Month: April 2022

Into Belgium: Gravelines – Dunkirk – Blankenberge

April 30, 2022 / fiandadrian

We love France, and so we contrived another stop before leaving France, and arrived at Dunkirk, a few miles away, where we wanted to see the 1940 evacuation museum.

We left Gravelines for Dunkirk near to high tide. A small fishing boat, seemingly unused to 17 tons of post industrial aluminium elegance lurching down the channel, reversed out of its mooring into our path causing an quick change to full reverse for us and an apologetic wave from them. It was a short drift with the tide round to Dunkirk. The coastline was largely industrial until the old town revealed itself as we headed down the harbour.

We missed the famous Dunkirk Siren marker buoy at the entrance to Dunkirk, but latter spotted her reclining on the dock awaiting redeployment.

The 1940 museum told the story of the evacuation of Dunkirk. The speed of the German advance in 1940 made us wonder if Putin had been expecting a similarly quick advance in Ukraine. We walked out to the beach where it all took place afterwards.

The next day we headed out along the coast to Belgium. We chose the smaller port of Blankenberge rather than the big ferry port of Zeebrugge. The big red sail came out and with the assistance of tide we kept up 6 knots most of the day in 5-9 knots of wind.

In Blankenberge, Bernie had a good run on the beach and we sampled Belgium beer at one of the many beach bars, until we got too hot in the sun and we went in search of Belgium chocolates.

The next day Bernie stayed at home whilst we took the 15 minute train ride into Bruges. This beautiful town was a mixture of quiet streets and just around the corner, thronging tourists. Not a mask in sight – it was great to see the pandemic is finally over.

Our next stop would cross over the border into the Netherlands, so whilst we waited for the tide to turn in our favour we headed into town to make sure we an adequate chocolate supply for the trip.

Boulogne to Gravelines

April 19, 2022 / fiandadrian

Boulogne was an active fishing port with more bustle and less tourists than some places we had been along the coast.

Bernie was super excited about a French smelling town again, and especially one with lots of fishy smells. He started demanding a walk around the town as soon as daylight appeared. He wasn’t disappointed and pulled us up the hill to the old town in search of cafes and fallen chips. We returned in time for the nice gendarmes from Calais to visit the boat and stamp our passports.

We went straight out for bread and wine – and I enjoyed this for dinner.

Something more substantial for lunch the next day, 3 course meal with wine – happy to be back!

The forecast for the second day after we arrived was originally ‘a spicy day out’, then increased to ‘you won’t need extra chilli with this’ and finally ‘this is going to spoil your whole day’. We headed out to the harbour entry channel on foot and thanked the clever weather forecasting people for telling us the best day to sail. When all the fishing boats stay in port, its a good day to stay on land.

When calm conditions returned the fishing boats on the wharf opposite us left in the middle of the night (ok, maybe dawn) and returned to sell their fish on the quay opposite us in time for our morning(ish) walk. The fish shops are a famous tourist haunt for the town and sell everything off the boats fresh.

We bought fresh fish fillets, oysters and these whelks from the market. Beautiful with some garlic butter.

We thought we might head to Dunkirk next, but found this little town (Gravelines) accessed by a drying canal that was reported to be super friendly but a little tricky to get to. Red flag to a bull… we were going. They can fit 15m boats and we are no more than 14.5 (ish). We snuck out of Boulogne just after lunch to ensure arrival at the canal entrance at high tide.

The coast was surprisingly rural as we approached Calais. I did an extensive rigging check from the front deck.

As we approached Calais the wind picked up to over 20 knots and the choppy waves from behind made it too rolly for sunning oneself on the foredeck. The ferries on the Calais-Dover run kept coming to say hello and look at our boat. I was later informed we were crossing a ferry lane.

We arrived at the entry channel which was distractingly narrow and had 2 knots of tide crossing it. It seemed like we were approaching at 45 degrees to the channel. I steered a course so we safely crabbed our way into the channel, with Fi watching the chart plotter and the seas closely, and shouting “more to starboard!” to ensure we wouldn’t hit the port side wall. After a few km of channel we squeezed through a lock gate and pulled up at pontoon 2 in the marina. Curiously all the other boats seemed much smaller than us.

Gravelines used to be a vibrant port on the coast, but silting led to its decline as a trading port. These days its more sedate with rotund older gentlemen snoozing on their boats in the emerging spring sunshine trying to recall the boat jobs they were doing today.

The town still has a moat and walled defenses. Fi jumped the moat in a single bound.

This is another example of the architecture of the Marquis de Vauban a French engineer, who was responsible for a number of fortifications along the coast, some of which we saw when we cruised in Brittany. He is thought to be one of the greatest engineers of his time. The town centre is shaped as a star with the moat around the outside.

Beautiful moat with the fortifications for the town.

Taking a bike ride through town and around the moat. Bernie was having some mandatory rest at home.

Having completed her ride through the fountain, Fi wondered about the type of water it might be….

Looking towards the sea. To the left of this picture, the canal continues to the marina. This is not quite low tide yet.

