw of 8.5A per hour, it should be remembered that Arabella carried a single 115A battery. That didn't give a lot of capacity for hours and hours of laptoppery at 8.5A. In fact after just seven hours, that rate of power consumption - when taken together with the combined draw of the instruments and VHF, and offsetting the charge input from the solar panel - would have drained the ship's battery down to the crucial 50% charge level below which one should aim never to go. And that was in daylight on a bright day, where the solar panel was actually sticking some charge back in. The drain would be worse at night.

Equally, the MacBook did of course have a battery all of its own. In fact, in my case, it had two batteries, because I had stumped up for a spare at the time I bought the laptop itslelf. Mac laptop batteries are frequently derided for their poor performance against Apples' marketing claims. To listen to Steve Jobs, you'd think a MacBook would run for six hours off its battery. Back in the real world, I found that I would get three-and-a-half hours' life out of the battery, less for power-hungry task like playing DVDs. Still, three or more hours battery life (twice) added to the seven (daylight) hours that the ship's battery could safely provide gave more than 13 hours continuous operation.

And there was another interesting little fact: when the MacBook was plugged into the inverter, the power supply didn't just run the laptop. It also charged the laptop battery, the same as plugging in it at home. In contrast, the direct (DC-DC) airline/Enpower cable didn'tcharge the battery, even when used in a situation in which it worked at all. In fact many such cables don't charge the laptop battery because they can't kick through enough juice. So using the inverter, while more costly in terms of draw on the ship's battery, also gave something back - at least one fully charged laptop battery. Which added a further three hours to the 13 hours mentioned above - 16 hours' total endurance. Make that 19 hours, if the inverter was left running - could be left running - for long enough to charge both batteries.

It didn't do my 24 hour + rule any favours, but it was more than sufficient until I had the patience, let alone the budget, to rethink Arabella's battery arrangements.

Mounting the laptop onboard

Quite a few people seem content to leave their laptops perched on the nav table, sitting on a non-slip mat. Others glue velcro to the table and the laptop, and ensure the two are introduced to one another. Neither approach appealed to me - Arabella is a little boat that bounces around a fair bit, especially when my lunatic racing crew get their hands on her. I couldn't see my laptop staying put very long under such conditions. I wanted a proper mount, and I wanted to be able to swivel the screen so that it remained sheltered from spray but was visible from the helm.

Unless you have something fabricated to order (too costly) or have the skills to make a mount yourself (I don't), there are not too many options. After some research, I alighted on a RAM Laptop Tray combined with an articulated double swing arm. At £125, this was not a cheap option, and when it arrived, it seemed both huge and ugly.

Above and below: RAM laptop tray and double swing arm mount. Not the prettiest things in the world, but very, very strong, secure and versatile.

On the positive side, the contraption looked a lot better when it was mounted in situ, and it was also hugely strong and secure. In addition, it could be removed from the bulkhead and stored away when not in use, although in fact once it was mounted it didn't look all that intrusive.

Siting the RAM mount on the rear bulkhead, it seemed doubtful to me whether the GRP could actually support the combined weight of the laptop and mount. In the end, I played it safe and through bolted the RAM mount, with wooden backing plates on both sides of the GRP. This resulted in a very strong and secure installation.

The beauty of the articulated arm is that it enables the laptop to be placed in a wide range of positions. It can be pushed back under cover if conditions demand, or it can be swung round so that it is visible from the cockpit. It does pay to keep the companionway hatch pulled over, though, partly to shade the screen for better visibility and partly to shelter the laptop from spray or rain.

Costs

I mentioned earlier that I set myself a budget of £250 to kit Arabella out for laptop navigation. In the event, I overshot and spent £335, largely because I had failed to take into account the costs of (a) powering and (b) mounting the laptop on board. Those two items alone came to £175.

In contrast, the necessary software and GPS unit were both, I thought, very good value at £35 and £33 respectively. I didn't expect these items to come in at such a modest total of £68.

The ARCS charts were not especially cheap at £90 for the Solent portfolio. Certainly if you stop and think about the geographical area covered by a typical vector chart cartridge, the higher cost of the cartridge seems to me to be good value per square mile covered by comparison with ARCS charts. But that cost differential is somewhat offset by the fact that ARCS charts can be digitally updated by CDs issued by UKHO for a modest annual subscription, whereas I have never found a realistic way of updating a vector chart cartridge - it seems you just have to buy a new set of charts every so often.

Mounting the laptop securely was a major expense, but ultimately I only owned one laptop, which had to serve all my home computing needs. I didn't want to be breaking it, no matter how religious I am about backing up my data to an extenal hard drive.

