Video of Winnie doing her stuff!

This was filmed yesterday as we sailed in a Force 6, with the rig set up 'goose-winged' (main and poled out yankee on opposite sides). as you'll see, we were going well!

She will be a great ally during the transatlantic and unlike Constance, our electric autopilot, she seems to thrive in big waves. The steering wheel is locked off in the straight-ahead position and Winnie own rudder, mounted on the stern, does all of the work.

Into Portugal with Winnie at the helm

Well we really feel that we've started the next chapter of the voyage, after a great time in Galicia.

We left the anchorage as dawn broke; the Islas Cies (where we anchored a week ago) looked beautiful in the morning sunshine:

We had an absolutely cracking sail south, with the wind right behind us. Our extra crew member, Winnie (the Windpilot) did fantastically well in the challenging wind and sea conditions. For a while we had up to Force 7, with 3 metre swell and breaking waves so we reefed down and charged on. Winnie is great in that she steers the boat without the need for electricity, food or sleep and does it silently too. We've filmed a short video of her in action so will post it when the wifi here is less busy
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We decided to keep going south rather than stopping at our planned destination so as to take advantage of the free transport. The forecast suggested the winds would die early this morning and, sure enough, we had to start the engine at 4.00am for the last 5 hours of the 27 hour, 169 mile passage. We've come to a small marina at Nazare, about 80 miles north of the entrance to Lisbon; it's run by an English couple (from Dartmouth, originally) and one of their cats came aboard to complete the rodent check!

After the green hills of Galicia, it's suddenly very brown and dry here. Hot, too, so our sunshades have been rigged. We're planning our next move; the harbour master recommends this as an ideal location from which to head for Madeira and he warns that the weather tends to change in mid October so we should not delay too long.   

I canna give you more power, Cap'n; the dilithium crystals willna take it!

Ever since the exploits of the USS Enterprise way back in the 1960's, vessels have faced the challenge of delivering power to supply increasing amounts of electronic equipment on board. I can remember small sailing yachts where the main bit of electrical kit was a Seafarer echosounder, powered by its own PP9 battery, whose flashing light whizzed noisily around a dial to give a rough estimation of the water depth.

 

Our recent problems with the failed engine alternator have brought into sharp focus the challenges of power management that we now face. Maunie has a network of instruments (with rather more modern LCD displays) giving us all sorts of useful information about wind speed and direction, boat speed, water depth and so on. She has no fewer than 3 GPS systems, giving our position to within a gnat's whisker, a chart plotter and radar, an AIS transponder and an electronic autopilot; on top of that we have our two fridges, navigation lights, electric water pumps, interior lights and even an extractor fan in the galley. We also plug in our laptop and satellite phone when we need to contact the outside world to update the blog and receive vital weather forecasts.  A PP9 battery certainly wouldn't cope with that lot so we have three large 110Ah 12v batteries under our bunk to run it all (and there's a fourth dedicated solely to starting the engine) but, of course, we have to recharge them.

 

In a marina it's easy - we just plug into the shorepower 240v and an onboard 'smart' battery charger tops the batteries up without us giving it a second thought. On a longer passage, though, (more than 12 hours or so) we have to apply some careful battery management. We therefore watch our battery monitor gauge with great care - it tells us how many amps we're using at any time and the cumulative number of ampere-hours we consumed and it warns us when the battery voltage has dropped to a level that, if we didn't recharge them, we could do lasting damage to the battery cells.

If the main engine's running, it normally (more later on this!) provides up to 70 amps of charge so a couple  of hours of motoring will restore the batteries to full health; however if there's a good sailing breeze it's a very inefficient use of a 56hp diesel engine to be running in neutral with only the load from its alternator. So we also have a small diesel generator which provides about 40 amps and uses a quarter of the fuel (it's a lot quieter too) and we'll run that for a couple of hours in the evening to ready the boat for the high electricity usage at night and then again in the morning to replace the energy used.

 

We're trying to be green on this trip, however, so burning diesel is something we're aiming to minimise. So we've replaced all the light bulbs with high efficiency LED's and we've installed two solar panels which will deliver up to 5 amps in full direct sunshine. Some boats add a small wind turbine mounted on a pole at the stern (we've decided against that at the moment  as they can be really noisy and add yet more weight where we don't want it) and there are some clever generators which have a small propeller hung over the stern to use the energy of moving water to create charge (they are pretty expensive and slow the boat down); we're hoping that a combination of careful energy management and our solar / generator combination will work ok..

