Is your boat ocean ready? Part one

In preparation for doing the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers (ARC) 2009, AY editor Barry Henson was forced to take a serious look at his boat, Walkabout II, and ask "Is she ocean ready?" In this article he looks at how he upgraded his boat for her first ocean crossing.

All sailors tend to look at their boat through rose-coloured glasses.  My boat, Walkabout II, a Hallberg Rassy 45, is a good example.  She had taken me, my family and friends safely from Amsterdam to Turkey with hardly a hitch. In my eyes she was the perfect coastal cruiser.  After five years of cruising the Med I decided is was time to bring my boat back to Australia.  I looked at the various options, including shipping it, and decided that the only way I could afford to do this was sailing her back.  Rather than risk becoming a perennial dinner guest of some Somali pirate, I choose the longer Atlantic/Pacific route.  This would be Walkabout II’s first Atlantic crossing, which would make new demands of her, so I needed to make sure she was up to the task.   As you follow my journey, it may prompt you to some things you’ll want to examine about your own boat.

The Atlantic Rally for Cruisers (ARC)

The best time to do an east-west crossing of the Atlantic is late November.  This is the tail end of the hurricane season and whilst an out-of-season hurricane is always a chance, the odds of running into serious weather are minimal.   The timing also increases your chances of finding the following trade-winds that develop as a result of the Azores high, and it would allow me to join the Atlantic Rally for Cruisers or ARC as it’s known, which is run by the World Cruising Club.  Originally created by Jimmy Cornell, the ARC had been crossing ‘the pond’ for 24 years; it is the largest, most professional run rally of its kind attracting 218 boats this year and if you ever have the chance to do the ARC, I can whole-heartedly recommend it.  

One of the benefits of doing the ARC is that they provide a lot of information and advice on how to prepare your boat for this crossing.  In addition they run a series of seminars in the week leading up to the start on topics such as power management, first aid, weather routing, emergency management, provisioning, etc.  These are first class seminars taught by people with numerous ocean crossings under their belt.   

The ARC team also force you (through their rigorous safety checks) to take a cold, hard look at your boat and her readiness to do an ocean passage.  

A cold, hard look at your boat

As we looked at Walkabout II, here were the areas that we felt needed work:

Resource management – how are you going to power your boat’s systems without access to shore power for at least a fortnight?  How are you going to supply the essential of life, fresh water?   

This former a real challenge as our genset was having ‘issues’ and was out of service.  Also, being an older boat, we had a higher electrical draw than newer boats that benefited from more modern equipment.  Clearly we were going to need another way to generate electricity and a lot of it.

Safety – the level of safety planning required for an ocean crossing is entirely different than the level required for sailing from Sydney to Pittwater.  You need to plan to ‘save yourself’.  This forced us to look at a much broader spectrum of possibilities and to plan for them.  For example, how would we keep gear in place in the event of a knockdown; what would we do in the event of rudder failure, or if someone got seriously injured, etc.

Rig and sail handling – the amount of wear and tear on your rig, sails and sheets during an ocean crossing cannot be underestimated.  Even the smallest bit of chafe over days of constant use will wear holes in sails and saw through sheets, so we needed to look at our chafe protection.  

Another aspect of sail handling that we needed to consider was the likelihood that our passage would be almost all of our passage would be downwind in trade winds (15-30 knots from the same quarter).  Not only would this increase chafe, but it meant we had to pay particular attention to our downwind set-up.  Did we have the right sails?  Were our blocks and sheets up to it?  How would we shorten sail for squalls?  

Communications – We needed to receive weather forecasts, e-mails and GRIB files at sea and we needed to transmit e-mails and position reports?   With an SSB on board, we were part way there.  Now we needed to think about emergency communications and redundancy.  

Steering – Walkabout II has a Raymarine ST7000 autopilot which we used constantly throughout our travels in the Med and whilst it performs brilliantly,
in sloppy conditions it draws a lot of electricity.  With the genset out of action our options were to hand steer for two months (not without a gun to my head or a storm at my back) or I needed to find an alternative self-steering system.  

Making Walkabout II Ocean Ready

Due to the amount of work we did I’m only going to cover power management and safety in this article with the other items to be covered in a follow-up
article.  As I explain our upgrades and the reasoning, I may jump back and forth a bit; this is because certain upgrades met multiple goals, e.g. power management and safety or safety and communications.  