Did £335 represent good value for money? I thought so. At the time, a Raymarine dedicated plotter with a smaller screen - albeit water-resistant and fully-interfaced with the other instruments - would have cost anything from £395 up to well north of a grand. There were cheaper brands, such as Navman, which went down to below £300, but again they used vector charts and had tiddly screens.

My MacBook, in contrast, lacked a full interface with the onboard instrumentation - but then, I wasn't looking for one - and had to be kept below decks in order to protect it. However it had a relatively big and very clear screen, and it could be swiveled on its mount so as to be visible from the cockpit. Plus of course it was a computer, which meant it could do what computers do: go online via a wireless connection or 3G dongle; send and receive emails; play music and Tv shows off iTunes; play DVDs; process photos; run videochats using the built-in camera and Skpe; and all the rest.

The system in use

So far, I have only used the system once when out sailing, but it worked just fine. The RAM mount positions the MacBook nicely inside the companionway, under the shelter of the main hatch and, as the picture below demonstrates, the screen is clearly visible from the helm even in bright light.

The MacBook Pro ran on its two batteries for well over five hours (at which point, it was switched off with 25% remaining on the second battery). Not needing to recharge, I used the inverter solely to power the laptop while hot-swapping batteries. That went fine.

The PassagePlus software and BU-353 GPS receiver worked smoothly throughout, providing SOG and COG data that correlated to that displayed by the onboard system (Raystar GPS and ST60+ Graphic Display). The track was uncannily accurate - see for example this detail from a screenshot, showing the point at which, outbound, we rounded up into the wind to raise the main before resuming our course down river.

Above: the little loop on our outbound track shows where we rounded up into the wind in order to get the main up. Note also the little purple arrow, next to Tidal Diamond B, showing real-time tidal current.

All in all, one satisfied customer at the fraction of the cost of a dedicated plotter. Not to mention that watching Desperate Housewives on iTunes while short tacking back up the river on the way home is one of those experiences that surely not even the new Moody can give you...

First sail of the season

2008-05-14T23:30:00.020+01:00

Above: At last - Arabella looking messy and well-used!

After a five-year layoff from sailing, the plan on buying Arabella back in 2005 had been to start sailing immediately. Foolishly, I had allowed myself to be diverted by The Epic Refit and by the demands of my career. (To be fair, perhaps the latter diversion wasn't entirely foolish).

I hadn't sailed at all in 2005 and 2006. In 2007, I had managed one day and one evening's test-sailing, followed by the frenzy of the Round The Island race, and Arabella had amassed slightly more 100 miles under her keel. If you discounted that experience, and a short, sunny afternoon's sail in Marbella in 2002, it was eight years since I had done any meaningful sailing.

Now Arabella was back in the water, sooner than expected. She was ready to go; but I was rusty and I knew it. Cue a spot of own-boat tuition from John Goode's Southern Sailing School (actually, the great man himself had sold up a short while back, to his chief instructor, but retained a peripheral involvement).

With the British weather granting one of those occasional periods of glorious sunshine and pleasant sailing breezes, I was itching to get out as soon as I could. However, the marine trades on the marina had one final trick to play before letting me out of their clutches. The on-site business which operated as a collection and drop-off point for the (off-site) sail loft decided to close without warning on a weekday - with my freshly-laundered sails locked inside - meaning another wasted trip down from London. So it was literally on the last day of fine weather before the weather broke that I managed to get out on the water.

The objective was to see if I could singlehand what is, after all, a very modest little yacht. By the end of the session, it was pretty clear that I couldn't - not yet, anyway.

My first attempt to reverse Arabella out of her berth was an unmitigated disaster. With a fresh breeze coming from dead astern, it ought to have been easy to go straight backwards, and that's precisely what Arabella proceeded to do. A lovely clean exit, marred only by the fact that regardless how much I turned the tiller, she continued reversing in a straight line, perfectly weathercocked into the wind. Once we were sufficiently clear of the berth to start swinging, I decided to cheat and turned the outboard to port to try and pull Arabella's stern around. That looked as though it was just starting to have an effect when the outboard decided to stop, and, with me pulling feverishly on the starting cord, Arabella, now at the mercy of the wind, re-entered her berth as obediently and tidily as she had left, indeed even slightly more quickly, fetching up with an impressive crunch as her bow found the far end of the berth. A swift lassoo thrown over one of the pontoon cleats by Roger, the instructor, prevented Arabella from swinging across onto her neighbour.

