After a season in St Maarten working on and off and doing odd jobs onboard Spirit we finally managed to head out to sea and make our way slowly back to Australia. First stop was in St Barth's where we headed ashore and had a nice big burger and piña colada to celebrate out departure. Johnny a great friend from back home and Ez also a close friend were to join us for the trip home. Johnny first at the start of May in St Maarten then Ez on the 14th of May in Antigua. So it was Johnny and I that left to start sailing Spirit on her first passage after arriving in St Maarten in December. We had just spent the last few days fitting the Katadyn 160E water maker the Weaco 80lt fridge/freezer and the new gas stove, along with many other smaller items and jobs on the to do list. We also lifted Spirits mast by using the spinnaker boom on the yacht I was running for the season. It was the relief captains idea and worked a treat saving some much needed cash and allowing us to sleep well knowing that all was ok at the mast rotation joint. On the day before our departure we did a massive provisioning outing with $1,500 worth of food being stuffed into every little nook and cranny within Spirits tiny main hull. Somehow we managed to hide it all away but in the meantime we reduced our waterline to zero and probably added about 500kgs to the boats displacement. We have to keep this in mind when sailing now as it adds to the stresses on the boats structure along with sails and rigging. She was built as a super light weight racer and she's now in full cruise mode ready for the delivery back to Australia and onto Thailand should things all pan out.
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In this update I thought I would share some of the ways we get our info onboard, like weather and navigation.
When we did the refit we decided to try and make the boat simple and easy to work. This applies to all the modifications we have done or plan to. With the electronics we run a 16nm radar (Furuno) and have a iPad for navigation. We also carry paper charts of all local areas we plan to visit or may have to in case of emergency. There are four independent GPS's onboard with the iPad and iPhone having internal GPS's that work very well. We run the iPhone 4 and 64GB iPad with 3G as these have the GPS function. On both of them we also run the two main chart apps iNavX and also Navionics. I have to say I prefer the Navionics user interface more than the iNavX but iNavX has better functionality and allows me to overlay the AIS we receive via the Standard Horizon VHF we have installed. They hang a little sometimes just for a few seconds but it annoys me as you need instant information sometimes entering unknown areas. I use mine for transits a lot and verifying where we are not ever relying fully on it. Other cool features are the anchor alarm and also the google overlays you can do as below. We also run the boats NMEA data to a wi-fi router from Digi wireless serial server that works great. Once you connect the iPad to the network, which is all very easy to set up you get all your AIS information from the Standard VHF displayed on the screen. We in turn keep the iPad in a waterproof case from aqua pac in the cockpit and she's there on the ready when we need her. It worked great on the way down as we had a ship on the port side disappear as we were entering a squall but the iPad allowed us to monitor him all the way through it. Our plan was to head down here and work for the winter season onboard Super Yachts doing Daywork and also finishing off our jobs list onboard Spirit. So far it's been working out well. I have a position looking after a yacht I used to run and BJ has been able to find a good amount of Daywork to keep the fun tickets coming in. In-between we have managed a few days out on Spirit out and around St Maarten. |