Location 35° 15.7S 174° 07.2E
Tuesday 12:00, 06.26.2007

The Schooner Maggie B arrived in Russell, NZ, Tuesday, June 26th. We are at the town dock, at 35° 15.7S, 174° 07.2E. We made an easy trip up from Auckland overnight, despite rather dire weather forecasts. The sail up was rather enlivened by dolphin playing around us at midnight and a large, mysterious sailboat, traveling slowly but with essentially no lights on.

Once into the Bay of Islands, we were quite surprised to see about a dozen tourist boats rushing around and a lovely big barkentine R. Tucker Thompson. Several of the tourist boats came by to look and one small motorboat came alongside to welcome us.

Coming into the Bay of Islands, we had initially thought of going into Opua, which is a few miles away. However, while Opua is an official port of entry and has a marina, it has essentially nothing else. Russell, however, is a marvelous little community. In the old days, Russell had quite a reputation. Quoting from the Lonely Planet: “Russell was a magnet for rough elements such as fleeing convicts, whalers, prostitutes and drunk sailors. Charles Darwin described it in 1835 as full of ‘the refuse of society’ and it also picked up the chirpy nickname ‘hellhole of the Pacific.’ Sadly all good things must come to an end, and the town is now a bastion of cafes, giftshops and B&B’s.”

There is essentially only one good docking space at the Russell pier. It is like a narrow “U” facing outwards, with big posts all around. We backed into it with some difficulty due to the 15 knot cross wind. With good crew coordination and some “high wire” work from Theresa, all worked well despite many onlookers at the pier. We are now trussed up like a moth in a spider’s web.

We find Russell delightful and are going to explore the surrounding area, which includes Tane Mahuta (Lord of the Forest), a 2000 year old kauri tree that is 51 meters high and has a girth of 13 meters.

In Opua there is a man who specializes in photovoltaic cells and we are going to see if we can get some fitted to help with our electrical consumption. Our big batteries seem to hold their charge less long, though they charge up quicker. We still end up running the generator for about two hours a day, when we are actively using the boat, if the Yanmar main engine isn’t running. The biggest energy users seem to be the radar/GPS and the autopilot, not the refrigerator and the water maker, as I suspected.

We are organizing supplies and beginning to track weather for the run north. We will probably leave early next week, weather permitting. There are a series of gales forecast for the end of this week.

We are a bit groggy, not from grog but from staying up late to watch the America’s Cup in ValeNZia. Thrilling to have the Kiwis up 2-1. Last night’s race was a real cliff-hanger with the Kiwi’s ahead 400 meters, a huge distance, only to have the Swiss catch and pass them by the last windward mark, only to have the Kiwi’s slip past on the last downwind and win by twenty seconds. Just doesn’t happen much in match racing.

All is well.

Waiting to head out to Opua

The Schooner Maggie B is still in the Viaduct Marina in central Auckland, waiting out a big blow. The forecast for the route between here and Opua in the Bay of Islands is NW 35 gusting 45. We will be heading NW. No hardship to sit things out here. After frontal passage, it is due to freshen to 40 with gusts to 50 from the SW, then reduce to 25 by Sunday. Our plan is to stay up late Saturday night for the first race of the America’s Cup, cheering on the Kiwi boat.

We had hoped to watch The Race at the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron, which is having a supper with big screens all around, but they decided that it should be Members Only and guest yachtsmen weren’t welcome. Too bad.

One area of critical interest for every Blue Water sailor is “man overboard.” The best strategy, of course, is not to go overboard to begin with. As has been mentioned before, we have excellent life vests with integrated harnesses and super strong jack lines fore and aft to hitch into. The life vests have strobe lights on them, and we have a MOM8 (Man Overboard Module) with additional goodies. But there is lots of other stuff, mostly electronic, that we have been looking at.

Several suppliers have little necklaces that are keyed into a central alarm board and if one of the active necklaces gets more than 50 feet away, an alarm goes off, and it can even (if the system is properly integrated) drop a mark in the GPS system to show where the “event” took place. They cost about $2000-3000. But you don’t really know where the person is, nor can you communicate with them.

Some experts suggest carrying one of the new miniature digital 406 EPIRB’s (about $800 each), which, when switched on, send a GPS position and identification to satellites, enabling the initiation of a rescue in minutes. We have a big 406 EPIRB on board, but the problem of having the small ones is that in most instances we will be in a “self-rescue” situation and we would have to telephone a rescue center, get the lat/long of the little transmitter, and then navigate to that position. You know just where they are, but can’t communicate with them and are dependent on effective communication with the rescue center.

