December 2008 Archives

On Saturday December 13, we left at about 2 AM from Carolina Beach to move Tahina south to St. Marys, Georgia.  My brother John lives there, so it was a convenient place to move for a while.  We'll be moving further south after the holidays.  The route took us a little over 300 nautical miles which we completed in just over 1.5 days. We arrived at about 4 PM on Sunday.

Karen and I got up and left while the full moon was high and bright.  We wanted to time our arrival to make sure we would be there during daylight hours.  The winds were pretty strong for the first day - averaging between 20-30 knots, but gradually dropped as we continued south.  We also had a tail wind for a good portion of the trip which made for good conditions to fly the big spinnaker sail.  But, we have a policy of not flying the spinnaker at night, so our speed was a couple of knots slower slower on Saturday night. It is too risky flying the spinnaker at night because you have to leave the cockpit area to raise and lower the sail.

The entire trip was recorded on my Garmin GPS, and we even remembered to take some photos.  I've now processed the GPS track and geotagged some of the photos.  I used GPSVisualizer to convert the GPS track into KML and to colorize the track according to our speed. If you look closely at our track in Google Earth, you can see how the boat would surge with the gusts of wind and the following seas (which were in the 6-8 foot range). You can also see we had a broad range of speeds, but mostly averaged in the 8-10 knot range. At the end of the trip, we motored into St. Marys Inlet with an outgoing tide - which reduced our speed by 2-3 knots.

Below is a slideshow of photos showing parts of the trip down, and pictures from St. Marys, Georgia after we arrived. You can see St. Marys is on a river (called St. Marys) which is the border between Georgia and Florida. There's a large marsh just to the south of the town and the marina. St. Marys is a small southern town with nice little shops, a pretty park, old trees with spanish moss hanging from their branches, and very friendly people. Also at the end is a photo of our new dinghy "Coconut" taken after we first tied up at the back of the boat (it was after dark since that's when the truck arrived on Monday night).

You can view the photos in Google Earth as well.

The challenge of preparing for a five year circumnavigation is harder than any project we've ever undertaken. And, believe me, we've done some hard things in the past. I've started and run several businesses and any entrepreneur can tell you startups are really hard. And, it's been equally hard on Karen who has to keep things going when I'm off working on a business. Even when I start a venture, Karen is truly an equal partner. I've covered the topic of preparing for a circumnavigation before in an earlier post.

The catch 22 we're in now is juggling several parallel major projects: 1) Google Earth Blog - a more than full time job researching and writing; 2) Taking care of Tahina, fitting Tahina out, and moving it to warmer waters for the winter; 3) Finding time to work on the redesign of GEB and the design for this Tahina site; 4) Starting in earnest the projects to get our house ready to be sold; and 5) finding time to spend with family (especially now with the holidays). The problem is the scale of each of these projects is large, and it is hard to get any one project done effectively. So, things like finishing the blog designs have been slipping.

So far I haven't publicly announced this blog (because it is currently still using a default template without any real graphical design). And, so, posts have not been coming out regularly yet. But, I really want to share the trials and tribulations of our preparations. So, I'm going to try harder to keep up with this blog and make a greater effort to get the design at least acceptable for public consumption. The good news is that we've been trying to keep a faithful journal of our experiences, so it should be possible to back-fill some of the more interesting experiences with back-dated posts.

Now, if we can only maintain our sanity while we're trying to get all these projects done! Right now, we're in Colorado visiting family for Christmas. We'll soon be back to North Carolina, but will be making another run down to the boat - which is now in Georgia - to show more family and friends the boat. We'll have to keep it short though so we can get back and get work done on the house.

The goal right now is to begin our circumnavigation by April or May (before hurricane season starts). But, we're still unsure about whether we can get all the critical items completed in that time. If we're not ready by May, we will mostly likely have to postpone departure until the fall after hurricane season ends. Insurance companies won't insure a boat if they are taken into certain waters during storm seasons. But, keeping a house and a boat (which cost more than the house) both going at the same time is a financial strain. So, the incentive to leave sooner is strong. More on this topic in a later post.

Wish us luck!

As mentioned on our "About Tahina" article the name for our boat was discovered because of a news story about a newly discovered palm tree in Madagascar. The tree was named Tahina after the daughter of the gentleman who reported the new tree. Tahina means "blessed" or "protected" in Malagasy (the language of Madagascar). We liked the connotations and the polynesian-derived aspect.

This Monday (on December 15th) we took delivery on our "new car", our rigid-bottomed inflatable dinghy (or boat tender) which will serve as our primary transportation to shore when we're at anchor or in a port. Soon I will write a post describing the delivery process and sharing some pictures of it. But, for now we just wanted to share that Karen came up with a great name for our smaller boat: "Coconut". An obvious name once you understand where the name "Tahina" came from. :-)

Today was a major milestone in preparing for the trip.  Tahina will serve as our house, and our primary means of transportation between locations.  However, we will also need a means from getting from our house on the water, to other destinations nearby on land.  Our "car" is a small boat (or "tender" is the term used for bigger boats like ours :-) ), which is commonly referred to as a dinghy.  In our case, we have chosen a boat which is part inflatable, and part fiberglass (these kind of boats are called "Rigid Inflatable Boats" or "RIB" for short). Today, we ordered a dinghy for Tahina.

