Monthly Archive for July, 2010

Right whale breaches onto sailboat

We will never forget our experience with breaching humpback whales in Alaska. We just hoped that the whale knew where we were and didn’t want to hit us. The yacht Intrepid was not so fortunate.

A whale leapt out of the water and crash-landed on the deck of a boat off the coast of South Africa July 21, 2010. Sailing near Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town, Paloma Werner, 50, of the Cape Town Sailing Academy, and her partner Ralph Mothes watched the whale move toward their 10-meter vessel and breached 20 meters away. The whale disappeared under the water, before reappearing in the air. “Then I just saw this huge whale crash onto our yacht,” Werner said. Fortunately, no one was injured, though the boat suffered damage. (Paloma Werner)

ShipTrak plots of Adagio passages

We just discovered this very nice Google Maps lashup by Tom VE3II. Tom uses the Yotreps database – up to 365 days, so you will only find our track from San Francisco across the Pacific 2009, 2010.

Ouvea — Loyalty Islands

Click the thumbnail for photo gallery

On 6 July we were anchored in Kuto Bay, Ile des Pins. That evening we hosted a very fun potluck aboard ADAGIO with fellow cat cruisers from TE HARINUI (New Zealand) and AHU (Austria).

It looked like the Southwesterly front had about blown itself out, with light-moderate SE trades expected to build on the 7th. We had been looking for an opportunity to sail up to the Loyalty Islands so we decided to take advantage of the change.

The morning of 7 July we sailed for the Loyalties, expecting we could make Ouvea in an overnight passage of roughly 24 hours. By 1250 we made our way around the south end of Ile des Pins through Passe Ndjua (which can be absolutely horrible if you attempt it with wind-against the 4kn tidal currents). Our timing was good, so it was just moderately bumpy in the 13kn SE’ly and about 2M swell left from the last frontal system.

By 1300 we had cleared Passe Ndjua and set our favorite downwind sails: reacher and Solent Jib as twin headsails. Our log entry said

“Gybe onto port. Beautiful, puffy cumulus clouds all around. Isle of Pines Oro Bay to port. Pic Nga in the distance”. (Pic Nga is the highest peak on the island)”

The run to Ouvea was happily uneventful, though we were wishing for more wind. Before nightfall we were motorsailing with reacher and the port engine at 2250rpm. At 0243 Dorothy logged:

“A quiet night. Watching for ships. The golden crescent moon just rose in the east, looking like the Cheshire cat’s smile. 48.8 nm and 8 hours to Ouvea.”

At 1144 on 8 July we entered the Ouvea Lagoon via Passe Du Coetlogon, and by lunch time had dropped the hook near the Hotel Paradis d’Ouvea by the village of Lekiny. We joined two other catamarans, SEA TRAIL and REHAB, both of which had sailed on by sunrise the next morning.

ADAGIO and ALLEGRO were quite photogenic, floating in the crystal clear waters of the very blue lagoon. Our obectives were to see the sea turtles and spotted rays that hang out under the bridge to Mouly Island, and to visit the Lekiny Cliffs on the southeast corner of the atoll. Our map showed a route from the lagoon, across the bridge, and along a beach bordering the Hnymek, a vast, shallow channel between the lagoon of the atoll and the open ocean to the southeast. The walk must be made at low tide, when the sand flats are exposed. We were fortunate that the low tide was in the morning, which was calm for best underwater viewing. The spotted rays were out in force, “flying” in formation under the bridge, noses pointed into the outgoing tidal stream. A local fisherman cast his net into the vast school of small fish which were schooling in a long formation along the white sand spit.

In the Ouvea photo gallery take note of the crowds of people on the Lekiny beaches. When we returned to ADAGIO for lunch we noticed that the only footprints on the beach were ours.

Easy integration with Picasa and Wordpress

I’ve not tested this method, but for those who like the price of free, this lashup of Wordpress.com and Picasa looks workable.

New high-performance yachts for 34th America’s Cup

We are extremely impressed by the way BMW Oracle is running the defense. It truly is being run for the benefit of all contenders. A good example is the process of selecting the next A/C design — in particular whether a 72-ft multihull or monohull. Our design team of Morrelli & Melvin is responsible for developing and presenting the multihull option. The next America’s Cup is going to very cool!

