Sorry for the delay in posting this update of our Atlantic crossing but …………………….. we made it!!! and that is TAXing as in Trans Atlantic Crossing which was definitely NOT “taxing” as in difficult.
This is a quick and dirty sat view of our crossing.
I’ll provide more details below, but short summary is 2718 Nautical Miles/5033km/3127 miles in 13 days 23 hours.
Zooming all the way out, here is a truly global view of our passage.
That’s a LOT of blue water!
This is our GPS track since leaving Turkey/Greece back on Oct. 31st with 5766 NM/10,678 km/6635 miles
Zooming back in to provide some context of the Caribbean Islands that we will be in for the next few months.
OK, now that you have all that for context, I’ll do my best to provide a summary of the passage and some of the more detail stats that many of you have been waiting for.
When we left off in the last update back on New Year’s eve, we were tied up in the Las Palmas marina on Gran Canarias Island all ready to head out New Year’s Day for our Trans Atlantic crossing.
After going through the check out process New Year’s Day, we headed we cast off the dock lines at 11am and motored out of the well protected bay on the NE corner of Gran Canarias Island and put Las Palmas in what little wake we produce.
Timing worked out great as you can see from the SkyBridge helm station as we we sailed into setting sun and more flat seas.
Passage and Paravanes Overview
As the nautical miles and days ticked by, we got into the typical and predicted Tradewinds that would help propel us across the Atlantic. Wind speeds averaged a bit more than 20 knots and swell averaged a bit more than 3 meters. All downwind sailing with both wind and swell coming from behind us and we had blue skies for almost the entire passage. Following seas are great because we get to surf down them as the pass under the hull and adds a bit to our overall speed.
However, following seas also produce some side to side yawing and rolling that creates what Christine refers to as “corkscrew” type motion as the boat crests the top of the swell and can turn to one side as it surfs down the wave.
It is really difficult to capture this in photos and video that conveys what it is like in person but here is a short video looking back from the Aft Deck to help show a bit better. For reference the top of the AL entry into the Workshop where the White LED light is mounted, is about 3m above the waterline.
This is pretty much the same physics in following seas for any monohull so nothing new to us just not the most comfortable and so we deployed the paravanes in these conditions, learned a lot and developed techniques and rigging to improve their performance and ease of launching, retrieving and clearing.
When not in use, we stow the paravanes upright and tied to the aluminium gate stanchions which worked well. Deploying them is a simple matter of slowing the boat down to under 4kts and then I lower them over the side and into the water. 
I use the White nylon retrieval line you can see here connected to aft end of the AL fin. This suspends the Paravane in a vertical position and makes it very easy to raise and lower.
As soon as they are in the water and trailing aft, I can just let go of the retrieval line and the Paravane immediately dives down in an arc the radius of the fixed length Orange/Black Dyneema lines that each Paravane is suspended from the outer end of the A-Frame boom. You can see the White triangle of the Paravane flying through the water about 6m/18ft below the surface.
I shot this short video to try to do a better job of showing how our Paravane rigging works and how they fly along through the water.
I came up with this method of running the White retrieval line through an AL low friction ring embedded into the Orange/Black Paravane lines. These White retrieval lines run slack and if you look at the photos above you can see how they trail out behind the Paravanes so as not to have any effect on the position of the Paravanes until I want to retrieve them.
Christine grabbed this shot from up at the bow looking aft which makes it easy to see how the Paravane lines run off the A-Frame booms on either side.
