PRE-DEPARTURE PLANNING & PREPARATION

THE ROUTE TO THE CARIBBEAN: I intend to sail Lord’s Prayer south from Cambridge, MD on or shortly after Monday, December 01, 2008. Departure timing will depend upon wind and weather conditions in the Chesapeake at the time. I will be sailing the boat single-handed for the duration of the voyage to the Eastern Caribbean, where I expect to later be joined by my wife, Chris on the 9^th of January… and where we will join up with other family members at later dates.

A brief stop on the way to the Caribbean before sailing into the Atlantic is probable near the mouth of the Chesapeake to await a suitable weather window. Once offshore, I expect to sail out past Bermuda (passing about 100 nm SW of Bermuda) and once in the Tradewinds I’ll turn to a southerly heading for the Leeward Islands. My intended initial destination there is English Harbour at the island of Antigua. My approximate route for the offshore portion of the trip is described by the following Positions of Intended Movement (PIM):

A chart of the PIM is shown in the following image:

I have chosen this route as the optimum likely path, given historic winds and currents in this part of the Atlantic during the month of December. The information to determine the route comes from Pilot Charts of the Atlantic; it was optimized using Visual Passage Planner 2 software and I have made an additional minor adjustment in the route to suit my operational preference of having a little extra windward position as I approach landfall at the end of the voyage; the result of this adjustment is that the leg between PIM waypoints 4 & 5 is a bit east of the calculated optimum.

I don’t expect to follow this route exactly, since the wind is rarely right where one might like it to be. But I do intend to approximate the route by working my way back to it whenever it has been necessary to deviate as a result of contrary winds or weather.

PLANNING CALENDAR (TENTATIVE):

01 Dec – 05 Dec          Departure Window

06 Dec – 22 Dec          Enroute English Harbour, Antigua

23 Dec – 09 Jan           Leeward Islands

08 Jan                          Begin mail forwarding to Jodie & Geoff

09 Jan                          Chris arrive Sint Maarten

10 Jan – 30 Jan            Visit various Leeward Islands and perhaps Martinique & St Lucia

31 Jan – 07 Feb           Visit Turner families visiting St. Maarten

08 Feb – 25 Feb          Leeward Islands

26 Feb                         Enroute BVI

27 Feb – 15 Mar          BVI

09 Mar                         End mail forwarding / Begin holding

16 Mar – 22 Mar         USVI

18 Mar – 20 Mar         Bob & Dawn join boat at St Thomas???

23 Mar – 27 Mar         Spanish Virgin Islands (Culebra & Vieques) & perhaps PR

27 Mar                         Chris, Bob & Dawn fly out of San Juan, PR???

28 Mar                         Resume home mail delivery

28 Mar – 31 Mar         Enroute Turks & Caicos

01 Apr – 02 Apr          Turks & Caicos

03 Apr                         Mayaguana Island, Bahamas

04 Apr – 05 Apr          Crooked Island, Bahamas

06 Apr – 07 Apr          Long Island, Bahamas

08 Apr – 09 Apr          George Town, Bahamas

10 Apr                         Cat Island, Bahamas

11 Apr – 13 Apr          Eleuthera Island, Bahamas

12 Apr                         Easter

14 Apr                         Great Abaco Island, Bahamas

15 Apr – 16 Apr          Man-O-War Cay, Bahamas

17 Apr – 22 Apr          Enroute Morehead City, NC (U.S. Port of entry)

23 Apr                         Oriental, NC

24 Apr – 26 Apr          Pamlico and Albemarle Sounds

26 Apr                         Great Bridge, VA

27 Apr                         Chesapeake Bay

28 Apr                         Cambridge, MD

COMMUNICATIONS:

CELL PHONE: My cell phone (410 463-3235) will be useable for voice and Verizon Broadband Access in the Chesapeake at the beginning of the trip, in the Spanish Virgin Islands (Culebra & Vieques) & PR and it will be available again once I am back in the Continental United States. It may also be available for Voice in the US Virgin Islands, but that has yet to be determined. I do not expect to have cellular service in the BVI, Leeward Islands, or the Windward Islands

VHF RADIO: Lord’s Prayer is equipped with an installed VHF radio with masthead antenna capable of line-of-sight communications and a hand-held VHF radio that normally resides in the Abandon Ship Bag (Ditch bag) along with a hand-held GPS.