 

The postscript to our alternator story is that, although it's generating electricity once more, the recharging regime is not working as well as it did previously. We managed to get hold of Antonio the electrician again, via the very helpful yacht club in Baiona, so did an unscheduled stop there this morning. Antonio came back aboard, this time with his helper, and spent a good 45 minutes checking everything. I'd already come to the conclusion that he reached, which was that when the the alternator failed it also destroyed an add-on 'Sterling' charge controller. This clever bit of kit fools the alternator into delivering more power than its own regulator would call for, thereby shortening the engine running time to recharge the batteries. Replacements aren't available here so we will have to contact the makers to see if we can get one shipped to a suitable location. In the meantime, though, we're still  a going concern so are planning to head into Portugal tomorrow. Antonio was apologetic that he couldn't resuscitate the Sterling controller and refused to take payment for his extra time today.

 

We're currently anchored off a beautiful beach at the north side of the entrance to Ria de Vigo after a brilliant sail across from Baiona ( a beat in a Force 5-6 so we reefed down); we're ideally placed for an early start in the morning. Graham took advantage of the evening sunshine for a swim and snorkelled around the boat to give the hull a good clean for that all-important extra tenth of a knot of boat speed. We'll check the wind forecast again this evening but it looks pretty good so we hope to be in Povoa de  Varsim before dusk tomorrow.

The Rain in Spain stops at last

Dianne made a phone call to her father in Hambleton (near Blackpool) this morning on the satellite phone and he was saying that the village had suffered some serious floods after days of really heavy rain. It's been pretty similar here (though it's difficult to identify any floods from the boat!); we've had absolutely torrential downpours and, last night a really loud and close thunderstorm.

 

The Spanish for 'thunderstorm' is 'tormenta' and last night's certainly did that in our anchorage. The time between the flash and the bang was very short, and there we were with a tall metal mast..... Thankfully we didn't get struck.

 

We left Baiona yesterday afternoon and motored right to the top of the Ria to a big shallow lagoon called Ensenada de San Simon. This afternoon, at last, the weather began to clear and we had our first glimpse of the sun for several days. To celebrate, Di's making plum crumble as I write; the food is good aboard. Last night's supper was a truly international affair - locally-caught fish (flat fish, no idea what they were called) with Spanish spinach and the last of our home-grown potatoes.

 

Tomorrow will probably our last full day in Spain. We'll head to a marina in Vigo to go to the chandlers for various bits and pieces that we need. The most important is a new VHF aerial for the top of the mast – we've been getting poor reception on our inter-ship radio so Graham climbed the mast for about the 5th time today and brought the fitting to deck level to find a split in the mounting. We don't think that the application of Araldite has sorted it, unfortunately so at the moment continue to use the emergency spare, mounted at the stern.

 

The forecast suggests that the northerly Portuguese Trade Winds will resume their normal service by Friday so we'll hitch a ride on them southwards. We're aiming for Lisbon, about 300 miles away, so will probably break the journey just north of Porto (about 12-14 hours from here). From Lisbon we'll probably make a break for Madeira (about 4 days sailing in good conditions) then head on to the Canaries. The big unknown on this coast is the size of the Atlantic swell, particularly after this unsettled period of weather, so plans may change once we've studied websites in the marina tomorrow. We'll keep you posted!

Antonio the electrician has done the trick!

Just a quick update to say that Antonio returned to Maunie at 10.30 this morning with a rebuilt alternator in one hand and the old rotor in the other - its electrical windings had failed.

All is now bolted back together and seems fine - a 275 Euro repair, including his time, which is a lot of money but there we are. We need to spend the next few nights in free anchorages and catch some fish to make up for it!

We'll enjoy the final luxury of the high-pressure showers here at the Yacht Club, get some provisions in town and then we'll head out to explore up the Ria beyond Vigo. It feels good to have Maunie back as a going concern, so we're looking forward being back out in the elements (which continure to be chiefly rain at the moment - better weather is forecast for the end of the week).