We have not ever had a boat with active stabilisers so we don’t have any experience to compare the performance to. However I know enough from reading and talking with those who do have active fin stabilisers that they tend to reduce the rolling by about 80-85%. Based on our limited experience with Paravanes so far and in talking with others who have them, the estimate for more like 60-65% reduction. Plus of course each hull and boat is very different in its ride characteristics taking into account hull shape, boat speed, displacement, length, beam and a long list of other factors that determine how any given boat reacts to various sea conditions. Whatever the numbers there is no question in my mind that active stabilisers would reduce the roll more than passive Paravanes and I think we would all take less rolling and motion underway than more. So it becomes a matter of setting expectations and so far for me I have been very pleased with the degree our Paravanes improve the ride. Overall I would say the most accurate description is that they dampen the roll by making it much slower and less number of degrees and we have been very glad to have them as an option to deploy whenever we wish. On this downwind Atlantic crossing I would estimate that we had the paravanes in the water about 60% of the time. By having them in and out multiple times we were also able to get a much better sense of the speed reduction from the drag they produce and this ranged from .5 to 1 knot of overall boat speed.
Atlantic Ocean should be called Sargasso Sea!
A new challenge we literally ran into on this crossing was an enormous “bloom” of Sargasso seaweed that began part way through the first week of the crossing and continued all the way over to the Caribbean. Everywhere you looked all you could see were these yellow/green masses of Sargasso weed and all their “grapes”. Some of these were the size of small lakes and there was no avoiding them, you just held course and went through them. No harm to the boat but over time we started to slow down as these masses of seaweed started to wrap themselves around the Paravane lines.
We evolved a technique for clearing these lines that worked very well. Christine would slow the boat down to about 3-4 knots and I would then hand pull the White retrieval lines through the hand winches on either side. The retrieval line would pull the Paravane into a tail up vertical position and as I kept pulling in a bit more line the Paravane would “pop” up out of the water like you see here.
This would whip the two lines attached to each Paravane as it surfaced and jumped up out of the water and shake off most of the Sargasso. If there was some still remaining, I could quickly repeat the process by letting the retrieval line out until the Paravane dove down in its arc and shed a bit more Sargasso and then pull the line back in until the Paravane popped out of the water again and shook of the remaining Sargasso. Worked very well and the whole process of clearing both sides would take less than five minutes and the Captain would bring us back up to our regular SoG (Speed over Ground) of about 8-9 knots.
There were a few times when we noticed that we did not return to full speed after clearing the lines so we knew that we must have also fouled either the hub of the prop or more likely the top front edge of the rudder where it is close to the hull. When this happened we would stop the boat completely and run in reverse for about 30 seconds and also disengage the clutch so that the CPP prop would come to a full stop and then take the boat back up to speed and continue. First time this happened I dove down off the aft end of the boat by the Swim Ladder with my mask on to confirm that the rudder and prop were clean and clear, which they were, and so we brought the boat back up to speed and continued. This added procedure to clear the prop/rudder was only needed about 3-4 times in the two week passage and the rest of the time we only needed to clear the Paravane lines.
About the only breakage we had on this crossing was a SS shackle that attached the Paravane fixed length line to the outer end of the Starboard/Right boom which meant that we were down to just the one Paravane on the Port side. 
In these sea conditions it would have been a bit risky to bring the A-Frame into its vertical stowed position and climb all the way up to replace the shackle with a new one so instead I simply tied a bowline loop into the end of the Dyneema line and was able to climb up on the Arch and loop it over the end of the boom with our long boat hook.
These Dyneema lines I had purchased were made to go on electric winches on the front of off road vehicles and if you look closely (click to enlarge any photo) you will see that they had some very tough reinforced anti chafe tubes wrapped around each which worked out just perfect for my use and no visible chafe by the end of the passage.
That was about the extent of the “excitement” on this passage so I am very happy to not have much else to report. All four of us quickly settled into our rhythm and the 14 days slowly ticked by until we arrived off the SE corner of the French island of Martinique where we anchored off of the small village of St. Anne.
When we left the Canary Islands we thought we were going to head for Grenada but a good friend and long time sailing collegue from Switzerland, Philip, had flown into Martinique for a few weeks of kite foiling and we had not seen him for several years so we changed course to land here in Martinique. I’ll provide more details and photos of this lovely spot in the next update and now go back to providing more details on the passage that many of you have been asking for.