After a little discussion and further experimentation, a number of things became clear:

Leaving the outboard at idle speed - which would have been ideal for manoeuvring in the confines of the marina - was not an option, because it was prone to stalling when put into gear. A certain minimum number of revs was required at all times.

Less critical, but still annoying, was the fact that, due to the absence of any kind of locking mechanism, the outboard developed a tendency to shake itself to port or starboard, a fact which became apparent to the inattentive (me) only when Arabella opted to leap in a wholly unexpected direction just as you thought you had her lined up on the correct course. Some means needed to be found of locking the outboard in the straight fore-and-aft position, even if it consisted only of lines taken from the control handle to the cleats and either side of the cockpit.

Fiddling with the outboard, with your head stuck down in the rear of the cockpit, is not conducive to spatial awareness. All the time you're focusing down there, the boat is up to something - usually something undesirable - and when you pop up for a look around, the scenery has changed radically and the boat is about to hit something. It's the same as fiddling around in the footwell when driving your car - bound to end in disaster.

Ultimately, what worked was to set the outboard at slightly higher revs than I might otherwise have imagined necessary; stop trying to steer with it (over time we proved that the rudder was more effective); and, secure in the knowledge that it wouldn't stall, just put it in and out of gear when manoeuvring in confined spaces as a means of control. That way, I could keep my head up and watch what the boat was doing.

I spent quite a lot of time driving Arabella up and down the river in astern, describing figures of eight and taking her in and out of the rows of pontoons in the marina, until Roger was satisfied that I had at least got the general idea and could be trusted with close quarters handling even with a fairly gusty breeze doing its best to confuse matters.

The next step was to see whether I could berth singlehanded. Once I had gained confidence with the outboard, I felt reasonably sure I could manage this. I knew the theory well enough. The trick was to lead a spring aft outside everything from a midships cleat. The end of the spring would have a loop tied in it, enabling me to lassoo a pontoon cleat alongside the cockpit. This would arrest Arabella's forward progress, and by motoring against the spring, she would be held in against the pontoon while I sorted out the other lines and secured her properly.

Roger tweaked the concept somewhat. The outside end of the spring was left as intended, with a decent sized loop tied in it. However, he suggested feeding the inboard end through the midships cleat without making it off, and leading that end of the line aft along the side deck to a cockpit winch. That way, if it became apparent that the spring line was too long once thrown onto the pontoon cleat, the excess could be pulled in on the winch.

The final approach to Arabella's berth would be downwind, and we would come in starboard side to. Using the "in and out of neutral" technique described above for the outboard, we came neatly in between the rows of pontoons, pointing slightly upwind to offset the effects of the fresh breeze, and I managed to swing Arabella round smartly to line her up for her berth. With the breeze now behind us, it was virtually unnecessary to use the engine, although I stayed ready to go into reverse to slow Arabella down if she began to accelerate as she entered the berth. Roger got ready to lassoo the pontoon cleat with the looped end of the spring, and looked somewhat surprised when I asked him to let me do it, but relented and handed the spring over. Arabella's freeboard being as modest as it is, it was easy for me to lean over the cockpit coaming from the helm and drop the loop on the spring over the pontoon cleat. As luck would have it, the length of the spring was just right to arrest Arabella's forward progress before she ran out of pontoon, and she came to a gentle halt about two feet from the end of her berth.

I knew that the theory was that if the engine was left running in forward gear, Arabella should now motor against the spring, but in practice that needed to be tweaked:

The tiller needed to be pushed over towards the pontoon (i.e., as if trying to steer the bow away from the pontoon).

The engine revs needed to be increased somewhat - just leaving them at low-speed manoeuvring level was not sufficient to hold Arabella against the pontoon.

But still, it was good to execute a textbook manoeuvre and it did a lot for my confidence after the earlier disaster.

What with all the pontoon-bashing, little time remained for sailing, but we did a brief run out on Southampton Water before short-tacking our way up the Itchen. The wind was getting pretty gusty by this stage and we furled up the genoa somewhat to improve the boat's balance. One point that emerged from the point of view of singlehanding was the need to lock off the tiller from time to time, to enable tasks other than steering to be attended to. I found that the Tiller-Tamer was fairly handy, but only to a point: fine for quick tasks such as tending the genoa sheets and, under engine at very low speeds, going forward and at a push, bringing in fenders. As soon as the boat's balance changed, however - whether due to a gust, or simply the weight of someone moving around on deck - she would change course pretty radically. I liked the Tiller-Tamer for its convenience, but it was no substitute for a tillerpilot if the helm had to be left for anything more than a minute at most.