Another suggestion is to carry miniature “old fashioned” analog 121.5 EPIRB’s ($200 each) and a direction finding system (about $2500). That way we could home in on the beacon, either ours or anyone else in distress with a 121.5 EPIRB. Note: you can’t home in on the 406 beacons because they are digital and their message is too quick to be homed in on. Also, again, you can’t communicate with the person in the water.

With all these pros and cons, we have purchased two new miniature waterproof VHF radios and four day/night flares. We are having pouches made to integrate the radios and flares into the life vest/harness system. We always listen to Channel 16 at sea and if someone went over, they could immediately call the Maggie B to alert shipmates. The flares would be used to locate the person. We have the advantage of keeping a continuous ship’s track on the course plotter, so it is easy to go back over our course and know that we are within 30 feet of where we had passed before.

This assumes that the person in the water is conscious. Unfortunately we all know that an unconscious person in the water has essentially no chance of survival. So all our efforts are focused around keeping people on board and in promptly rescuing a shipmate who can be saved.

All is well.

Safely docked in Viaduct Marina, Auckland
06.16.2007

The Schooner Maggie B is still safely tied up in Auckland in the Lighter Basin of the Viaduct Marina. But the days are getting pretty cold, so it is getting to be time to head for the Tropics.

We have been enjoying the town and also getting a lot of routine work done. Our life raft is checked and repacked, as is the MOM8 (Man Overboard Module, but we call it “Mom”) and the life jackets. The 406 EPIRB (our rescue beacon) is overhauled. We also have a huge new anchor, a 100 pound Manson Supreme, which should keep us safe in the tricky anchoring challenges of the Marquesas and the coast of Chile and Patagonia.

Theresa overhauled our diesel cabin heater and Owen almost has our stove propane system all fixed up (the remote sensors seem to have a mind of their own). We are fitting some additional heavy weather ventilation systems so that we can get closer to the impossible goal of keeping below decks dry and well ventilated even when it is splashy on deck.

We have been carefully through our engineering spares, such as fuel filters and spare impellers, because it will be a long time (if ever!) that we will be in a place as well supplied as the Viaduct in Auckland. We purchased a 30 pound “Kiwi Anchor Buddy.” They are also know as an “angel,” kellet, sentinel, or anchor weight. It will ride part way down the anchor chain, to help keep the pull and surge against the anchor parallel to the bottom, rather than prying up the anchor. With the new anchor and the kellet, we should be able to sleep well at night most anywhere.

Auckland is a marvelous town. It is heaven for sailors. There isn’t just a single good chandlery, there are half a dozen, all fighting for your business. One near us is called Nelsons and it has been in the business more than a hundred years. On the other side of us is Sailor’s Corner which has one of everything or can get it in a minute. They have deeply discounted Musto wet weather gear and we added another suit to the ship’s inventory (just Owen’s size, hmmmm).

The Maritime Museum here is just excellent. It is huge and has excellent exhibits on everything from the earliest Polynesian voyages to yesterday’s America’s Cup Race. Up the hill a ways is the War Memorial Museum which is an amazing resource on Maori history and artifacts, though it isn’t as well organized as the Te Papa in Wellington.

But Boats! Auckland is all about boats. Across the way is Team New Zealand’s base and near it is a spare hull for BMW Oracle. In the basin a few hundred meters from us is NZ 40 and 41, which can be hired for day trips (hire both and race against yourself!). Around the next corner is the square rigger, Pride of New Zealand. The next way you look there is an Alden Schooner that used to belong to General Patton, or a marvelous little eighty-year-old steam launch called Puke (pronounced Poo-Kay which means a low hill in Maori). Right.

Sailors, when they land in a marina, immediately ask where the 1. toilets, 2. showers, 3. Laundromat, and 4. bars are (not necessarily in that order). Most marinas have 1, 2 and 3 near the gates, marvelously called Ablution Facilities in Cape Town. Here things are a bit different. Viaduct Marina is more for working (tourist) boats or plastic monstrosities belonging to someone in a nearby office of condo. So for #1, we use a public facility 20 feet away (why can’t every city have nice, clean public toilets?). For #2, we have joined a nearby YMCA that has taken over the historic “Tepid Baths” facility and has steam, sauna, hot tubs and two big lap pools. For #3 it is a bit of a hike, aswe are in too fancy an area to have anything like our favorite cafe/laundromat in Salamanca Square in Hobart.