Passage by the Numbers:
Along with many of you, we have been looking forward to compiling some of the real world data of the boat’s performance as we put more and more nautical miles under the keel and more hours on the engine and all the systems. Easy to skip over for those not interested, but below is my summary of the overall performance of Möbius so far. I’ll try to keep it simple and just list all the measurements that I think will provide the best overview. We do everything in metric units but I’ll provide some conversions for US and British as well.
- Total Passage Distance, Las Palmas Gran Canarias to St. Anne Martinique: 2718 nm / 3128 miles / 5034 km
- Total Elapsed Crossing Time: 13 days 23 hours
- Average wind speed & direction: 19kts @ 160 degrees to boat (almost behind)
- Average seas: 0.8M surface waves + 3M Swell @ 165 degrees to boat
- Overall Average boat SoG Speed over Ground: 8.1 kts/hr / 9.3 MPH / 15 Km/Hr
- Average NM per 24 hour day: 195 nm
- Total Diesel Fuel consumed: 5072 L / 1340 USG / 1116 Imp. Gals
- Fuel Consumption @ 8.1 kts: 1.87 L/NM 0.49 USG/NM 2.03 NM/USG
- Gardner engine average RPM on passage: 1448 RPM
- Average Exhaust Gas Temperature EGT: 335 C / 635 F
It is worth noting that all these numbers are actual directly measured units, not estimates or calculations. Fuel totals for example are the sum of every refill of our Day Tank as measured using a sight glass tube. Distances are as measured by our GPS. Elapsed times are from the time we left the dock in Gran Canarias until we arrived at the anchorage in St. Anne Martinique.
To my way of thinking, using such direct measurements throughout the passage and totaled at the end of the total passage time frame and distance provides the most accurate and realistic numbers possible.
Our design goals for Möbius included being able to average 8-9 knots SoG enabling us to cover 200 NM per 24 hour day while burning less than 2 Litres per NM and so we are very happy with these real world numbers. Our sincere appreciation to our brilliant designer and NA, Dennis Harjamaa at Artnautica Yacht Design in Auckland, NZ for designing our hull and boat that met and exceeded all our design goals so well. Thanks Dennis!
I will continue to keep logging all the extensive amounts of measurements for every nautical mile we cover and will update these as the months, years and nautical smiles go by.
Mr. Gee v2 Performance
I’m also delighted to report that Mr. Gee v2 performed flawlessly. We’ve never had a power boat before and so having an engine running 24/7 for two weeks was also a new experience. In total Mr. Gee’s hour meters recorded 337.3 hours and he purred away every one of those hours without a problem. Needless to say we are particularly delighted about that performance figure!
Similarly, our Nogva CPP or Controllable Pitch Propeller and Gearbox also exceeded expectations and performed flawlessly so our overall propulsion choices continue to be one of our best decisions in designing this boat. This propulsion duo has given us a “set it and forget it” kind of combination where we pretty much just set Mr. Gee’s RPM at 1450 and let his governor keep it there, adjusted the Pitch until the EGT was at about 340 degrees C and didn’t need to change it until we put the anchor down in St. Anne two weeks later.
Answering more Questions:
To answer a related question I’ve received a few times about drive line noises and vibrations we might have given that the Gardner engine is directly bolted to the Nogva Gearbox and then a direct connection between the output shaft of the Nogva CPP gearbox and its propeller shaft.
This is in contrast to many boats which have a constant velocity universal joint or CV arrangement in their driveline but this is not possible with a CPP as the pitch adjustment rod needs to travel all the way from inside the gearbox through the center of the prop shaft and back to the hub of the CPP prop.
Instead, the Nogva gearbox input connects to the Gardner crankshaft via a large flexible rubber CentaMax coupling like this.