With some pretty hefty gusts coming in, Roger chose to furl in the genoa partway. Doing so certainly improved visibility but I got the sense that it also induced more weather helm - on one occasion, Arabella rounded up pretty sharply into a F6 gust. That's very rare in my (limited) experience; Arabella seemed exceptionally well balanced in such gusts on last year's Round The Island Race. I didn't say anything, but I think that as and when time comes to reef, it might be as well to reef the main as well as the genoa, to try and keep the centre of effort forward.

There also seemed to be quite a bit of play in Arabella's forestay, which Roger commented on. I'd try and get the rig tension looked at before the next trip out.

Inevitably, we only notched up five miles or so, but it had been more than worthwhile. I'd learned a lot, and had plenty to reflect on as I flaked Arabella's mainsail and sluiced down her decks under a deep crimson sunset. The rain finally arrived just as it got dark, ending the week-long run of hot, sunny weather, and I honestly couldn't have cared less as I plodded contendedly away up the pontoon to head for the station and home.

Conditions: NE F4-5, occasionally gusting F6. Sunshine. Sea state slight.
Distance covered (GPS over ground): 5.16 NM
Total distance covered to date (2008): 5.16NM
Engine hours: 2.6 (total for 2008: 2.6)

How to make fitting-out really, really fast

2008-04-23T23:30:00.012+01:00

Above: Small but perfectly formed, Arabella awaits her return to the water.

Arabella was craned out on 15th April. The plan was for the yard to carry out a couple of jobs - servicing the outboard, doing the antifouling - while the sails went off for laundering and I dealt with reapplying teak oil on the brightwork that needed it and polishing the hull. I was happy that the sail laundering (by the ever-prompt and helpful Sanders Sails) and the polishing/oiling (by me) would be done quickly, but knowing the yard as I did, I assumed for planning purposes that Arabella would be out of the water for at least four weeks.

Yet here she was, ready to crane in again after only eight days ashore. That may not sound especially amazing to those people who manage to squeeze all their preparations for the new season into a day or two, or indeed between tides. But believe me, for Arabella, getting all this done in eight days was something wondrous to behold. In fact, get this, we had caught out the marina, who couldn't actually crane Arabella back in until 28th April, by which time she would have spent a meagre thirteen days ashore.

And what, might well you well ask, had caused this miracle....had the yard turned over a new leaf? Hired more people, perhaps, or just decided to do things quickly? Had global economic conditions, and the dwindling bonuses of investment bankers, brought more modest customers like me to the fore once again? Had my lawyer written the yard rude letters?

No, it was something far simpler. The yard had gone bust.

They went into administration at the beginning of April. They played no role in any of the jobs that needed to be done to get Arabella turned around and back at her berth, ready for the season ahead. And that, sorry to say, was the single biggest contributor to this extraordinary reversal. There I was, already beginning to give in yet again, to surrender to the inevitable and to plan on another season delayed or curtailed while the yard dragged its feet on the tiny number of remaining tasks...and then the yard, in letting me down right at the end, inadvertently cut me loose and forced me to make alternative arrangements.

Suddenly, all manner of things got done. That new spinnaker pole you see there, is mounted on brackets that I (gasp) actually fitted myself. Now, don't mock. I thought it would be simple too, but no, after protracted email correspondence, the yard informed me that they were still waiting for some of the parts and the job would have to wait. When I went round to liberate from their premises the things that belonged to me - before the administrator arried and tried to lay claim to them - the box of nearly-but-not-quite-all the bits for the spinnaker mount was included with the other items I carted off in a trolley.

Upon inspection, I saw that the yard had been right. Not all the bits were there. There was a nut missing. A three minute walk later, the chandlery gave me one of the correct size - for free - and three minutes after that, I was back on board merrily bolting on my spinnaker pole mounts. Half an hour later, they were done.

I could recite a litany of similar items, but to do so would be to divert attention away from another valuable thing I discovered as a result of the yard's misfortune: the value of alternative suppliers.

I'd decided early on that, with work and domestic commitments as pressing as ever, there was no way I was taking on the antifouling. As for servicing the outboard, with my mechanical skills, there was no surer way of ensuring that I became another dreary coastguard statistic ('rescued due to engine failure'). These jobs were pre-booked with the yard well in advance. Once the yard ceased its involvement, I had to start ringing around to find someone to take on these tasks.

At first I tried to do the decent thing. The marina company naturally wants its customers to use onsite suppliers where possible. In fact, as part of its protectionist policy, it charges an entry fee to offsite contractors. I sent emails and left messages with five different providers, which were either on site or permitted by the marina to advertise in the marina reception. Not one of them - not one, mind - could be bothered to respond. I never received a single acknowledgment.

