Electrical Sailing

We left bright and early for the roughly 10-hour haul to Nassau. Almost all the sailing we have been and will be doing for the foreseeable future will be into the prevailing easterlies. That means a lot of motoring and banging along against the seas. We can get the sails up sometimes, but we must keep very close to the wind. It can get noisy and tedious, and it makes it hard to work in the galley…but not as difficult, I should think, as if we were in a monohull where everything would be banging and crashing on an angle.

Frisha and Whit have proved invaluable. They get the sails up and down, they cast off and cast on (no, wait…that’s knitting). Frisha taught me to whip. Gentlemen, before you get excited, that means I can bind the end of a line so it won’t fray, nothing more thrilling. They take the helm, they navigate, operate the radio. I keep them fed. I’m afraid galley work will in no way make up for them when they leave us. WW assures me he can handle most tasks solo, while I learn. I’m picking up an understanding of the navigation stuff from Whit. It must be said, the electronic equipment on Django is a far cry from the compass, chart, protractor, and pencils I remember from my youth.

Django’s autopilot allows the helmsman to choose a compass course or to choose a course based on angle to the wind. The nav station has an electronic chart that shows shoals, depth measurements in meters, land features, waypoints (and you can create waypoints), notes, etc. It shows the course you have been on, your course over ground on your current heading, and your speed over ground. Also your longitude and latitude, and the longitude and latitude of waypoints. It has a radar alarm to let you know if there’s anything in the vicinity. You can set the sensitivity in increments of three kilometres. At the helm, you can see the depth, wind speed, wind direction, heading, speed. I am studying to master pressing all the buttons. WW insists it’s just a glorious videogame.