Welcome back to our blog – not much sailing so far in 2020 thanks to various issues – including Skipper Nigel getting his knee fixed and of course that little thing called “lockdown”.
July and August has been catch up time on Gemini J with the hope that we can set sail again in September. We knew we had a small problem with our Autohelm which is the autopilot system that can steer the boat for us, but we hadn’t really had the opportunity to investigate fully. We managed to get out sailing in June/July a few times and do some testing.
We narrowed the problem down to our fluxgate compass – which is not the compass that we look at everyday on the console, it is located out of sight and away from any other objects that could interfere with it’s flux system. Now, I didn’t even know that a fluxgate compass was the name of the one that links to the autohelm system – so that was a new word for me. It works on a flux system that has coils of wire which use electricity to make the signal stronger (I learnt that too, it’s a bit more complicated but that’s about the limit of my ability to explain, thankfully Skipper understands it much better than me). It seems that one of the coils wasn’t working on ours, since we could use the autohelm on some compass headings but not all of them. We were missing around 245 to 0 degrees.
Back home to the internet – a few searches later and a replacement fluxgate was ordered. We had to wait a while for it to arrive from the UK but this weekend it was here – waiting at the marina when we arrived.
Friday morning we were up early and emptied the portside locker which is where we believed the fluxgate to be…..this was no small job and it was really, really hot too. That is the locker where we keep all our fuel, spare ropes/lines, cleaning products, table, entry hatch, spare anchor, spare tiller …….the list goes on, as you can imagine it’s quite a big locker! The next step was for Skipper Nigel to get inside and remove the fluxgate…..
Not the easiest of jobs – which was made a little more difficult by the fact that it wasn’t actually where we thought it was ….. and there began the search.
We knew it should be somewhere near-ish to the centre line of the boat, and located away from other electronics etc. So we had to start looking elsewhere, we emptied the locker on the starboard side, not there. We went down below, we took up all the floorboards, nowhere to be found there. We emptied the aft cabin, and that took some doing, not there either.
We had the boat to pieces, we took apart the bed in the forecabin, even though we knew it should be nearer to the aft of the boat. We searched all the lockers under the seats, we even looked in the engine compartment, again, we knew it shouldn’t be there either. All the time we were getting hotter and hotter! It was probably the hottest I have ever felt on the boat, but all the time we became more determined to find that flux!!! We searched forums on the internet, we searched google.
Finally – Skipper Nigel searched the coffee/tea, cups and plates cupboard and there it was ! Plain as day, not easy to see without crouching down but still, the easiest place of all the places we had searched!!!!!
Ridiculous really, but finally we were just so relieved to have found it – and that it was easy to switch over we changed it there and then!
The only thing left to do was put everything back in it’s place and of course test the new one.
We managed to get out the next day – but conditions were not in favour of using autohelm, they were in favour of sailing – so with 20 knot winds we sailed away……the testing of the new fluxgate can wait for another day.
The Adventures of Gemini J 