The loudest engine related noise we have is actually that of the extraction fan which runs at all times and is part of our fire suppression system and this is something I am looking into replacing with a quieter fan. The Gardner itself cannot really be heard at any speed from either helm station. There is no audible sound from any driveline vibrations but if you really focus on it you can feel a slight vibration when we are underway. It is very steady and smooth so not something either Christine or I have noted.
Difficult to know how to measure and better answer this question and I don’t have a similar hull with a fixed prop and CV setup for comparison but I can say that one of the features we have been most impressed with and appreciative is just how quiet Möbius is both underway and at anchor. Indeed one of the most common unsolicited comments we get from our guests and others who come aboard is the almost complete lack of any noises on the boat and just how quiet is is while on board.
However, I too was curious about noise overall and so during the passage I used a sound meter app on my phone to take some readings at various places on Möbius and found the following averages all taken while cruising at 9 knots in 22 knots of following wind and about 3 meter seas:
- Inside Engine Room 80db
- Workshop 73db with ER door open
- Guest Cabin 57db (which shares a bulkhead with the ER)
- Main Salon 55db
- Master Cabin 50db
- Skybridge 58db
- Aft deck 64db
This chart will help make some sense of these db decibel numbers.
As another frame of reference, right now, sitting in the Salon typing this message with the door open while at anchor with about 21 kts of wind outside my sound meter is showing 21.5db
You can draw your own conclusions from these numbers but one of our better decisions was to put in so much EPDM and acoustic panel insulation in Möbius and we appreciate this literally every day we are aboard.
Observations from this Atlantic Crossing
Many people ask about a day in the life when we are on these passages and about our watch schedules. During the daylight hours we are quite informal about our watch schedules and just take turns being on watch and at the helm until we feel like a change and a break. In these mild weather conditions we spend most of our time up in the SkyBridge as it has such great views with its height above the water and 360 degree views all around. We have super comfy helm chairs from Llebroc at both helms which are fully adjustable to recline, change lumbar support and have a good foot rest so spending hours in these is a joy. We are both voracious readers and so we probably spend the most hours reading our wildly diverse range of book genres from romance and murder mysteries to quantum physics.
We find 6 hour night watches work best for us so we tend to have dinner around 6pm and then I start my watch at 19:00 and Christine comes on at about 1am through 07:00 when I get up and take over again. Christine will often go down for a few hours in the morning and then we settle into our relaxing day mostly lounging about and reading.
For me the biggest surprise of the passage was how much I missed the challenges that come from sailing. It is just little things like the satisfaction of adjusting your sail trim and getting a bit better boat speed. The drill you have to go through to adjust or douse sails when you see a squall up ahead and then put them back up after it passes. Or that calm that comes over you when you turn off the key after having to motor for some time and the sounds of just the water on the hull takes over your whole audio spectrum. I just felt a degree less personal satisfaction at the end of the passage having not faced those sailing types of challenges I had for so many years. However this is also the very first passage under power I’ve ever experienced so time will tell how this evolves and what new challenges lay ahead as our world voyage continues.
One thing that did not change was one of the things I have always marveled at and enjoyed about ocean crossings; being alone in the world’s vast ocean expanses for days or weeks on end. Where every one of the horizon’s 360 degrees is nothing but water meeting sky. We saw less than five other boats the entire crossing so we had these vistas all to ourselves and you truly felt blissfully alone. I am so grateful for these experiences where I feel like I am the most insignificant teeny little speck of dust on the planet and yet simultaneously also the most significant bit as I am all the only speck there is. I had that profound joy for almost all of this passage.
At night, the complete lack of any other light sources meant that I once again had night after night of stary stary skies that not even Van Gough could have captured. One interesting difference this time though was that I did become much more aware of the increased number of satellites taking over the night sky so I was glad to have this chance to take in all those stars against such a black background the likes of which I may only see in reduced degrees in the future.
Our timing worked out such that we had a lot of moonshine the whole passage so that was an extra bonus we both enjoyed on our night watches.