SSB RADIO: Lord’s Prayer is equipped with an installed Single Sideband (SSB) radio with backstay antenna capable of long range voice communications in the HF & MF band and a Pactor Modem that allows for computer controlled email via the SSB radio. This is a limited bandwidth system capable of sending and receiving plain text messages. It is this text system that will be used for all offshore communications and weather information as well as most of the communications while in the Caribbean and in the Bahamas. We will not be able to maintain our website at www.LordsPrayerLog.com via the SSB radio. However whenever we are able to access WiFi, the website will be brought up to date. We expect that these occasions may be somewhat sporadic.

POSITION REPORTS: We will report our position as we have done in the past within each log segment whenever the segments are transmitted. In addition, we will report our position on a regular basis to YOTREPS and Winlink.org. Persons with access to the Internet may go to the following links to see a graphic portrayal of our most recent position. There will be a satellite image showing our position on YOTREPS: http://www.pangolin.co.nz/yotreps/tracker.php?ident=KB3LHC. And there will be a map of our position on Winlink.org: http://www.winlink.org/dotnet/maps/PositionreportsDetail.aspx?callsign=KB3LHC.  These links utilize my HAM callsign, which is: KB3LHC. The first of these links appears to be quite a lot faster at coming up than the second.

EMERGENCY SEARCH AND RESCUE COMMUNICATIONS: Lord’s Prayer has a GPIRB aboard, which if activated broadcasts its identity and a GPS position over COSPAS-SARSAT (406 MHz) rescue frequency to orbiting satellites. The unit is registered with the FCC and the USCG along with contact information for certain key family members who will be able to confirm the boat’s approximate location and give search and rescue command centers a sense that the signal is not a false alarm – something that has been a problem with earlier Emergency Beacons. Activation of our unit would be expected to result in the initiation of a search and rescue effort.

WEATHERFAX: The weatherfax is something of an aging technology. The machine in the boat is slow and often the charts are barely readable. The reprogramming interface for the weatherfax is not user-friendly; the reprogramming effort usually takes me almost an entire day. But the weatherfax does serve as a backup source of weather information and we frequently receive NAVTEX information over it as well. The weatherfax operates on a timer that switches it on at times when a fax is due to be transmitted. And it turns the unit off when the scheduled time has expired; this helps conserve our battery power. In recent years, the GRIB charts that we receive over the SSB/Pactor Modem have proven to be more useful than the wind forecasts of the Weatherfax and these GRIB files can now be loaded into the navigation software so that the forecast wind barbs are presented right there on the electronic charts. As a consequence, I have dropped our previous routine of receiving the wind forecast charts over the weather fax in favor of receiving more NAVTEX announcements on the Weatherfax. We continue to receive the surface analysis charts on the weatherfax, however, as these show the locations of fronts and troughs… information that’s not available on the GRIB charts.

WEATHERFAX SCHEDULE:

RECENT BOAT MAINTENANCE, REPAIRS, & MODIFICATIONS: Actions completed over the past couple months have included the following:

STORM TRYSAIL: I installed hardware and a dedicated halyard for handling the storm trysail, which hoists on its own track on the mast located slightly to starboard of the mainsail track. Previously I would bend the trysail onto its track and bag it at the mast where I expected it would be handy to use. But the prospect of dropping the mainsail to shift the halyard over to the trysail and then rigging trysail sheets when the boat was leapfrogging wildly over the waves… well, that was just more challenging than what I felt like fooling around with. The new arrangement has the trysail lying idle alongside the mainsail and inside the North sail cover that is held up by lazy jacks. The clew of the trysail now sheets back to a point on the boom rather than to turning blocks on the rails… and sail trim is adjusted with the main sheet rather than individual trysail sheets. With the storm trysail rigged this way, I believe that I shall be able to hoist it alongside a double or triple reefed mainsail before actually dropping the main. This should keep the boat a bit steadier for the transition; I am hoping that I will find this set-up to be more useable than the rig I had previously. Actually I would really like it if I never have a need to use it... but that isn't likely!

