Centro Nautico Algés

It’s Sunday 5 October today, and I’ve been back on the boat for a week already. Plenty of boat jobs have been done again, including yet more changes to the navigation “black box” space.

Since the deckhouse now runs entirely on B&G chartplotters with beta software, it seemed sensible to have a backup on a different system. That turned out to be an Orca Core2, together with the Orca app on the iPad (and the laptop and phone if need be). It’s an OK backup, but it doesn’t yet have the functionality of the real chartplotters. What is attractive is that you get charts worldwide, insofar as they have them. I’ll post a review at some point.

I’ve also replaced the router with a dual-purpose little box from PredictWind called the DataHub. It’s designed to have two WAN outputs, to the Iridium Go!Exec and the Starlink, and to offer WiFi and ethernet to the devices on board. Nothing exciting in itself, and any old router could do that. However, it also has an NMEA 2000 interface, and that lets this box do two neat things. First, out on the ocean it provides “over the horizon” AIS data: via the satellite link it pulls in information about ships between 200 and 30 miles away and shows them on the chartplotter. So it extends your range, and you no longer need to receive the data yourself. That means you get warned hours before you could ever see a ship. We’ll see how useful this turns out to be. The second is that it automatically turns the sailing data (wind and speed) into a polar diagram; I see that in the latest version they now call these “AI polars”. Yeah, right, AI. Anyway, the idea is that PredictWind uses this data to learn how fast your boat is, and uses that to improve the routing. That strikes me as really handy.

The second pump of the watermaker has also been replaced; it had packed up after just 2 hours. Douwe (KMY) gave me a new one to take along. I thought I’d sort that out in an hour or so, but Schenker has made the pump unit so stupidly that it took me from 9 till 3. The watermaker also turned out to be stinking already, so it needed an acid clean. And then you have to replace the filters too. Unfortunately I found another installation blunder: the filters had been fitted with the plastic wrapping still on. Who comes up with something like that? Grr.

And the most important one: the Hoyt boom. When I got back the boom had already been fitted and everything looked beautifully repaired. The pin was too: lovely bushings fitted everywhere, everything turning sweetly with minimal play. But after raising and lowering the boom a few times as a test, it would only go up. Oh no, not that again. We had this in Aruba too: the boom has one side filled with gas (nitrogen) and the other with hydraulic oil, whose pressure you can vary from the cockpit. If you let the oil out, the gas pushes the oil back and the boom goes up. If it only goes up, the seal between gas and oil is worn and more and more oil slowly ends up on the gas side. I called Douwe straight away; he went to look into a service kit but couldn’t do anything until Tuesday. And that’s in the Netherlands, not where I am. So I brought in Tiago, the yard manager. In the end the cylinder was collected on Monday at 5 pm by an outside company (specialising in hydraulics) and brought back repaired exactly 48 hours later. So Tecnodraulica (also) gets a gold star: excellent, fast service. The fact that it wasn’t exactly cheap I happily forgive them; the original seals won’t have been cheap and had to come by courier.

Add some tinkering with software for the boat and the new radar software, and the week flew by again. I thanked and praised the yard manager Tiago Marcelino of Centro Nautico Algés at length. Their normal rates are a bit below those in the Netherlands, the machinist is a bit more expensive, but they know their stuff and they do what they promise, schedule included. So highly recommended, especially in summer when the yards in the Algarve have no time. The only downside is that you have to go ashore if the job takes longer than a few hours.

On Friday I was splashed and motored over to the anchorage east of Cascais where I’d been earlier with Ella. It’s a lot quieter in early October than in mid-August! This afternoon I moved into Cascais marina so that Koen can step aboard easily tomorrow and settle in at his own pace. Koen is coming a few days before Saskia, who still has to stand in front of the class until Wednesday. He can lend a hand with the last mechanical jobs. There are no showstoppers left, but there’s always something to do. The boom creaks a bit, the winches need greasing, there’s still air in the port rudder cylinder, and I’m sure I’ve forgotten a thing or two.

Once Saskia is here I think we’ll leave for Porto Santo near Madeira fairly soon. That’s 477 nautical miles, so it should take about 2.5 days.