Sada

Highlights – the overview

We leave Ferrol and Manoliño comes to say goodbye! He crosses our stern a couple of times. It’s a lovely day for sailing!

The results of today… 🙂

The weather is warmer and since we are at anchor, we take the opportunity to clean the bottom of the boat. Wim takes the new underwater electric scrubber and Sher has a plastic putty knife and scrapes off most of the weeds… between both, the bottom looks much better, but there’s still more to do.

Suddenly the wind picks up from the South-West. Oops, it picks up a lot! We see 30 knots. Wow… Then: anchor alarm! We’re dragging. We watch the movement for a minute or 2 to see if the anchor digs in again but no… We get closer and closer to the beach. We start the engine and while Sher steers Dione IV into the wind, Wim hoists the anchor. Shitty, the line from the little yellow anchor ball is all tangled around the chain. No time to untangle that, the wind blows and the waves get higher and higher. He gets our new ceramic knife and cuts the line loose. Anchor up. There’s a lot of soft clay on the anchor. That’s why we were dragging: the bottom is very soft. Yes, it is an estuary and we are close to the river so, there’s a lot of sediment: mud. So, this isn’t a suitable anchorage with this wind, blowing us to the shore… We decide to go back to Sada, the nearest port, 5 sea miles.

The wind keeps blowing 25-30 knots and it’s right at our bow. The waves are steep and high. We throttle up Mighty Mitsu to 1500 revs and we do only 3 knots against this all. Big sprays of water hit the windows of the pilot house and we get into our clothes and sailing jackets quickly. Wow, Wim thinks: half an hour I was lying naked in the sun with no wind at all and now we’re battling against a stormy sea against strong wind!

The Captain’s Log [T+308, 309… 319] – the complete story

OpenCPN Navigation Software

April 21.

We leave Ferrol and head to Marina A Coruña to pick up a package from Amazon that was delayed. We see some big traffic when we leave the Ria de Ferrol.

Manoliño comes to say goodbye! He crosses our stern a couple of times.

We get a gentle 8-10 knots breeze from the North-West so we set full sails on the Southern course to A Coruña.

After picking up the package at the fuel dock we set sail to Sada. Up to the cape Punta Corval it’s a close haul against the wind but it’s great sailing. When we turn around the cape we ease the sheets.

April 22-23.

In Sada, we have an appointment at the Seldén dealer. We want to have a second whisker pole for our fore sails. We have a big 5m pole for the Yankee but we’d like to have one for the jib, too. That one is shorter (4m) and less heavy. Here in Sada the rigger is going to have a look at the requirements and measurements and make a quotation.

April 25.

For about 15 years, Wim has been using “Yachtcontrol” navigation software on Dione IV. Yachtcontrol navigation was the only software that ran on a PC that time. Running the navigation on a PC has some advantages over the existing plotter systems: a PC and screens are hardware that is easily and cheap available everywhere and we can have a many backup copies as we like: on the board computer and on our laptops and tablets.

Yachtcontrol is a Windows application. We have been growing up with Windows (since the 80’s) but we see more and more restrictions. Registrations (and fees), forced updates, eating a lot of computing power (and energy), etcetera. In the past years, Wim has gradually been switching to Linux. Ubuntu. A much more compact operating system. Open source, entirely written in C++ (machine language). It’s small, fast and rock stable.

For yacht navigation in Ubuntu there’s OpenCPN. We both have been working with OpenCPN in the past but Yachtcontrol was better, for our demand. At this time, we re-investigate: OpenCPN has a large community of users and because it’s open source, every programmer can add functionality. It has been growing rapidly over the years. So, now we install Ubuntu and the latest version of OpenCPN and we compare it to Yachtcontrol. It is quite a challenge… It takes us a number of days and a number of questions on the OpenCPN forums to get everything working. But gradually we discover it outpaces Yachtcontrol! We see a number of advantages!

The results of today… 🙂

April 26.

But we see a group of smaller dolphins passing by. They jump for joy!

April 27.

Around 1300h, we read in the Viveiro-WhatsApp group that there is a massive power outage in Spain and Portugal. The entire Iberian peninsula and a part of France is without electricity. While all Spain and Portugal panics, we don’t have a problem: we have our own energy. Plenty of it.

In the evening, the internet connection is gone. Backup diesel generators at the cell masts are meant to run for 8 hours and these 8 hours have past now… The villages on the hills around us are totally dark. Our anchor light is the only light in the area.

Later that night, at around 2 o’clock, when we wake up to have a glass of water, we see the lights on the shore again. Power has been restored.

April 28.

Wim gets into his wetsuit and does some hull cleaning with the electric scrubber. We’ve seen a quite sudden and rapid growth of thin green weed just below the waterline. Perhaps our location has something to do with that: brakish, relatively warm water here, near the river. We got a new brush from the manufacturer in Taiwan to try out. This brush is more course then the ones we had and it seems to be working a little bit better. Still, it’s a big job to brush 2x12m on a width of about 30cm underwater. He scrubs an hour, then the scrubber’s battery is empty. Time for a shower on the fore deck and a sun bath.

April 29.

A warm day (28°C). We get into our wetsuits and do a cleaning job on the hull. The seawater is 17°C and that is too cool to stay in the water a couple of hours without wetsuit.

Today, Sher takes a plastic putty knife and scratches most of the weed off. Wim has a round pad of Scotch Brite on the electric scrubber and polishes the last bits of weed off. At the same time, the Scotch Brite opens up the copper particles in the Coppercoat and exposes the copper to seawater. That should prevent the growth better.