As well as our first crossing under power, this was also a first crossing of the Atlantic for both of us and so that felt great to add these experiences to our lists. I think the only other major ocean passage neither of us have done is now the Indonesia and the Indian ocean so we still have those adventures ahead.
Not sure how well I have been able to capture and convey our latest experience but I hope you found parts of it interesting and worth reading. If you have other questions or topics you would like me to cover in future posts please just put those in your comments below and I’ll do my best to cover these in future posts and comments.
We have now been at anchor here in St. Anne for almost two weeks and so stay tuned for an update on that in the next post. Until then, thank you VERY much for your patience with me in providing you this overview of our Atlantic crossing and I look forward to your comments and questions below.
Wayne
What a fabulous experience and adventure, the nights must have been particularly spectacular. I trust your time in the Caribbean will be restful and exciting at the same time. Cheers, Dave
Yes, as I noted those night watches with those truly stary stary deep black skies are truly awemaing to me and always have been. Hence such a treat for me to be experiencing them again.
Thanks, Wayne! So glad (and relieved) to hear bout your successful passage to the Carribien. “The journey IS home”!
The journey IS home is a great summary of how it works for me, so thanks for that.
-Wayne
Beautiful experience and a beautiful vessel you built, I’m still in Greece, but I’m planning on doing basically the same passage you did,in about a year from now under Sail
Ahoy Captain! Hope some of the details we’ve been able to share about our journey across the Med from Turkey and then out and across the Atlantic will provide some useful first hand experience for when it’s your turn.
Excellent blog Wayne and Christine. Congratulations for having completed the Atlantic Ocean, the only major passage left for us. I wonder if you would have had sargasso weeds collecting around the rudder if you were a sailing vessel, and not a motor vessel. The only time we have ever snagged sargasso weed (and we have sailed through many such lake-sized areas) was when motor sailing across the SW Caribbean close to the San Blas Islands. Nearly always, I would argue that a sail boat just sails through. Stopping the boat, and clearing those weeds from our skeg when the boat was heaving up and down in the swell was definitely an unnerving experience. Well done to you both.
Hi Wade and Diane. Sorry to take so long to get back to this and your other comments, all very much appreciated.
Interesting question about the Sargasso fouling being different for sail vs power boats. My sense is that a spinning prop does not make any difference or at least I’m not currently able to explain why, but would certainly be interested to hear from you and others about why a powered prop would cause fowling of the rudder? If anything I would think that the powered prop would tend to reduce fouling of the rudder because it would “chop up” the seaweed to some extent as it goes by and make it at least a bit less likely that the Sargasso would end up trapped between the rudder and the hull.
I should also clarify that I am NOT sure just where the Sargasso was accumulating underneath us. It is just my speculation that it would most likely have been trapped in that spot between the top front edge of the rudder and the hull, but it could have also been around the hub of the CPP prop. Our “keel” that just encloses the prop shaft, has a very slopepd forward edge so I don’t think any seaweed or other debris could get stuck there and our rudder does not have any skeg to trap it either so the only two spots I can see it accumulating is that rudder/hull corner or the prop hub. We did not have any noise or vibration of the prop itself so I’m pretty sure that the prop blades themselves were never fouled. But by the time I dove under to do a visual check, the seaweed was already gone and the entire bottom was clear and clean so as I said I was not able to visually confirm just where the seaweed had been trapped.
The technique we came up with for clearing the bottom was really very quick, easy and comfortable enough and we may not have been completely unnecessary. It may well have been that we only had that one time when there was more drag than could be accounted for from fouling the paravane lines and all the other times we did the reversing and stopping the prop shaft were not doing anything because there was nothing trapped there to begin with. This was more of a “just in case” measure. Given that we had to slow or stop the boat for me to go through clearing the paravane lines that were very easy to see how much they were fouled, then it seemed worthwhile to go ahead and reverse the pitch and stop the shaft briefly just in case there was any other Sargasso trapped underneath.
