SPOT
23 April 2020 | St Marys, GA
Capn Andy | Cold Front, Windy
https://maps.findmespot.com/s/FWYV/50
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The above URL is my SPOT tracking page which hopefully will track my upcoming voyage.
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I finished adding the reef to the heavy jib sail by sewing on the reef point patches which are diamond shaped, 4 1/2 inches across and doubled with a smaller diamond underneath the larger. It is very difficult to sew these for they are located in the middle of the sail and there is a lot of cloth in every direction that has to be crammed in the throat of the sewing machine. The shortest distance to the edge of the sail is from the reef point to the foot of the sail. Even this amount of cloth forms a dense pack between the machine’s sewing needle and the machine. The photo is of the cloth jam while sewing a reef point patch.
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After sewing the patches a grommet was driven into the center of each patch. When the sail is reefed a short piece of line is rove through the grommet and used to tie up the unused sailcloth.
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The question was what pizza oven was I using and the answer is PizzaQue. A recent online article showed another brand of oven which cost 3 times as much as the PizzaQue, but when I searched for the current price of the PizzaQue, it is now twice what I paid.
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I’ve been reading Jack van Ommen’s blog for quite a while and he did lapse for several long periods while he was rebuilding his boat at Cape Charles on Chesapeake Bay. Now he is writing quite a bit and has sailed to Sint Maarten and Saint Barts to celebrate his 83rd birthday. He has left to sail on to Florida and is currently in the Old Bahama Channel just North of the Cuban coast. His website is cometoseaus where there is a link to his tracking device.
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The sail work just completed was done while the weather outside was pretty awful, high winds, tornado warnings, and heavy rain. Now the weather has cleared and it’s time to do some outside work. I hoisted the reefed jib on the inner forestay and was pleased at the way it fitted, smaller and heavier than the light air staysail. Of course, set unreefed on the headstay it is a large strongly built sail, good for reaching in strong winds.
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A fellow yardbird offered me a 4 Winds wind turbine. They are known as stout units, heavy, produce a lot of electricity, but I had my Air 403 project. I could not buy another wind turbine while I hadn’t followed through on the Air 403. Then Radio Bill announced he had purchased an Air X turbine on eBay. I decided to find out if my 403 was worth any more work. We had rainy and stormy weather forecast so I brought the whole unit, wind turbine, mast supports, but not the blades, over to the Breezeway where I cleared a table to begin troubleshooting the unit.
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I had already bench tested the turbine months ago before I brought it out to Kaimu at the mooring. It did not work out there and I abandoned the project at that time. There were many other things to work on, so I left it till now to pick the turbine back up again.
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I took the stator out of the nacelle and disconnected it from the rectifier bridge inside the unit. The stator and rotating magnet produced enough AC voltage to generate rectified DC. I removed the rectifier bridge from the nacelle. The rectifier is a block of aluminum that is insulated from the aluminum of the nacelle. It is mounted with 2 screws that pass through insulating columns. The block is split so that each half is insulated from the other. The 4 stator leads that attach to the block each connect to a diode on each half of the block, thus there are 8 diodes, 4 pairs, and each diode rectifies one polarity of a stator lead and each lead has 2 diodes to pass plus and minus polarities to the two halves of the rectifier block. I tested the diodes that each one blocked current in one direction and tested the whole rectifier block to ensure that there were no shorts or opens where there shouldn’t be any. I connected the stator leads to the rectifier block and tested the overall raw rectified DC voltage while spinning the stator shaft with a drill. The unit showed 32 VDC. Well, it looks like the basic DC generation is working.
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I reassembled the nacelle with the stator in place and the rectifier feeding large electrical brushes that transfered the DC to wiring inside of the mast. The other end of the wiring at the charge controller was disconnected. I wanted to see if the voltage continued to the controller. It did. Then I reconnected the controller and found there was no voltage at the test point.
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The charge controller has three circuits in it, a switch and relay, a monitor module, and the charge controller card. When I designed the controller I wanted the turbine to have its leads grounded by the switch which is how the turbine is put into survival mode in high winds, and also grounded by the relay when there was no call for charge current. It is safe to leave the turbine with its leads grounded and is a further safety factor in that if the turbine turns at all , it will turn slowly and thus not pose as much of a danger to slice and dice the crew.
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It looked like the no voltage I was seeing was the result of either the manual switch or the relay grounding the leads. I remember designing the circuit so that the relay, which has both normally open and normally closed outputs, be normally grounding the leads. With no battery hooked up to it, the controller would short the leads no matter what the manual switch was doing. I decided to change the circuit. The manual switch would switch the leads to ground or switch the turbine current to the center pole of the relay and the relay can charge the battery or ground the turbine depending on whether the battery needs charging or not.
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Also built into the controller is a meter that shows battery voltage and charge current. There is also an inline fuse and a blocking diode. There was the possibility of grounding the battery leads which would be disastrous, so the blocking diode would prevent reverse battery current. After changing the circuit I set it aside to begin preparations for Pizza Night.
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I had the idea of making meatball parm pies again. Also a couple of quiche recipes looked like they might work on a pizza. They did not include tomato sauce, one had olive oil, bacon, and swiss. The other had kale, mushroom, and cheddar cheese. I would make those two pies and two meatball parm pies. But I went further with the idea that I would be making only two pies with tomato sauce and I usually use the leftover sauce to make pasta during the week, so why not just make a good pasta sauce with chopped beef, onion, garlic, tomato puree, and mushrooms. Then I wouldn’t feel compelled to use excessive sauce on the pies and the sauce I had left over would be perfect for pasta later.
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And so I did make the sauce and the two non-tomato pizzas. The two meatball parm pizzas were topped with a thick sauce and I baked them a bit more to get that crust crunchy. Fabio made a pie with anchovies and black olives, and focaccia bread with onion.
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The next day I tested the wind turbine again and it worked properly. Unfortunately I could not find the machine screws to reassemble the stator to the nacelle nor the screws that hold the mast supports to the deck.
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We had scheduled a delivery of a Gulfstar 44 from Ft. Lauderdale to here, St. Marys. The date was looming up. We can’t be sailing around in South Florida with this corona virus thing, can we? The owner says yes, the trip is on. We will fly from Jacksonville, a hotspot, to Ft Lauderdale, an even worse hotspot. I began gathering my devices, charging VHF batteries, checking the SPOT device. I even planned a route and checked Passage Weather. SPOT has changed their shared map function, so my previously posted shared maps showing my progress at sea are no longer available. The new map address will be posted here when I can get it to work. What a pain. It worked so well before, why change it.
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I picked up the necessary screws to finish reassembling the wind turbine and mount it on deck. Although we have a forecast of high winds, Kaimu is in a sheltered area of the yard and there is not enough wind to get the turbine going. If the wind direction changes, we might actually see some charge current.
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The photo is of one of the pizza pies made with bacon, garlic, and swiss, with no tomato sauce.