We had a 12 foot RIB designed by Apex Inflatables on our previous boat PatiCat (pictured above).  We debated buying something a foot or two longer, and even one with a "center console" with a driving wheel and a seat.  The advantages for the console is that you can sit forward and a bit dryer.  Without the seat, you have to sit on the side of the boat on the inflatable tube while holding the tiller of the motor to drive.  Sometimes you get splashed by water in this position.  Reportedly you stay dryer with the seat and console.  However, there are some disadvantages to the bigger set up:  1) the weight of the boat increases by a couple hundred pounds (making it heavier to lift, and harder to pull up the beach). ; 2) you have less room on the boat for people and payload because the console and seat take up room; and 3) the boat price more than doubles for the larger boat with the console.  Part of the increased cost is the necessity for a larger motor as well (which also weighs more), larger fuel tank, battery start-up required, etc.

So, we decided to go with the same 12-foot RIB from Apex as last time, but with a slightly larger 25 hp motor.  The nice thing is that the manufacturer happens to have one on hand and is making a delivery right past the marina we're moving to this weekend.  They are also able to supply us with a motor and ready-to-go assembly.  So, next week we'll have our new "car".  We haven't picked a name yet for her, but I'll let you know here when we do.

My friend Gerard drove down early this morning from Cary, NC so he could go for a day sail. Gerard is originally from France and still has the distinctive accent despite having been married to an American for 20 years. The Frenchman came out to Tahina in October with his family, but the weather prevented us from going for a sail. Today the weather was pretty much perfect (excepting the temperature which was around 50 degrees F).

Karen opted to take the dogs with her while she did some shopping. She also took the dogs for a walk at the park while we went sailing.

The conditions started out with 10-15 knots of wind heading out of the marina - winds coming from the NW. This is an excellent direction for a sail up the coast since the winds are coming across the shore. No swells, just chop. The winds picked up to 15-20 out of the inlet where we raised the mainsail with one reef. As soon as we put out the genoa we took off to 10+ knots.   It wasn't long before we were hitting the teens (Tahina's speed log reads a bit high, but our GPS had us at 13.7 knots at one point).

Here's a short video clip showing us moving along:

We had a nice sail up the coast past Wrightsville Beach. The sun was on our backs and with the helm on the lee side we were comfy in our coats, hats, hoods and gloves. Gerard was amazed how smooth the ride was even at the double-digit speeds. There was some 2-3 foot chop, but no real swells, so the ride was actually quite smooth. There was a bit of spray a few times, but not much hitting us. Tahina can handle that size chop easy.

We ended up double-reefing the jib and then cutting in closer to the wind so we could move back towards shore after we got over 3 nm offshore. I figured we would have a better point of sail if we got in close. We made some sandwiches inside for a few minutes as we gradually got in to about 1.5 miles offshore. The autopilot did a wonderful job of holding us in on a close reach.

After cleaning up from lunch we tacked back south. This tack was even better where we were able to go on a beam reach with a bit less apparent wind. We were still averaging close to 10 knots over ground the whole way back to Carolina Beach Inlet. On the way north the solar panels more than kept up with the power requirements, but going south the sails blocked the panels. So, we were eating up 10-15 amps average. Running the surround sound stereo system probably added to the power requirements - but, it was worth it!  We had some rock-n-roll as we cruised along enjoying the sail!

Here are some photos from the trip (thanks to Gerard for his photos):

We were back to the marina by about 2:30 pm after a trip just over 30 nm. Gerard was more than willing to lend a hand helping me wash the salt off the boat. We gave Tahina a thorough bath and even wiped down all the stainless as well. I used GPS Visualizer to colorize our GPS track according to speed so you can view our track in Google Earth. You can see how we accelerated with the wind gusts especially on the way north. On the way back we pretty much steadily made 10 knots as I set the autopilot on a track for a waypoint at the inlet.

Next weekend, we're planning to move Tahina to warmer waters down south. The plan has been to go down to Florida and eventually get to the Miami Boat show in mid-February. We have a part to pick up from St. Francis (the manufacturer of Tahina) which is impractical to ship around (it's a 10 foot "passarelle" - or gang plank - a ramp for getting from the dock to the boat at marinas). St. Francis put it on a new boat that will be shown at the boat show.

I was amazed when researching possible marinas for keeping our boat, that there are very few places down the coast that meet our conditions. The tricky part is that since Tahina has a mast which is 71 feet off the water, we can't go under the ICW 65 foot bridges. This reduces us to finding marinas near inlets to the ocean without bridges to go under (excepting a few taller bridges, or draw bridges). The next tricky part is finding a marina which has the right kind of dockages for a large catamaran (allowing for our very beamy width of 26.5 feet).And finally, trying to find a reasonable price in Florida is an issue.

I was able to use some nice tools to help research locations. I used Google Earth, Peio's Google Maps NOAA charts mashup, Marinas.com (which has very nice aerial photos of many marinas, and other useful data like links to web sites), and I would Google search for any feedback (positive/negative) on particular marinas. Anyway, we finally picked a location for our first stop - at the border of Florida/Georgia: St. Marys, Georgia. My brother John lives nearby, so he can keep an eye on the boat for us and we can visit with him while we're there. See the location of Lang's Marina . They have the right accomodations, and the price is right - it's even a bit lower than Carolina Beach.

We are back at Carolina Beach on Tahina right now. We're doing some final preparation, and basic maintenance in preparation for the passage. The trip to St. Marys is about 300 nautical miles (nm) by going to sea down the coast. We'll have to stay somewhat close to shore to avoid going into the strong gulf stream northward current. 300 nm is a little over 1.5 days on a typical passage (remember, our speed is dependent on wind conditions) for Tahina. We'll have to plan our departure to ensure we arrive during daylight hours.