Alarmed!

SAILING: Yesterday and today we've sailed across the Golfo de Penas and we're now motoring along Bahia Anna Pink towards our anchorage. We'll reach it after a 32-hour trip. Larry chose the departure time really wisely as we've sailed most of the way and haven't needed to use up much of our precious fuel.

In another and quite different display of the Captain's brilliance, a VERY LOUD ALARM warned us that we had changed our course more than 10 degrees. Sailing headings are chosen on points of a compass between 0 degrees (North) clockwise around to 360 degrees (North again) so a change of 10 degrees wouldn't really endanger your boat in a large Bay such as Anna Pink (shown in photo). This short explanation of how headings, our compass and the alarm works is very simplistic and only explains one facet of a complex situation.

We really needed this alarm because of our 'finicky' auto-pilot. Otto (the pilot) has been acting up for quite a while. Failures have occurred at the worst times, such as when we were sailing past Leopold Island on the NW Passage, up north of Svalbard and while we were passing through a gap in the reefs in Australia on the Barrier Reef. The boat making a large turn, after steering straight for hours and hours, is exactly how an autopilot failure manifests itself.

Larry had tried several times to get the 'source code' for the auto pilot. Since it's nearly 20 years old, and the original company for all our instruments has changed hands, useful information was not forthcoming. If we wanted to buy a new Otto, we'd have to buy a complete and costly set of new instruments. They're all formulated to work together and the new auto-pilot would not work with the other older instruments.

With an unreliable autopilot, Larry simply added the alarm 'fix' to the compass which he designed and built. His compass has worked perfectly now (for us anyway) for over 25,000 nautical miles. This was just another one of his software additions to the already competent little device.

DIVING: I've been spending many hours of the trip trying to correlate the 3 dives we've done in the identical location at Caleta Ideal into useful statistics. There are 3 steps. One is to turn the MS Word list into something useful for Excel. The first step is to itemize all the animals according to our Donna/Charlie Gibbs/ Andy Lamb-inspired 'take' on Linnaeus into a list. So here's my way of listing items.
1 Flora … kelp and algae
2 Porifera (sponges)
3.1 Hydroids
3.2 Anemones
3.3 Sea-whips, Pens
3.4 Corals
3.5 Hydrocorals
4 Jellies Ctenophores
5 Worms
6 Molluscs
6.1 Polyplacaphora Chitons
6.2 Gastropods limpets snails
6.3 Brachiopoda Lampshells
7 Nudibranchs
7.1 Dorids
7.2 Aeolids
7.3 Tritonia
7.4 Dironids
7.5 Bubble shells
8 Bivalves
9 Arthropods - Barnacles
10 Shrimps, Isopods
11 Crabs
12 Bryozoan
13 Echinoderms Stars
14 Urchins
15 Sea Cucumbers
16 Ascidians, Tunicates
17 Salps
18 Fish
19 Mammals
20 Overviews
Of course, I keep track of which animals are not yet identified in the Chilean Guide (published 2009), and state the name in NA (North America) if applicable. I also state if the animal has not yet been identified anywhere. At least anywhere that I can find with my limited resources. That way divers in future can go in and find new animals or (at least) note range and habitat changes for known species!


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At 2017-12-02 18:11 (utc) our position was 45°48.33'S 074°35.83'W