All my much too commonly long winded way of saying that I just don’t know where the Sargasso was being trapped and whether or not being a prower boat made any difference.
As I said though, I would be most interested in learning more from you and others with some first hand experience with such fouling and reasons why sail vs power would affect this.
In any case, we are a powerboat now and there is still LOTS of Sargasso floating all around us here in Martinique so I think this kind of fouling of at least the Paravane lines will continue to be with us for the next few monthsand we have a quick and easy way of clearing that now. If we do end up getting more fouling than “just” the paravane lines, then I will dive as soon as we stop and try to get visual confirmation of where it is being trapped. So stay tuned for that if it happens in future episodes of “Wayne’s World”! 😉
Would also be fun to catch up with you and Diane better some time so perhaps we could also set up a good daytime for us to do a video call? So let me know if you want to set that up and just contact me on WhatsApp or the like.
Thanks again for your comments and coming along for the ride with us.
-Wayne
Wayne, I appreciate your comment missing the sailing life. I felt the same after passages in my Vicem.
I also appreciate the data you share. Thanks much. More proof of your Mobius boating concept as a superb means of exploring, transport, and living on the water.
Hi there Richard, great to get this comment from you. Like you it sounds, I was just a bit surprised by my reaction to this part of the experience of making the transition from sail to power.
I also appreciate your feedback on the value of the real time data and will do my best to keep sharing more as we continue our voyages. I know I prize such first hand data over most others and just wanted to do my best to pay back those who shared their data and helpe me so much and pay it forward for those about to venture out there. The lack of good feedback loops is an ongoing challenge with these online mediums like blogs so the value and role of comment sections is huge to me.
Thanks again for your help with this and please keep it coming!
-Wayne
How come that we can’t follow your AIS by Marine Traffic? At present it still points to Las Palmas and when you left Turkey it was already an interrupting connection. Do you have antenna problems? As you have AIS A version with an amplified power output.
Good question for which I unfortunately don’t have a good answer.
As you noted, we have a Class A AIS transponder and so we too are particularly puzzled by this and so many other odd things with AIS related reporting and visualizations. We continue to research and talk to as many others as we can and this seems like a common thing for which I have yet to find any good answer to. When it comes to things like AIS by Marine Traffic, I suspect that some of these things are due to the AIS reporting of land based line of sight stations being all done by volunteers. There is sat based reporting but that is for paid services mostly for the commercial shipping world. One thing we have determined is that here in Martinique there does not appear to be any land based AIS reporting whereas on other nearby islands there is. You can determine this by turning AIS satellite reporting OFF and when you do so, there are NO AIS boats showing up on Marine Traffic for here in St. Anne for example where we are currently anchored with literally several hundred other boats and which show up on our AIS receiver, charts, etc. so they are definitely broadcasting AIS just as we are. What we have yet to explain is why our AIS position seemed to stop being reported as soon as we lost our last land based internet connection off of Las Palmas and why it has not picked up again once we arrived off Martinique. Right now we think this is because of the lack of land based AIS stations here in Martinique.
There are many other such “anomalies” we are aware of with AIS so we will continue to try to figure these out and if you have more ideas and suggestions please do pass them on.
Thanks,
Wayne
Love following your adventures, epsecially the detailed paravane information. We have been discussing adding paravanes to our trawler (Kadey Krogen 54) for passages and find it difficult to get real world, measured data. Appreciate your posts.
Hi Steven, appreciate you taking the time to send this note and that you are finding some value in the paravane and other content in our blog posts.