Power management

The first thing we did was monitor what each piece of equipment drew in terms of amps, both at rest and when working (the loads can be vastly different).  We identified the most power hungry items (autopilot, freezer compressor and pump, chart plotter and nav lights) and we worked on reducing and/or managing their power draw.  In some cases we ended up replacing equipment and in other cases we managed their use, see the table below:

Power Generation

Even with our power management steps, we needed to generate a significant amount of electricity to run our boat.  With our genset out of action and no time to get it repaired, here were the options we looked at:

Solar is clean and quiet, but once we did the calculations we realised that we would need a tremendous area to generate anywhere near the amount of power we needed.  Solar is fine for trickle loads to top up your batteries or as a supplement to other methods, but powering a boat with solar alone is the stuff you leave to universities.   

Towed arrays are quiet and they generate a lot of power, but they can create up to half a knot of drag and there is always the risk that you can lose this very expensive bit of kit trailing out behind your boat.   One of the most attractive alternatives we looked at was the DuoGen by Eclectic Energy.  This is a hybrid towed array/wind generator.  Unfortunately, it was out of our price range at approximately $6,000 AUS.  Several boats in the ARC used the DuoGen.  I spoke with two of them and both said that the unit met their entire electrical needs, which I thought was very impressive, although one did comment that his unit’s impeller broke down and had to be replaced.  

In the end we chose Eclectic Energy’s D400 wind generator.  It generates 200 watts at 20 knots or about 125 watts downwind at the same wind speed (allowing for apparent wind). It also had the benefits of being quiet, in anything less than 15 knots you can’t hear it at all, and within our price range.  

Our D400 performed very well during the first part of our trip, which was head to wind across the Med meeting almost our entire power needs. However, once we turned the corner at Gibraltar and headed down the African coast, the wind was abaft the beam and our ability to generate power dropped in line with our apparent wind.  So, instead of getting the rated output for 20 knots of true wind, we were getting the output for 12 knots of apparent wind.

So what is the solution?

I learned that energy self-sufficiency requires both a rigorous effort to reduce your energy use and a mix of methods to generate electricity.  You would be wise not to depend on one method alone.   Ideally, the mix should work well together, but they should also be selected to give you redundancy should one of the environmental inputs fail.  For example, you might have a couple of solar panels and a wind generator or towed array.  In most conditions they will work well together, but as they require different inputs they offer you a level of redundancy should the wind drop or cloud cover move in.   Given the opportunity to do this over again I would have gone with a solar panel and a DuoGen, which would have given me solar, wind and a towed array.

Water please!

The next challenge we had to overcome was fresh water.  A human being can survive for weeks without food, but without fresh water you will perish in a matter of days.  Whilst we had 1,000 litres of fresh water in two tanks or 9 litres per person per day on the planned passage, but should a tank leak or become contaminated, we would be in strife.  

We purchased a Spectra Ventura 200T with Z-Brane.  The Z-Brane is an electronic controller that makes maintaining the unit much easier than it would otherwise be.  Ralph did a superb job installing the watermaker and I have to say, it functioned without a hitch.  Anyone want a shower?

Self-steering

My autopilot works brilliantly, but with my genset down I couldn’t afford the power draw especially across two oceans, so I needed an alternative self-steering method that wasn’t going to add to our electrical footprint. To this end I purchased a wind vane steering system.  

There are two types of wind vane steering systems: direct and auxiliary rudder systems.  The direct systems are quite powerful as they have lines that go directly to your steering wheel or steering quadrant.  The other alternative is an auxiliary rudder system.  This system has its own rudder and it steers the boat independently with your boat’s rudder fixed in position.  It isn’t as powerful and quick to correct as a direct system, but it’s less intrusive on a centre cockpit boat and the second rudder provides a back-up rudder should you lose your primary rudder.  It’s worth mentioning at this point that two yachts were abandoned during this year’s ARC–both due to rudder failure!  

After looking at both systems I opted for an auxiliary rudder system from Hydrovane.  It was a proven system and the customer support was first class.  No question was too hard.

The installation took one day start to finish.  At first it seemed a little fiddly to use, but once you got the hang of it, it did an excellent job of steering the boat.  The tricks are to ensure that your sail plan is well balanced and to lock your wheel with just enough rudder to counter any weather helm.  The Hydrovane will then take over.  It isn’t as accurate as my autopilot in terms of the course steered, but it’s a lot better than you would achieve hand steering, and with no power draw!    
Safety upgrades

Safety is something I take very seriously.  As I explained to my crew ‘I want to be safe and have fun, in that order’.   The ARC is very specific on what they require for boats to pass their safety inspection.  They provided me with a laundry list of items I would need, most of which I had. Problems arose, however, when I started to test our safety equipment; a lot of things didn’t work. For example, our life raft didn’t survive the re-certification testing, it literally fell apart.  Our first priority was a new life raft. There are a lot of good life rafts on the market.  I ended up purchasing a Winslow Ocean Rescue. It’s an excellent raft with great features, but what I really liked was that the vacuum sealed packing gives it a three year span between re-certifications. Re-certification testing actually decreases the life span of a raft.  By increasing the time frame between re-certification from 2 to 3 years I would not only increase the life of the raft (all things being equal), but I’d save about $3,000 to $4,000 on testing over the life of the raft.  