After 2 hours of swimming and scrubbing, Dione IV is pretty clean and smooth. We have a shower on the fore deck and Wim has a siesta in the sun. After that, he continues with the OpenCPN software. There’s an answer from a guy at the Cruisers forum about the implementation of the radar and Wim tries some new settings. Yay! It works like a charm!

Suddenly the wind picks up from the South-West. Oops, it picks up a lot! We see 30 knots. Wow… Then: anchor alarm! We’re dragging. We watch the movement for a minute or 2 to see if the anchor digs in again but no… We get closer and closer to the beach. We start the engine and while Sher steers Dione IV into the wind, Wim hoists the anchor. Shitty, the line from the little yellow anchor ball is all tangled around the chain. No time to untangle that, the wind blows and the waves get higher and higher. He gets our new ceramic knife and cuts the line loose. Anchor up. There’s a lot of soft clay on the anchor. That’s why we were dragging: the bottom is very soft. Yes, it is an estuary and we are close to the river so, there’s a lot of sediment: mud. So, this isn’t a suitable anchorage with this wind, blowing us to the shore… We decide to go back to Sada, the nearest port, 5 sea miles.

The wind keeps blowing 25-30 knots and it’s right at our bow. The waves are steep and high. We throttle up Mighty Mitsu to 1500 revs and we do only 3 knots against this all. Big sprays of water hit the windows of the pilot house and we get into our clothes and sailing jackets quickly. Wow, Wim thinks: half an hour I was lying naked in the sun with no wind at all and now we’re battling against a stormy sea against strong wind!

Well when we come closer to Sada, the wind and waves decrease. And the wind shifts a little so that we can set some sail. We unfurl the jib and get a 5-6 knots speed.

April 30 – May 1.

We enjoy Sada. The weather is rather changeable: sometimes sun, sometimes small rain showers. We keep working on our navigation software. Yes, OpenCPN is definitely better than Yachtcontrol and although there some small glitches to be solved we decide to stick with OpenCPN. The support on the Cruisers forum is great. Any question receives a rapid answer and the guys who programmed the plug-ins are really involved and helpful. We’ve made a dual boot system on our board computer so we can switch back to Windows anytime and we’ll keep Yachtcontrol as a backup for the next year. Then, our subscription for Yachtcontrol ends and OpenCPN should have proven itself.

Concluding:

We had a number of demands for our navigation software:

• Have charts of excellent quality. The Navionics charts we used in Yachtcontrol are the best.
• Have all our instruments displayed on screen. In Yachtcontrol, we built a customized dashboard to have an overview of all important data we want to see in the blink of an eye. We would be happy to have that again, in new software.
• Integration (overlay) of our B&G 4G radar.

When Wim investigated OpenCPN a couple of years ago, the quality of the charts was lousy (although they were for free. The Navionics charts cost us hundreds of euro’s per year). Also, an instrument dashboard wasn’t possible and radar integration wasn’t possible. So, a no-go. But let’s see how they developed since then…

• The charts for OpenCPN supplied by O-Charts are really nice. Not as nice as Navionics but close. Not for free but at for a very reasonable price. You pay for a small area in which you sail: for the entire Northern and North-Western coast of Spain we paid 30 euro’s. It has 1 year free updates. When we get to Portugal we have to buy the Portugese coast, 19 euro’s. And so on, till New Zealand 😂
• A customizable dashboard is available as a plug-in. Programmed by a couple of enthusiasts. Yes, we can make a customized view of all data we like to see in a glance during sailing:
  • Wind speed and direction
  • The coordinates of our current position
  • Compass
  • The time in UTC
  • The local time
  • The rudder angle
  • The depth
  • The course over ground (COG)
  • The speed through the water (STW)
  • The speed over ground (SOG)
  • The heading (magnetic course)
  • The seawater temperature (to determine if we have to wear our wetsuit to cut off a fishing net in the prop. Instead of having to climb down and feel the water temperature with one toe 😂)
  • The coordinates of the cursor (put the cursor at a ship and call: ship at position: xxx xxx xxx xx xx
  • The engine’s revs
  • The engine’s coolant temperature (these are particularly important at our outside display at the steering pedestal since we have the engine’s own dashboard inside, in the pilot house).
• Another group of enthusiasts programmed a radar plugin. After some trouble to get that working it appeared really great! As if we have a new radar! It even has MARPA (tracking radar objects), awesome! This is really a big improvement. There’s a huge amount of settings and new possibilies.
• On top of this, we have some other improvements:
  • Zooming on the chart on the outside touch screen is now with 2 fingers, like on your phone. Very handy! Yachtcontrol couldn’t that, we had to press zoom buttons all the time.
  • Our inside and outside screens have different resolutions. With Windows (mirror screen), the screen with the highest res (inside) had black bars aside. Now, with Ubuntu, both screens are 100%.
  • And, all software is open source, non-commercial and free of charge. This is not our main concern because for our safety, money doesn’t play a role. But is’s nice. Anyway, we’ll make a nice donation to the developers of Ubuntu and OpenCPN and the plugin programmers!

May 2.

Today, there’s no rain in the forecast until late afternoon so we decide to sail to the City Marina of A Coruña to see some of the city and it’s surroundings.

We’ll stay here a few days. Our friends on the “Bird Song” are here, too.