(…) “We’ve always said that the new design will be for the America’s Cup community. The result with be a ‘non-partisan yacht’ rather than a ‘defender’s yacht’,” said Ian Burns, Design Coordinator for BMW ORACLE Racing. “A great deal of input was sought from the America’s Cup community and the concept briefs given to the rule writers reflect that feedback.”

In a twin-track process, US SAILING will author a multihull rule and the RORC’s Seahorse Rating a canting-keel monohull rule.

“It would be premature to rule either a monohull or multihull in and the other out at this stage,” commented Russell Coutts, CEO of BMW ORACLE Racing. “Which type of boat is best for racing and media impact is one of many evaluations we will be testing over the coming months.”

The choice between monohull and multihull will be made after the conclusion of these trials, the first round of which is scheduled for Valencia in late July.

(…) Download the concept papers for AC 34 Monohull and Multihull design

AC 34 Class Rule Multihull Concept (2035)

AC 34 Class Rule Monohull Concept (updated 19 July 2010) (1925)

Read more »

Adagio laptop does not like drinking cafe mocha

I spilled a full Cafe Mocha into the Macbook Pro 15″ enroute from New Zealand to New Caledonia. Yikes – we love that laptop – this is definitely not a Good Thing! That is the first time that has happened — Adagio got hit hard enough by a beam sea that it just blasted my coffee cup straight up, it turned over at the top of the arc, then fell straight down in the middle of the keyboard. Mocha splattered over about a 2 meter radius of the saloon. It was such a mess I didn’t even make a log entry of the incident, but rushed straight into the task of minimizing damage.

Key priorities for a laptop keyboard spill: cut the power so you don’t fry any delicate innards; get the contamination out without doing more damage; be sure all is completely dry before reinstalling the battery — again to avoid electrons traveling unplanned paths.

I turned the MBP upside down – removed the battery, washed externally with fresh water whilst maintaining the MBP inverted position (messy!). Then I sprayed all the crevices with contact cleaner to drive out as much of the water as I could. I left the laptop out to dry for 3 days, then reinserted the battery and restarted. The Macbook Pro booted up normally with its happy sound. After some brief testing I noted at least 3 keys were not working, so we connected a spare keyboard and mouse. The MBP seemed to run fine for about 3 days.

Then we noticed that the menu bar charge status showed “charging” but battery state = 0%. The next day the magsafe connector green light was dark, and the MBP would not boot. Wanting to enjoy NC for a while (instead of pretending to be an Apple service center), we then switched to Backup Number Two, our trusty old iBook G4.

Which iBook I had been using happily just a few months ago — for our very-outdated CAD software which will not run on the modern CPU and OS. Dang — after a few hours we start getting hard drive errors! I did some directory repair, no joy; erased the drive; then installed a diet-clone of the Mac Pro boot drive; that worked for a day; then more drive errors. OK — I already had a 150GB Firewire portable drive running an older clone of the Mac Pro — I booted the iBook from the portable drive. That worked – so we hauled the iBook + external drive to Kou Bugny for one brief internet session. Inconvenient trying to balance laptop on lap + external drive + cable which must be firmly connected at all times, etc.

Over the next few days we found that the iBook booting off the external wasn’t reliable – possibly because the Firewire connections aren’t absolutely 100%.

So, on to Backup Number Three — the Dell Inspiron 5100 laptop. It doesn’t have internal wifi, so I inserted the EnGenius 200mW wifi PCMCIA card, wrestled the Windows configuration “Lizard” until it finally said “Uncle – OK, I’ll connect”. Then I downloaded and installed the latest Google Chrome browser so Dorothy would not have to fight with Internet Explorer. Hmm… Google is so smart, that noting our IP address in France it insisted on installing the French Chrome. More practice for Dorothy :-)

But after a couple of hours, the Dell wouldn’t recognize the wifi card. Sigh… So we have decided to focus on Newcal and just use Adagio-accessible wifi, which means iNet around Noumea or the Hotel Coral Palms wifi at Ilot Maitre. We’re looking forward to Telstra NextG wireless broadband when we get to Australia.

So in the space of a couple of weeks we have had more computer problems than the total of nine years since 2001. 2001 was the year of the Windows infestation with the “cursor from hell” which caused a fruitless month on the phone with Dell “support” in Malaysia. I finally figured out that Windows Professional was doing a logical OR of the GPS NMEA stream with the mouse. That is a Windows feature (not a bug according to MS$).