With the new raft in place we could now focus on the next priorities, which included affixing floor board with locks in case we suffer a knockdown.  I found a smart method of fixing floor boards in place using a lever style lock that is affixed to the bottom of the floor board with a key that goes through the board and allows you to lock or unlock it.  This would allow us to store things below our floor boards with no fear of them flying around the cabin in a knockdown.  Peta Broadbent did a superb job installing the locks, two per floorboard, over a two day period.  

The next safety upgrade was to put in a cockpit mounted bilge pump (an ARC requirement).

Whilst Walkabout II has two automatic and one manual bilge pump, the manual pump was mounted next to the nav station, so we needed a new one in the cockpit.  Sounds easy, right?  Wrong!  This was one of the most difficult jobs as just about every mounting spot intruded on the interior or on cockpit seating.  In the end we found a low profile Plastimo 1038 bilge pump that has an integral handle built-in that would do the job.  The installation was a bit tricky due to the placement, but one of our crew members, Martin Hill, owned a carpentry business and he gave us a professional installation.

Other safety upgrades were the addition of new life lines and tethers (ours didn’t meet the CE standards that the ARC requires).  Lifelines and tethers seem like fairly generic items, but I came across a smart system from Wichard that includes a reflective strip that runs down the middle of the life line making it easy to see the life line even in soft moon light and they use ‘glow in the dark’ plastic on their tethers.  Funny isn’t it, how a small change like a reflective strip or day glow plastic can take a commodity item and make it a lot more useful.  

The ARC requirements forced us to look at things like use by dates on flares and fire extinguishers.  Things that you’d be tempted to let slide on the basis that they’re probably still usable, but the peace of mind of knowing that your fire extinguishers are fully charged and that you have the decent number of up-to-date flares is worth it.  We now have enough flares to fight a small war or light up a good portion of the Atlantic.  

I also had to add considerably to my ditch bag, adding things like a hand-water maker and GPS handheld. A lot of this is common-sense, but how many of you currently have a complete ditch bag?

Another area we looked at (and this crosses into sail handling) was how to prevent accidental gybes.  Running downwind for 17 days in 20-30 knot trade winds presents a lot of potential for gybes and for the safety of the crew and the integrity of the rig, we needed to prevent accidental gybes.  To that end we purchased a Hutton boom brake and we used it in conjunction with a preventer line rigged to the end of the boom.  Neither item will totally prevent a gybe, but together they slowed down the gybing process to a point where we could take corrective action.  I would like to say that we had no accidental gybes, but we did.  Luckily, through these steps no one was seriously hurt and nothing got broken.

The last big safety item was a Simrad A150 AIS system.  AIS systems use GPS and VHF to communicate your position, speed and track to other vessels and their system does the same.  Your AIS then displays their information, including vessel name and MMSI and tells you the closest point of approach.  You can then use this information to hail the vessel via a direct DSC VHF call to ask them their intentions, or to take evasive action.  The beauty of this system is that it makes you visible to shipping that might otherwise overlook you as a mere blip on their radar.  AIS allows you to call them directly even when you can’t make out the name on the ship’s side.  The number of ships that don’t respond to calls is alarming.  Prior to using AIS we used to joke that the only way to get them to respond was to pretend you were a NATO warship: ‘Big bloody freighter, big bloody freighter, this is NATO warship Walkabout II, Walkabout II, you have 30 seconds to respond!’.   Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?  Anyway, the good thing about the AIS system is that it allows you to place a direct call to the vessel in question via your DSC VHF, just like a telephone call, so your chances of getting a response go way up.       

Another important upgrade was in  our communications systems.  We bought a new Raymarine fixed VHF to replace our ailing Sailor VHF and hooked the new system up to our GPS so we’d have DSC capabilities.  We then did the same to our existing ICOM M-82 SSB Radio.  Now both our short range and middle/long range radios were DSC equipped.

The last thing we did was reactivate my Sailmail account.  This would allow me to send and receive e-mails, weather forecasts and GRIB files from anywhere via my SSB.  I had used this system extensively in the Med as a cheap way of keeping in touch.  There will be a more detailed discussion of communications options in my follow-on article, ranging SSB to Sat Phone, to Iridium to Mailasail.  Each one offers different advantages and cost structures.

As you can see getting Walkabout II ready to cross an ocean was no small undertaking.  The requirements of a coastal cruiser are dramatically different from a blue water cruiser.  I hope that this discussion raises your awareness of the issues (and costs) involved and provides you with a starting point for planning your own upgrades.