Annoyed as hell, I contacted off-site providers instead. The response was startlingly different: I nearly had my arm chewed off. Within a few hours, the outboard service was delegated to Orca Marine, who were even happy to come and collect the engine and drop it back afterwards (a big bonus for someone like me, who tries to travel to the coast by train as often as possible, but then lacks a car with which to run local errands around Southampton). Equally impressive were Boat Care UK a very slick operation that was set up by David Hawkins as a college project and then became his career: David's firm got the antifouling job and, on the strength of their excellent response time and professional approach to service, subsequently won the task of polishing and sealing the hull when my feeble attempts to extricate myself from work commitments failed. (Edit: regrettably, Boat Care UK folded in late 2008. One of their employees, by the name of Will French, subsequently set up the excellent Blue Yacht Management - they have looked after Arabella for me ever since, and very well too.)

Were these people cheap? No. They were not especially geared to the needs of yachties with 21-foot secondhand boats. However, they were no more expensive per hour than the yard had been, and they were hugely better value for money simply because they not only did their jobs well, they also chased the work and did it quickly, treating me like a valued client despite the fact that I wasn't offering them a Sunseeker to work on. In fact they were much like Sanders Sails, another off-site provider that had yet to deliver anything other than an efficient and professional service.

With the best will in the world, it would be difficult to show how the appearance of my Tohatsu changed once it had been serviced, but the shots below show what a good job Boat Care UK did.

I was left only with the task of masking up and oiling the teak rubbing strake and a few other untreated bits of brightwork, which took me a pleasant afternoon on one of the first days of the year on which the sun was out and it actually felt like Spring.

All of which added up to what, exactly? Well, for starters, that the businesses based around the marina were either too buried with other customers on site, or couldn't be bothered for some other reason. Whereas those off-site were, at the very least, competitively priced, and were prepared to come get the work before someone else did.

And while I bore no ill-will towards the erstwhile yard, whose work was rarely less than good and which was run by some very nice guys, there was no getting away from the fact that the demise of their business had liberated me to an degree that I doubted I would have ever have achieved, had it not been for the fact that I was forced to take control and run the closing stages of the project myself.

In truth, some very minor jobs remained, some of them a little ironic in nature. Such as cutting a vent in the companionway washboards - discussed, agreed, invoiced and paid for a while back. And more tellingly, revarnishing the handrails - originally done by the yard as one of their early tasks, in a refit which had stretched on so for long that the varnish was now wearing through...

I wasn't troubled by these items. They were easy to do and I wouldn't even be out of pocket, because I would make damn sure I deducted any costs from any final yard bill when it arrived from the administrators. There are advantages to being a lawyer. But when all was said and done, and the cheques were written and invoices were filed away - for review by some future buyer who would shake his head and wonder at the idiot who spent so much in total on a boat that was worth so little money - it all added up to something much more important.

Come 28th April, Arabella would be back afloat, looking beautiful - even if only to me - and more finished, and readier to sail, than she had ever been. The waiting, the polishing, the varnishing, the oiling and the paying of endless refit bills were over. The disappointments of last season, when Arabella sat idle, even on the few fine days that punctuated that lousy summer, waiting for the yard to get on and finish the work, were behind us.

It was time to go sailing.

Refit: plodding to a conclusion

2008-03-18T22:39:00.002Z

There's not much to report this month - which is good news, in one sense, because it means that there is relatively little left to do to conclude Arabella's refit.

Two of the last items are now installed. Arabella now has webbing jackstays fitted, port and starboard, to Wichard pad-eyes, through bolted to strong points with metal backing pads.In addition, the zipped canvas divider between the "forecabin" and the "saloon" (okay, so I'm exaggerating a bit) has now been installed.

Above: The new canvas partition between the saloon and the forepeak.

Arabella now needs to come out onto hard standing for a few weeks, just to give her a quick dry-out, to get the antifouling done and to re-oil the bare teak on the rubbing strake. Also, having got her coachroof and cockpit all nice and shiny, I want to have a go at her hull and see what kind of results I can get.

Meanwhile, in readiness for this year's Round The Island, a spinnaker is on order. I'm one of those people who find spinnakers genuinely scary, so once Arabella goes back into the water, I'll be having a spot of 'own boat tuition', I think.

The big unknown is how long the yard will take to get around to doing the final tasks, which include the antifouling and the engine service as well as some snagging list items. This is the stage at which it all fell apart in 2007, with the result that a less-than-ready Arabella went into the water with barely any time to spare before the Round The Island race in June. I'm keeping my fingers crossed - and harrying the yard.