For #4, there are 100 great bars within a ten minute walk. A favorite is a nearby Irish bar, which has a comfy fireplace as well as live music every night. A recent note from T’weez speaks for it:

“Danny Doolen’s is a tidy pub,
Where Weeza’s gone to dwell.
She hopes that you will see har there,
Before she starts to smell.”
(Last word hard to read, could be “swell”)

One important purchase is red socks for all the crew. They are a symbol of the Kiwi America’s Cup boat. Peter Blake, the legendary Kiwi sailor, used the sale of red socks to help finance his original challenge. We hope them the best in the finals this month against the Swiss (which is also full of Kiwis). Tonight may be a bit more difficult as the All Blacks are playing Canada in rugby. Hannah is insisting that we all have to wear Canadian flags on our faces when we go out to the sports bar to watch the match. We may not live to see Sunday.

New photos on the web site today!

All is well.

Thoughts by Nigel Irens on directional stability and broaching

The Maggie B is often out in big seas and big winds. One area of concern for any sailor who goes in those conditions is “broaching,” where the boat is going down wind and down wave at high speed and twists sideways to the wave and capsizes, often with the lost of rigging and sometimes with the loss of life and the boat. The Maggie B has always felt quite stable in such conditions. I was particularly interested in the impact of the use of the centerboard in “big weather.” Standard practice is to raise the c/b when off the wind, but I have always found that the additional stability from having the c/b down seemed valuable, both for crew comfort as well as keeping the sails steadier. The danger is that in some boats, the c/b can cause the boat to “trip” and can bring on a broach.

I asked designer Nigel Irens his considerations on directional stability and broaching in designing the Maggie B, and below Nigel writes:

I think the first thing to say is that in the interests of helm-balance sailing boats tend to have the deeper parts of their hulls placed in accordance with the distribution of sail area down their length in order to balance the helm.

A schooner, for example, which has its mainsail aft will always have a deep heel to the keel and a fairly shallow forefoot, whereas a ketch will usually have a deeper forefoot but the heel of the keel will be less deep.

If you consider directional stability without any sail set then it’s easy to see that the schooner would be the most directionally stable downwind - simply because the undercurrent of a breaking sea is less likely to get a ‘grip’ on a shallow forefoot. At the same time the long sternpost (and consequently longer, more efficient rudder) will have tendency to stop the stern trying slew and ‘overtake’ the bow (which is what broaching is all about). This analogous to a dart or arrow - the flights want to ‘trail’ back and so keep the un-flighted end pointing downwind.

In Maggie B’s case there was another characteristic built in which I hoped would help limit the tendency to broach and that is that the entry of the waterlines forward is fairly fine, which means the bow has more of a chance of passing through the back of a wave without to much resistance. If the front doesn’t slow down too much this again limits the tendency for the back to try to overtake it.

You couldn’t choose to have fine waterlines forward if the weight of the boat was also too far forward - otherwise she would trim down by the bow. In our case the weight is moderately far aft but the forward sections are quite ‘U’ shaped so that for the weight they carry (i.e. the immersed volume) neither is the forefoot too deep nor the waterlines too bluff.

I was very pleased to see in Antigua last year that for a boat of her displacement the relatively fine waterlines mean that she is not stopped too easily when pitching into a sea - she seemed quite eager to get on with going up wind. That was a slight weakness in my ROXANE design - although the static waterline (design waterline) was relatively fine the waterlines higher up the freeboard were were progressively bluff and the boat does get stopped a bit as these enter the water. This happens when her natural pitch frequency is excited by the coincident ‘rate of encounter’ of seas advancing seas, which is in turn a function of wavelength, wave height, boat speed and the angle at which waves are encountered.)

Sometimes a boat will be stopped upwind by an unusual sea and so the helmsman will bear away a few degrees (and maybe crack off the sheets) to break her out of that resonant pitch frequency into which she has fallen. When the speed has picked up and the frequency broken again she can probably be nudged back on the wind a bit more. Most people who sail a lot do this instinctively - especially if they are often on the same boat and so get used to her ways. (I imagine you can keep Maggie going with your eyes shut these days !)

Coming back to your question about whether to use the centreboard downwind or not I think you are bound to try different ideas and see what happens. If she was a ketch - with the centreboard well forward I’d say leave it up as it could cause directional instability - or even exaggerate a tendency to broach, but as Maggie’s is well aft (like her sailplan) then she may be more steerable with a ‘pivot’ to steer around. It’s hard to say. One thing is sure and that is that I think a schooner will always be best in very strong following seas because of the above-mentioned ‘dart’ shape, but the most reassuring formula must be a schooner with main furled in strong winds so she is being ‘pulled’ and not ‘pushed’ from behind.(Try pushing a pencil across your chart table rather than dragging it !)

Not much actual science here I’m afraid, but I hope it helps….

