Two days - one work on boat, one to have pleasure on it.
Work day
Mast adjustments again.
I readjusted mast again using forward lowers to straight it. It was not easy, but at some moment i realised that top shrouds have BIG effect on this "natural", as I thought, spreaders level bend to port side. However i was able to play with forward lowers and top shrouds to make mast almost straight and without dramatic difference in tension.
But sea trial showed the problem is not completely fixed but I have some progress.
But now I’m starting to think the issue is more related to the top shroud settings.
Monday I “confirmed” this with GPT chat ;-)
The correct name for my rigging is: Masthead sloop with discontinuous standing rigging with single inline spreaders.
Actually, it looks like my mast “virtually” has two spreader levels, but the upper spreader is absent. Instead, intermediate shrouds run from the spreader plates to about 3/4 mast height.
That changes the whole mast adjustment strategy.
It’s becoming quite a long saga already, I’ll try another re-adjustment next time.
Shore power input.
Recently my shore power input GFCI unit started tripping when the refrigerator compressor starts.
Last time I checked the compressor connector poles resistance to the compressor body, and could not measure anything lower than several megaohms, so I was pretty sure everything there was OK. I thought the GFCI maybe got “wet” or became too sensitive because of the high outdoor humidity.
When the GFCI started tripping again this time, I decided it was finally time to install a real Equipment Leakage Circuit Interrupter unit designed for the marine environment.
To say ELCIs are expensive is an understatement — you can hardly find anything below $250, even on sale.
But I hate the idea of keeping 110V on the boat without active ground-fault protection, so I bit the bullet and sourced a 30A ELCI plus an IP67 enclosure to install instead of the industrial DIN-rail GFCI.
This weekend the ELCI arrived — nice and shiny.
I spent about an hour reinstalling proper terminals on the wires and figuring out the best way to route everything inside the box. Then… when I put the last screw into the ELCI terminal, I heard a “crack,” and the terminal came loose.
Looks like it was not secured properly inside the unit.
So I ended up without a GFCI/ELCI unit until my next visit to the boat.
Open plotter troubleshooting
Last time I finally installed the AIS transponder, and it works well.
But during that same trip I also started having issues with my autopilot system — it just did not want to stay running.
I did not connect the dots until this week.
My autopilot is based on pypilot as part of OpenPlotter, and I discovered that the control program had started rebooting every 30 seconds for some reason.
Deeper troubleshooting showed that it only happens when the AIS receiver is active.
Long story short, the MAIANA AIS Transponder sends GPS data to the Signal K server as an additional GPS source, and Pypilot crashes because it cannot parse the data properly.
I tried switching Pypilot to use the Linux GPSD daemon instead, and pointed GPSD to use a standalone GPS receiver. Everything worked fine at the dock, BUT once underway GPSD started locking onto stale coordinates, resulting in incorrect position detection and bad speed-over-ground readings.
I had to restart GPSD every time it went to weeds.
So now I am back to the drawing board trying to fix the issue.
Sailing
Not a lot of pictures... Just my happy wife.
The weather forecast showed 0.7' seas and 5–10 knot winds. The day promised to be nice and calm.
We decided to sail to Redfish Island, about 8 miles from Kemah. We had to beat against the wind, but it was not too bad. The boat ran nicely, with a little heel, and we were making 3–5 knots. Everyone was happy.
We anchored along with a couple of other boats and had a chance to swim in the bay for the first time. The water was great.
I (as always) took the opportunity to check the boat below the waterline. Task #1 was checking whether I still had rope leftovers on the propeller and removing them. When we motored away from the boatyard, I caught the swimming ladder line in the propeller. Thank God it was old enough to break, otherwise we could have been in serious trouble at that moment. But part of the rope stayed there the whole time.
And yes — I found about 4 feet of rope wrapped around the shaft and propeller.
The bottom paint works GREAT.
Then I checked the prop and shaft, and they appeared to be covered in small barnacles. Looks like I will need to clean the shaft and propeller every month to keep them clean.
But magic always comes with a price.
The way back to the marina was pretty rough. During our relaxing time at anchor, the wind picked up to 15–20 knots and the waves built closer to 2'. Keep in mind this is the bay, so the wavelength is short and the boat motion gets uncomfortable quickly.
So we had an hour and a half of rock-and-roll, even though we were not sailing dead downwind.
On the other hand, we were making a steady 7 knots — almost hull speed.
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