The Winter “To Do” List

It’s winter and Pacific Cup starts in 6 months.  That means it is time to get serious about the To Do list on Spadefoot.  It is so much easier to get things done on Spadefoot with the boat only 30 minutes away versus the preparing Shearwater for crossing oceans when the boat was 3-5 hours away.  We definitely do not take the convenience for granted.

With that, we’ve been busy knocking out a few things on the “Buy” list and the “Do” list. Recent purchases include a new A4 “max runner” spinnaker from Quantum.  The A4 is made out of heavier AirX cloth and will be 10% smaller than the A2.

The Quantum “Max Runner” A4

We also ordered a bright orange storm jib from Voyager Sails in Portland.  There are rules for how big a storm jib can be, based on the size of the rig.  As a result, Spadefoot’s storm jib is a cute 40 square feet.

Our storm jib will be slightly smaller than this one, on the 100 foot Comanche

While we expect to hand steer nearly all of the time on the way to Hawaii, we found a really good option for an autopilot from Pelagic Autopilots.  This is one of the few cockpit mounted autopilots that will interface with instruments and steer to apparent wind.  And the price is really attractive too.

After doing our energy budget and knowing we will only have solar for battery charging, we ordered two 70 watt solar panels and a Genasun MPPT charge controller.  The panels will mount across the stern and rotate towards the sun for maximum effectiveness.  We specifically chose two panels instead of one large panel because of the fact that the efficiency of a panel drops dramatically if even a small portion is shaded.  Having two panels increases the chance that one of the two panels will not be shaded at all and will be providing maximum charge more often.

One of the topics that has caused me the most headaches has been the emergency steering required for Pacific Cup.  On Shearwater we ended up with a combination of an SOS rudder and a Galerider drogue.  Neither of those options were appealing for Spadefoot.  In the end we found a custom cassette rudder solution from CCI in Canada.  Hard to beat the Canadian exchange rate right now.  Our erudder will have the unique feature that it can fit on the original rudder gudgeons if those are still useable or new gudgeons mounted to the port side of the original rudder.  Hopefully, we won’t need to use this, but if we do, we’ll have some confidence it will actually work.

Our rudder and cassette will look something like this.

All of the above is on order now.  It should all come trickling in over the next 2 months.