— Nigel Irens, Ashburton, May 2007

Location 36° 51S 174° 46E
Wednesday12:00, 06.06.2007

The Schooner Maggie B is safely docked at the Viaduct Marina in downtown Auckland. We are at 36° 51S 174° 46E. If that looks to be right in town, it totally is. We are surrounded by condos, office buildings and great bars and restaurants. When we were in Cape Town, we though that we were right in the middle of things, but here it is astonishing, especially after being in smaller places for a bit. We are like Midwest farmers staring at the tall buildings in Manhattan.

Coming across the Hauraki Gulf was relatively easy. Easy for the Hauraki Gulf with only 20 knots right on the nose. But then it blew 40 here yesterday and is due to blow again tomorrow. Coming in the channel at night and docking (back in, please) wasn’t much tougher than a night carrier landing. There were more lights of every color than at O’Hare Airport, and we had to dodge two big container ships outbound, four or five ferries, three Pilot boats, and some odds and ends. Great fun.

More news tomorrow and more photos.

All is well.

Location 37° 2S 176° 30E
Monday12:00, 06.04.2007

The Schooner Maggie B was at 37° 02S 176° 30E at noon on June 4th. We are power sailing towards Whitianga, where we hope to be tied up tonight at their little marina. We will be there for the next gale, which is due tomorrow.

Whitianga is small, 3500 people, but the Lonely Planet guide makes it sound interesting. We will probably rent a car to see some of the sights in the area, including Hot Bath Beach, where one shovels out a hole in the beach near low tide, which produces your own hot tub from thermal water.

There is also a man in Whitianga who will teach you how to make your own Maori bone carving. He must have bought up all the used dentist drills from miles around.

Once this next blow is over, we will slide around the corner of the Coromandel Peninsula into the Hauraki Gulf. It is a complicated route into Auckland and we are headed all the way into the center of the city to the Viaduct Marina, so we will be sure to time it for daytime (for a change…)

All is well.

Running up the east coast of New Zealand
Sunday 06.03.2007

The Schooner Maggie B cast off from the Gisborne Marina exactly at noon today. We are headed north for the Bay of Plenty, running up the East Coast at 9-10 knots in a nice big Southerly. A Nor’westerly gale is due Tuesday, so we hope to be safely around East Point and across the Bay by then. Depending on our speed and the speed of advance of the gale, we should be in either Tauranga in the Bay of Plenty or Whitianga on the Coromandel Peninsula. From Whitianga it is just a half day to Auckland. (for interested parties, the “Wh” in Whitianga is pronounced “F” as in “Fitianga.”)

We hope to go by White Island (Whakaari) in the middle of the Bay of Plenty, which is New Zealand’s most active volcano, last erupting just a few years ago and actively steaming now.

At the End of the World?

Right now we are just 70 NM from the International Date Line, which makes some of our electronic charts act as if it is the end of the world (see Pirates III). Almost tempting to cross over and back to spend the shortest day ever.

All is well.

Location 39° 22S 177° 49E
Thursday 12:00, 05.31.2007

At noon on May 31st, the Schooner Maggie B was at 39° 22S 177° 49E, just along the East Coast of the North Island, Near Portland Light. We are motorsailing in about 10 knots of wind, making our best time for Gisborne, where we should arrive today at about sunset. We are safely ahead of the gale. Castle Point, where one turns north after leaving Wellington, had 41 knots of wind at noon today. Whew!

Roaring 40s

Today at noon is the first time we have been north of the Roaring 40s in a long time - March 10th, to be exact. Seeking the sun as winter settles in in the South!

As we left Wellington yesterday, we passed the Chilean Sail Training Ship Esmerelda. A lovely four masted square rigger — just magnificent, though somewhat in need of a paint job. She was there for a port visit and surely will have lots of fun. She does carry some baggage, though, as she was used for terrible purposes under Pinochet. For many, a trip on the Esmerelda was one way.

Gisborne & Whale Rider

Gisborne is the place where the marvelous movie “Whale Rider” was filmed. This is a good excuse to go our to your video store and rent it and get a great feeling of this area.

We passed Young Nick Head, named after Captain Cook’s Cabin Boy, who was the first to spot New Zealand. In Gisborne there are lots of Cook memorials. The best of all has to be up the hill at Titirangi at Cook Plaza, where, due to some historical screw-up, the statue isn’t in British naval Uniform, nor is there any facial resemblance to Cook. The plaque reads: “Who was he? We have no idea.”

There is an Irish bar the we will no doubt seek out, Irish Rover. It supposedly has a sign, “No hats, no undesirable tattoos.” I’m not sure that all the crew will be able to get in.

Lunch today was fettuccini with roasted garlic and New Zealand Green Lip mussels, chased down by a Nautilus Sauvignon Blanc. World Class!

All is well.