Dawn

Sunrise is a magical time on the ocean. Overnight is not a time for sleep, but a time when your ears do the looking.  

The sun sets and the stars come out, your ability to see diminishes but sound carries incredibly well over water. Sleeping whales breathe loudly in the obscurity of the night, just at the waters surface. They are invisible to your eyes, but not to your ears! 

All night long, your imagination runs wild as you peace together random fragments from your senses; and then dawn comes. The sky to the east begins to glow in preparation for the suns glorious arrival.  

When the sun comes up, you get to change watches and get some sleep. Imagination fades as your eyes squelch out your creativity, showing you what “is” there rather than letting your mind believe it knows what is “to be” there. 

Sta-Lok

Have you ever wondered what goes on inside a Sat-Lok fitting? At the Annapolis Boat Show, I had the privilege of seeing just how their system works with my own eyes (instead of imagining it based off of technical drawings). 

Sta-Lok milled away a section of one of their fittings to allow show-goers the ability to lay their eyes on what goes on inside of the terminators.  

Sta-Lok is a HyMod type fitting where the strands of the wire are actually spread out over a cone and then pinched at the bottom. The outer strands wrap over the cone while the core strands pass through the cone. As the wire is pulled out of the fitting, the cone crushes down on the core wires, holding them in place. The whole system is very simple and very effective, and this model just makes everything easier to mentally grasp.

Electric Motor Regeneration

Electric motors have one key advantage over a diesel when it comes to blue water cruising: regeneration.

It is common practice to run your diesel motor once or twice a day to "charge up the batteries" while crossing an ocean. The winds are consistent offshore, so you don't need the motor for propulsion, but you do need the motor for power. 

Imagine being out on a gorgeous day of sailing and then have to crank on your motor for a few hours. All the peace and tranquility is ruined as your diesel clanks and clunks away, shaking the boat and your eardrums for hours!​

Electric motors can not be "run" to make power. Running them actually consumes power! The only way an electric motor will produce power is if you are sailing fast enough that the water passing over the propeller actually causes the propeller to spin. This in turn spins the electric motor and causes the motor to act more as a generator, producing power that is then fed back into your battery bank.​

There is no need to tarnish your perfect sailing day with a noisy diesel motor. The propeller is spinning all the time and producing power that keeps all your batteries topped off! In this particular moment, we were sailing along at around 7 to 8 knots and the motor was constantly producing between 6.0 amps and 6.9 amps. That might not sound like much until you recognize the fact that this in in 48V. When this is stepped down to 12V, the amps are multiplied by a factor of 4. This means that 6.0 amps @ 48V becomes 24 amps @ 12V and 6.9 amps @ 48V becomes 27.6 amps @ 12V!​

Imagine having a quiet source of power that cranks out 24 amps continuously, day and night! Needless to say, we had no issues with power demands while we crossed the Atlantic in the summer of 2018, all without the need for a noisy diesel motor.​

Bait for Fishing

If you plan on fishing while out at sea, you don't need to worry about taking bait along for the voyage. Flying fish live a sad life, as everyone wants to eat them. When they are in the water, predatory fish will pick them off and eat them. To escape this fate of certain death, flying fish will take to the sky and fly above the water where they are safe from predatory fish, but fall prey to birds that also love to eat them. 

By day, these little fish will take flight and skim over the surface of the ocean as they escape their inevitable fate. By night, these little fish won't see your yacht and will smack right into it. The force of the impact will knock them out and stun them as they lay on your deck to dry out and die. Every morning, we would find multiple flying fish scattered around the deck which we would then use as bait. 

Preparing the flying fish with hooks turns the flying fish into a "real fish" lure. Unlike plastic lures that merely look like a real fish, you have something that looks like a real fish and smells like a real fish as well! Best of all, you won't have bait smelling up your fridge.

Catching Fish

Let's face it, sailors and fishermen are two different breeds of people; but we both wish we could be each other. Fishermen get places quickly while catching many fish along the way while the wish they could get further out to sea. Sailors wish they could get places quicker and wish they could catch many fish while far out to sea.

Catching fish is a great way to add fresh meat to your diet while on a long voyage. The problem is, if you are not good at fishing, it is not safe to count on caught fish as food source. We voyaged over a thousand miles, trolling the fishing line for most of the journey before we caught this little fish. I have no idea what kind of fish it was, but it was delicious!  

This did make for a very fresh meal, as it was caught, filleted, and on the grill in under an hour! This fish was rather odd as it looks like a reef fish, but we caught it in water that was 15,000 feet deep (3 miles deep). It had no teeth, and was rather small. 

When we sailed from Bermuda to the Azores, we caught this exact same type of fish again, this time in water that was 16,000 feet deep! This was the only fish we caught in a 2,200 nautical mile voyage while our friends were catching large mahi mahi every other day.  

Your skill as a fisherman will pay off when out in the ocean as you will have plenty of time to troll a line behind your yacht. Fishing will also give you a way to pass the time as you wait and see what is biting from deep down in the sea.