The Curse or Not?

So the charity daysail itself went off without a hitch yesterday;
light rain and dark, threatening clouds gave way to clear skies and
sunshine, our guests arrived on time, the engine worked, the sails
raised, and we enjoyed a warm and fairly gentle sail down into Elliot
Bay past cruise ships and racing sailboats for a nicely framed
portrait of the downtown Seattle skyline. Our guests, three of them
from Arizona and one from Federal Way, seemed to enjoy the trip and
the perspective, despite some pretty bumpy moments. Winds were brisk;
we changed down to the #1 jib before we left the dock and raised the
main with the first reef already tied in it in order to keep the ride
as sedate as possible... with three non-sailors and a five-year old
along, we think those were probably wise decisions.

We got them back to Shilshole right at the planned time of 1400 and
elected to head north immediately for Hadlock. Winds, of course, were
from the north, and were blowing fairly briskly north of West Point...
10-15 knots, which can turn into 20 when you add five knots or so of
boat speed to them. They'd been going since early morning, so there
was a good bit of chop built up as well, 1-2 feet of whitecaps
blanketing the Sound. The current was against us but only slightly,
and we didn't really have a time limit so I thought we might as well
just crack on and we would get there when we got there. We've made
the trip at night before and the wind was not supposed to drop until
late, so it seemed we may as well take advantage of it.

It turned into a pretty long day. With the chop, which increased to 3 foot and more north of Kingston, you can't really do a lot other than
sail or sit there. There's only one person at the wheel at a time, so
the other one is mostly sitting there.

Mandy did well with the rough stuff until her first turn at the wheel
ended, after which she got a little queasy. I was able to hug the
shore just south of Point No Point however to put us into a slight
counter-current for better speed and less choppy conditions, which
allowed her to recover without actually getting to the point of
spewing.

It was around this time, out of boredom, that I tried to fire up the
radar and discovered I was back to the old "No Data" problem again
that I thought I had fixed a couple months ago by repairing a shoddy
connector. Making matters more complicated, from time to time the
radome would report in and show as available to the display, which
allowed me to run built-in diagnostics (all of which reported that it
was in fine shape, thank you very much), but as soon as I would switch
it into scan mode, it would almost immediately fail. Once I got about
half a sweep out of it, but that was it before the "No Data" message
came back.

This didn't bode well with darkness falling, and it was too rough to
troubleshoot much beyond resetting the system and checking connections
(neither of which worked) so we pulled the sail down just off Double
Bluff and motored straight north the rest of the way across Oak Bay
and through the canal to the mooring ball at Hadlock. It was only
about an hour run, but it was safer than trying to sail it sans radar
(and since that was dead upwind, it would have taken more than an hour
under sail to get there).

Curiously, however, with the engine running, the radar came back to
life! That was my first clue as to the nature of the problem but I
still couldn't check on it at the time, I just gave thanks for the
pink returns painted on the plotter and plugged on. I also learned
that the radar is almost worthless in any sort of head's up mode if
your system compass is whacky... apparently, it orients itself to the
display based on your reported heading, and if that is off, so is the
picture. There is a magnetic anomaly north of Hansville that we have
run into before, and it rendered the autopilot compass useless, which
in turn affected the radar. Something to file away for future
reference if you happen to use an integrated Raymarine system like we
do.

A little poking this morning seems to indicate that it's a power
problem; the house battery bank showed a voltage level indicating a
nearly full discharge. That's bad news, since we didn't use nearly
that much power yesterday (or, I should say, I don't think we used
that much power yesterday... there may be a short or something in the
system I don't know about, or some item left on I wasn't aware of) and
the shore power connection should have allowed our charger to keep the
batteries topped up completely while at the dock.

It's going to take further testing to determine whether or not the
batteries simply won't hold a charge, or if the charger itself is
busted. The lights on it work, anyway; but my new multi-meter is crap
and I haven't been regularly checking performance as I used to.
Another argument for a dedicated battery monitor, I suppose.

I wouldn't be entirely surprised if it's the batteries gone bad.
Normally they should last longer than this (they've been in for three
years now, I think) but a mislabeling problem early in their career
had the house bank used to start the engine regularly, and they
weren't designed for such high-amp loading and may have been trashed
in the process.

At any rate, I hooked up our solar panel and there are no appreciable
drains while the boat is on the mooring here, so we'll see if it can
stick a charge on them after a week or so of sunshine. That should
eliminate the charger as a point of failure, since the solar setup
uses its own independent charge controller. Real testing will have to
wait until we are tied up alongside a float with real shore power
again, though, and that probably won't be until after the wedding
(Mandy is already thrilled at the prospect of a honeymoon spent
hunched over a multi-meter, let me tell you) at our first planned
stop, Victoria.

What I am having trouble deciding, though, is whether or not this fits
in with the Charity Day Sail Curse. Does it count if the problem was
pre-existing but simply didn't reveal itself until the day of the
sail? What if it happens on the day of the sail, but doesn't actually
come up during or affect the sail itself? Hard questions, best
debated by more philosophical minds than my own... I leave it to you,
dear readers, to debate and decide whether the curse has been broken
or merely adopted a more chimerical form with this year's event.