Avoiding the rain and gales with a long Sunday lunch!

Atrocious weather here yesterday! The rain arrived with a vengeance and the wind increased to a full gale. Even though it was coming from the south west (so we were sheltered by the main town to a degree), the boats in the marina were all straining at their mooring warps and Maunie was bouncing around a fair bit. The only thing to do was to go and have a very long lunch in the Yacht Club!

Heidi and Peter from Stormvogel joined us for an excellent lunch. Peter updated us on their delights of their engine removal and the uncertainties of what will happen next - have a look at their blog for photos: www.wiedekamm.com

Outside, meanwhile, the wind was screaming through the masts and the rain was bucketing down (or sideways actually!).

We spent a fair amount of time adding extra mooring lines and adjusting them to get Maunie to stop careering round the pontoon. Thankfully the wind began to drop as we went to bed so this morning it's still pretty cloudy but we are mercifully still!

After reading up everything I could find about alternators, diodes and batteries, Graham has done all the checks he can think of so our hopes now lie with finding an electrician who can come to take over the investigations. Meanwhile we'll take the opportunity to use the washing machine and dryer and explore more of the town. 

A (relatively) quiet night at anchor before the gales

We took the decision to leave Combarros yesterday, after a final shopping trip ashore. We finally took the brave pill and bought some fresh fish (which, to our relief, was experly gutted and filleted for us) and some wonderful bread and pastries. The rain and stong winds are still forecast to arrive on Saturday evening so we thought we'd head towards Baiona but anchor in the lee of Las Islas Cies, at the entrance to the Ria de Vigo.

 

There was no wind for the 18 mile passage but we enjoyed an Empanada (a Galician flat pastry pie with savoury filling - tuna in our case) and cheesecake at lunchtime as we motored along the rocky coast. We anchored 100m off the shore of the island, which is a beautiful nature reserve with white sandy beaches, rocky points and thick forrest, and settled down to a bit of reading and boat maintenance before setting about the cooking of the large dorada (a fairly blunt-nosed but meaty fish) that we'd bought. After debate we decided on oven cooking in a foil parcel containing onions, butter, white wine, cherry tomotoes and tarragon; the result was pretty good but should have added some lemon!

 

Supper over, we turned our attentions to increasing our comfort at anchor. As a heavy displacement, relatively narrow yacht, Maunie is a brilliant sea boat in windy conditions but, at anchor, she has bit of a tendancy to roll. It's not just a steady rolling motion, though; she starts gently and then builds momentum over four or five rolls then does a biiiig roll before stopping momentarily and then restarting the whole sequence. It can be a little wearing.

Our anchorage was windless but we had a little surging swell so we tried, for the first time, deploying the 'Sea Brake'.

 

As its name suggests, the Sea Brake is a sea drogue, designed in Australia to provide control and safety in extreme sea conditions; it would be let out on a 100m rope behind the boat to slow her down and let big breaking waves slide past us rather than having us careering down their faces like a large and mildly out-of-control surfboard. We therefore hope it'll never have to be used for this purpose but we were told that it does have a secondary use as a roll-reducer at anchor.

 

With a small anchor and some chain hanging below it to make it sink, we deployed it over the side and hung it from the end of the main boom which we swung out as far as it would go. The results were brilliant! As the boat rolled towards it, the Sea Brake would sink further below the surface then as she tried to roll back, the small vents in its 'funnel' would restrict the flow of water out of it so it restrained the upwards motion of the boom. It didn't stop all movement of course but we had a much steadier night so we'll use it a lot in the future.

 

This morning we had an amazing "red sky in the morning, shepherds' warning" sunrise so we left our anchorage late morning to head across the bay to Baiona. As forecast the wind swung sound to the southwest rapidly increased so, as we beat towards the harbour, we had gust of up to 40 knots across the deck. Drama over and where we've settled in to the plush potoons of Monte Real Cub de Yates, a very smart yacht club.

Baiona sounds lovely - much less urban than it's much bigger neighbour Vigo, with a well-preserved castle and old town - so we had a walk around the castle this afternoon and look forward to exploring it more tomorrow. Hopefully we'll find an electrician here to investigate our non-charging problem on Monday but, if not, we'll move up to the boatyards in Vigo.