Trip to San Diego, What Worked Well and What Didn't Part 1

Overall the boat and crew did great!  Much better than I could have hoped for.  Fortunately the "What Didn't" is a fairly short list, so I will start with that. 

Manna's Happy Crew; Doug, Julie, Curtis... Notice Annie was not permitted shore leave!







Which part could it be... that is another post to come


First off our aft head (AKA Toilet near the back) stopped pumping or emptying the bowel very well.  Not too drastic as we still had the forward head.

I tried replacing 1228CW underway, but it did not work.  Took out C253 and it was definitely bad, but did not have a spare.








Next up was the jam cleats at the forward end of the boom...well jammed.  Not in a good way as the name implies they are supposed to do.  They are supposed to jam the reefing line as you reef the main sail (bring the sail down to make it smaller in stronger winds).  Something you want to work well when the wind kicks up!  Our reef lines are led back to the cockpit and have clutches in the cockpit that also lock the line, so we do not really need the boom end jam cleats.  The problem was when we were trying to raise the sail and all four of the boom jam cleats locked up.  The whole block of jam cleats was jammed!  We did finally get it unstuck and moved on.  One more item to add to the list of things to do.



Is that the right direction?

The one true annoyance throughout the trip was Annie.  Our temperamental and often bored autopilot.  Julie will have to write a post on how she came up with Annie's name.  Annie loved playing games with whoever was on watch.  She would quietly just stop steering the boat.  If you did not happen to be staring at the instruments at night or paying close attention to the wave patterns during the day (remember no horizon of land to watch!) you found your self drifting off in some other direction.  Once for me (Curtis) and once for our crew Doug, we found the boat happily motoring 180 degrees off course (opposite direction) in light winds. 

Annie thought it was hilarious.




Annie!  Julie's turn to get us back on course...





Annie's Brain... tore it open trying to diagnose, but no luck

I checked the NMEA 2K connections around the autopilot computer, rebooted everything a couple of times.  Checked all the settings I could imagine in the B&G Zeus3 chart plotter/autopilot controller.

No setting fixed the issue, but I did find an alarm that would instantly tell you if Annie was acting up again.  It took some of the fun away from Annie, but it did not deter her from stopping to steer at very random intervals.  Sometimes 3 times in 5 minutes and other times never in 3 hours (length of night watch).




We did have our Racor fuel filter clog up from all the churning of fuel in our tank during the rougher seas.  No problem, although it was 2:00 AM when we had the problem occur.  We fortunately had just found a problem with the old fuel filter system and installed a new dual filter system just a couple weeks before departure.  Having the new system made changing filters in mid passage quite easy.

Everything else such as adjusting line leads for ease of handling and minimizing chaffing, lashing loose lines, storing gear that was not stored well enough, and finding gear we stored too well just made the trip more interesting!