ENGINE INSTRUMENT PANEL: I replaced the engine instrument panel, which is made of some kind of plastic type material; it was crumbling from exposure to the environment and the weather seal behind it was no longer functional, nor would it keep water from flooding into the boat if a wave filled the cockpit.

HATCH SEALS: I replaced the weather seals on the two cockpit seat hatches and on the cockpit hatch that covers the engine. The intent here is to hold the seawater out of the boat on those (hopefully) infrequent occasions when an ocean wave breaks into the cockpit and fills it up… The seals need to hold the water back at least until it drains out through the scuppers.

ENGINE COOLANT LEAKS: I pulled the coolant circulating pump (sometimes called the fresh water pump) off the engine to replace a seal, where a tiny leak had developed and I also replaced the drain cock in the engine block for the coolant, since it was also leaking.

ENGINE OIL LEAK: I traced an oil leak to the aft main bearing seal between the engine and the transmission. This one I am going to have to live with, as to fix it would require pulling the engine out of the boat and then some significant man-hours of work to fix the leak. The source of this leak has had me baffled for several years. It is not a big leak but constant; the engine loses about a quart of oil every 100 operating hours. I’ve put an aluminum pan and some Oilsorb pads underneath to catch the oil that escapes.

DIGITAL LCD TV: I installed a small replacement TV that is both digital and analog capable and will thus be able to pull in the digital-only signal that’s coming to the United States on Feb 17, 2009. In the process of this modification, I removed a small shelf that had held the old TV and I mounted the new TV on the bulkhead with an adjustable bracket that I obtained from an RV outlet. The bracket is quite robust and has a locking feature that is not available on similar brackets made for household use. One of the great improvements of the new flat LCD TV is that it draws about a tenth of the amperage of the old TV. That will translate into fewer gallons of diesel fuel burned by the engine to recharge battery banks.

SHORT HAULOUT: I had the boat lifted out of the water by Generation III Marina on Nov 17, 2008 to replace zincs. While it was hanging in the Travel Lift straps the yard gang pressure washed the slime off the bottom for me and we knocked off a few barnacles that had grown around the prop and on the ground plate. The Interlux Micron 66 bottom paint that I had put on in the spring looks to be in very good condition, so I may well get the 18 months I am expecting from the 3 coats I put on last spring. I discovered that there is just a bit of paint missing from the forward corner of the keel where I unintentionally rubbed it off by running the boat aground on a 4' spot in Penobscot’s Barred Islands last summer. The depth mark display, which was very small and obscured by a course line, had escaped my notice (a most unusual and embarrassing occurrence). Presumably the depth-mark size issue has been corrected in Nobeltec’s just-released Service Pack 2 fix for their VNS MAX PRO navigation software.

FUEL JUGS: I have purchased four new plastic 5-gallon diesel fuel jugs to add to my spare fuel for the trip south. This brings the fuel onboard to about 81 gallons, more than doubling the 35 gallons held in the main fuel tank. This quantity exceeds the fuel I had aboard in 2000 by about 10 gallons (when I made a similar trip to the Caribbean).

DINGHY: We discovered last summer that our inflatable Zodiac dinghy had sprung a water leak and so after we came home from Maine I took it to Maritime Solutions, an inflatable repair expert in Annapolis. It turned out that the glue that holds the dinghy together was degrading and the bottom of the boat was starting to separate from its inflatable tubes. The end result was that the bottom of the dinghy had to be removed, cleaned up and then re-glued back in place. The repair will give us several more years of use from our trusty little 8.5 foot dinghy, which is now 9 years old. It’s very first use was to take me ashore at the Island of Barbados back in 2000. How time flies!

LIFE RAFT: The life raft had its annual maintenance in the spring. In addition to its normal equipment, it contains a hand operated watermaker.