wind sensor working… now time for a sail

Well it's working now! The wind sensor that is. And I'm very pleased with it.

There was one difficulty, and that was threading the wire down the inside of the mast. My idea was to attach a screw to some whipping twine and drop that, then attach the cable and pull it through.

Helen was at the bottom of the mast trying to hear how far down the mast it got. It never got to the bottom, that's for sure. 

So then I tried taping a screw on the wire itself and dropping that. With a lot of jiggling it ended up at the bottom of the mast and then I could solder the connections and route the wire though to the display.
Then we needed to calibrate the sensor. So this time Helen went up the mast and I touched the relevant wires together and hey presto… we had a working wind sensor.

This final step we did before going out for a sail.

The winds were light -- 9-12 knots but enabled us to get very close to across the bay and back. A really enjoyable sail.

When we got to the turning point, we hove-to for lunch (hence the tiller tied to starboard).


Elisabeth came with us, and enjoyed the sail too.

With slightly stronger winds maybe we can get past Cape Pyla in a morning. We'll have to see how having a wind sensor improves our sailing.

I realised that just having that sensor helped my confidence. Although I've had Liza for just over a year now, the way a twin keel boat sails is really quite different and some things I am still getting used to.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What no wind again?

Image
 So time to chill out after a lot of work… in other words time for a sail. 09:30 we put the new straps on the bimini (yes, this works really well now) and motored out of the marina and put up the sails. Wow… we're sailing along at 0.9 knots… then 1.1 knots… trim the sails and we're speeding along at maybe 2.1 knots. And it looks like it's race day for the local sailing club. A dozen boats on the water all trying to get the speed they need to beat the others. And then the wind dies. Well… it does where we are, about a mile or two out from the shore. Along the shore they are still trying to race and going nowhere.  So what to do when you're going nowhere? Get out the paddles for the dinghy and paddle! And it's the first of December… …and it's hot enough to be in a shirt and no sweater! Even me!
Read more

Wind…

Image
Wind at last… we (Sheila, Katie, Elizabeth and me) went out for a brief sail yesterday and there was wind. Sheila remarked how different the helm felt with wind. The Kingfisher has a relatively large rudder so even very small movements make a significant difference to the direction. About 5 nautical miles sailed. Not far but good to be out on the water. And still relatively warm. What was surprising to us was that since it was glorious sailing weather and the previous weekend almost no wind at all… there were almost no sailing boats out sailing (I counted 3 others, and none when we started.)
Read more

Potamos and trying out a new navigation App

Image
The weather looked good for a long day sail over to Potamos and back. It's about 30 nautical miles which in a small boat is a good day sail. I checked the weather on Predictwind.com and Windfinder. The two most dissimilar forecasts came from Predictwind, but both looked reasonable.  There was supposed to be a lull as the wind changed direction but other than that would be great sailing across the bay and back. I've been using iSailor for my navigation app and they have changed to a subscription model so I thought I would check out other apps if I am going to have to pay a subscription. Don't get me wrong iSailor is good and I have used it for a number of years, but there are quirks to using it which I found frustrating. The charts are digital but display a lot of detail at all scales and so look cluttered and hard to read at times. I'd used Navionics charts on chart plotters so thought I would try their app. It was a lot cleaner in interface and had no learning curve. I...
Read more