As you likely already know there are other KK owners with paravanes and there has been a fair number of threads on paravanes on the Trawler Forum where they have commented on their experiences and setups, so you have that distinct advantage of others with the same or very similar boat as you with paravanes in use and all the resultant learning and data. In our case with Möbius being such a custom and rare boat and hull, I didn’t have that benefit. Do keep this in mind as you read over my posts and data that these are ALL my best guess as to what will work best for us and our hull. One important example, coming up with what the best amount of surface area for our paravanes as this is perhaps the most crtical factor in determining the amount of roll attenuation you are going to get from a paravane.
If it helps you to know, I built ours to the following sizes: (I’ve converted these to inches)
* Width at aft end of triangular plywood wing = 31.5″
* Total fore/aft length of paravane = 25.5″
* Total surface area = 448 sq in
* bulb weight = 30 lb
If/when I build another pair I will likely try making them a bit bigger just to see how that changes thir roll attenuation as I think that might be worth it and worth the time to try.
The other thing I have NOT yet had time to experiment with is what hole to use to connect the paravane line to the paravane bracket. Right now I have it such that when you hang the paravane from the line up in the air, the plywood wing is horizontal, parallel to the water. I have other holes further back that would tilt the paravane varying degrees of nose down which would create more drag all the time they are running through the water but I’m not sure how much this would change the roll reduction and if it is worth the “cost” of the extra drag with reduced SoG and increased fuel consumption.
Hope this all helps and if you have any other questions or info on the paravanes I’d be happy to share it with you.
-Wayne
Hi Guys
What a nice first time Atlantic crossing report. Question: I note in the ER picture a black hose going into the exhaust run. Please explain what I am seeing, I’ll not guess.
Hi Tom, glad you enjoyed the update from our Atlantic crossing.
Re the black hose in the Engine Room you asked about, I suspect the confusion is due to a bit of an optical illusion caused by the camera angle in this particular shot. In reviewing this photo, I can see how it could appear that the black rubber hose is going into the vertical SS dry stack pipe, which would be pretty crazy indeed and thus your question. In this photo the SS brackets for the support rods on the vertical dry stack add to the confusion. If you click on the photo to enlarge it I think you’ll be able to more clearly see how the black hose goes into the AL exhaust pipe leading out to the exhaust exit on the front Stbd side of the ER wall which then goes over and out the side of the hull. Please let me know if this still doesn’t make sense.
Sorry for this confusion Tom, I guess that I’m just too familiar with the setup to have noticed and appreciate you pointing it out.
-Wayne
Either you have a programming error on the unit or, more likely, an antenna issue especially if the signal is mixed with a VHF antenna. You should be able to see your own boat on somebodies display up to 30 – 50 nm (@ 12.5W). If you don’t see it far enough then start on the antenna.
Yes, that was my initial thoughts as well so we confirmed with several other boats that they are seeing our AIS signal and they all were. We have a dedicated AIS specifica antenna and no mixing with any other VHF signals or cables. Not sure what “programming error” would be as we have been showing up on the likes of Marine Traffic as well as other boats so I’m still a bit perplexed as to why our last reported position is off the SW corner of Las Palmas but I’ll keep checking to see if this changes when we next move to another island.
-Wayne
Regarding the paravanes…would lowering the poles to give a “wider stance” provide less roll?
Hi Richard. Yes, anything you can do to increase the distance that the PV’s are outboard of the boat will help increase the lever arm and so I will do more experimenting with increasing the angle of the A-Frame booms/poles and see how much effect this has and any problems that arise from this larger angle. Currently I have the fixed length dyneema lines that hold the poles at 45 degrees so you start to get diminishing returns from increasing this angle but would definitely increase the lever arm the more they move the PV’s out to the side.
I think the bigger reduction would likely come from increasing the surface area of the PV’s, the white painted plywood on mine so when I stop in a place long enough to do so, I will try making a pair of larger plywood PV’s to increase the surface area and see how that works. I’ll be sure to report on these kind of changes and experiments as they happen here on the blog so stay tuned for that, though I can’t promise any timelines as this point.
Thanks for the astute suggestions and please let me know of any more that you have.
Wayne