Going to Weather

Thoughts on sailing hard on the wind

Sailing hard on the wind from Two Fish on Vimeo.

Monohull sailors will often preachingly ask us “how we sail to windward.”  On our last sail of the season, the answer would be “just fine”.  While beating up the south coast we passed a monohull that had no sails up, motoring into the wind and seas.  We were tacking back and forth but eventually caught up to the motoring mono.  How does she sail to windward?

The reality of cruising is that all cruisers spend hours reading GRIB weather files and spend days hiding in harbors to avoid sailing to weather.  We are no exception to this rule and will use our engines to make a tide or to enter a harbor before sunset.

A few ideas for sailing upwind:

1) Set up your sails for power or speed according to the wind speed and sea state.  In the video, we are in power mode as the seas were on our nose; we wanted power to accelerate after hitting a wave.   We positioned the jib fairlead one slot forward and the main halyard a bit looser.   The draft on both sails was near 50%  (measure from clew to tack).  We had the main and genoa twisting at about 35% between the clew and the head.

2) Your instruments can help you determine how much to point for distance, or foot for speed.  Our chartplotter draws a line coming from the boat showing our course made good. As I pointed the boat lower, the leeway was reduced and our course made good pointed higher.  Wow, now that is backwards but it worked.  Point lower and achieve higher!

Hydrogenerator by Watt&Sea

In 2016 we will sail about 12,500 nautical miles, comprised mostly of 4 to 21 day legs. I have discussed in past posts that this type of sailing requires that we run the generator every day.   This is typical on cruising boats that run fridge/freezer/RADAR/Auto pilot/chartplotter and more but I was hoping for less generator time and dependency. We decided to experiment with some new technology and buy a hydrogenerator that produces electricity when the boat is moving.  The hydrogenerator has an underwater propeler that is spun by the movement of the boat through the water.  This creates three phase power that is sent to a charge controller.  The charge controller then sends the proper 14 volt power to the batteries if they need a charge.   In the video you can see the hydrogen moving back and forth like a rudder.  Besides dropping the Hydro-gen in the water there are no other tasks for the crew of Two Fish.

The hydro-gen can use one of three propellers with different diameters (small, medium and large).  The larger propeller allows power to be generated at slow speeds; the cost is that at higher speeds the propeller ceases to produce power because of cavitation. Our unit came with the medium propeller, but its production matched the marketing material for the small propeller.  Artistic license?  Poor water flow because of our positioning? Either way the dealer has decided to install the large propeller. We will test this when we come back to the boat in the fall.