Low tide at the marina gave both of us a shock when we left one morning. We could clearly see the bottom, and boats on the inside pontoons would sink into the soft mud. We remained floating, as we were placed on the outer pontoon. This boat looked like it had been settling in the mud now for a few years.

We are keen to see a little more of this coast line, and on our next trip we visit Dunkirk in France, and also plan our next country change into Belgium, leaving behind cheese and baguettes, for chocolate and beer.

Eastbourne to Boulogne

April 7, 2022 / fiandadrian

It was finally time to shake off our winter inertia and venture out into a world beyond Eastbourne.

The passage to Boulogne is 50 miles in a straight line. But the tide goes from 0 up to 3 knots sideways so a straight line is a curved line. And then there are shipping channels that you must cross at 90 degrees. But you must point across at 90 degrees so with the tide it might be 75 degrees or 105 degrees. And the shipping channels change direction so 90 degrees might point you East and a few miles away 90 degrees might point you East North East. But at least we are sure about our boat speed because it is dependent on the wind and the forecasted direction and strength is always right.

So we started with a plan, and then we changed it, and changed it again as the conditions changed.

Eastbourne marina had been a friendly sheltered harbour for Away over winter. Dinner at the Grand Hotel and catching up with friends were highlights. But Bernie never quite fell in love with pebble beaches and the local Harvester never felt like our local. It was time to return to the land of baguettes and fine wine. At 5 am the alarm reminded us sailing in tidal areas is not always on our preferred timetable.

The Eastbourne lock dropped us a disconcerting distance into the exit channel.

We slowly made our way out with the center board raised for extra clearance.

The wind was behind us and our recent practice with the pole was put to good use. This used to be one of our favorite ways to sail on Addictive and Away seems equally happy with this configuration.

We managed to get further along the coast than we expected before picking our moment to dodge the big ships in the shipping channel. Our path successfully avoided 5 of them but the last looked a little close.

A couple of minutes later Fi appeared on deck looking suitably chuffed and announced she had chatted to the ship and it was changing direction for us!

The wind and waves built to 20 knots and 1-2 meters as we scooted across the no-mans-land between the east and west shipping channel. We experimented with some reefs and different sail configurations. It was looking as if we might sail a straight line to Boulogne if the wind continued and we hit the shipping channel far enough north.

Bernie was flat out helping with everything.

There was one ship that was on a collision course with us, but Fi jumped on the radio and soon had him sorted out.

I was just commenting that we had 30 minutes till the edge of the shipping channel and then we would need a close look out for crab pots, when a crab pot whistled past a few meters to starboard. We were back in French waters.

Approaching the French coast the waves started reflecting off the shore and it became more and more confused. Away handled it with ease but we were extra careful when going forward on deck.

We had made the crossing faster than expected, and once safely docked we did perform arrival formalities: wee on the dock (Bernie), buy baguettes and red wine (Fi & Adrian).

We also did the other more boring arrival formalities, such as filling in forms, and getting a visit from the lovely police officers from Calais who drove down to visit us especially and give us the much coveted stamp in our passports.

The next day the entrance to the harbour looked slightly different with gusts into the 50s! We might stay here a few days till it calms down. Boulogne is the biggest fishing port in France, so there is plenty of food to keep us interested.

Winter Boat Jobs

April 6, 2022 / fiandadrian

Being in Eastbourne we have not had too many distractions from the long list of boat jobs we wanted to get done before heading to the Baltic. Here are some of the jobs we got done.

We secured some storage boxes in the cavernous unused spaces under the floor.

Installed an retractable clothes line in the tech room.

Modified the bimini cover so it can be put away without detaching the front frame which simplifies set up and put away.

Organised the sail locker with some boat hook holders, shelves for paddle boards, storage boxes, and electric outboard mount point.

Installed a gas strut under the bed so we can get to the storage without holding up 753kg with one hand whilst accessing storage with the other.

Crocheted an orchid hanger (first indoor plant…its a slippery slope)

Installed an offshore safe fruit bowl

Improved the bike storage (yes it was worse before)

Found a good spot for Bernie’s folded carriage

Fixed some issues and learnt lots about our distributed power system. You CAN read the stories here.

There are always more boat jobs to be done, but for now this represents for us a good start and it means we can head off. Its sometimes hard to break the inertia, especially when boat jobs are always there, but we are committed to continuing our journey. The last big job is to haul out and hose off the bottom of the boat from a winter of sitting still (its looking pretty green), plus check our anodes, however the Sovereign Harbour boat lift is fully booked for months, so we have to find another port in which to do this – so off we will go!

Getting to know our Scheiber

April 6, 2022 / fiandadrian

We expect many owners first experience of distributed CAN based electrical systems will be when they pick up their Garcia. In our last boat, a wire ran from the switch panel to the light/fan/etc and back. In the Garcia power goes to distribution ‘blocs’ to which the light/fan/etc is connected, and the power is turned on/off by a message over the CAN network. After about hull 24 the Scheiber CAN based power distribution was used not just for lights, but for almost all power distribution.

There is lots of discussion about whether this more complex system is ideal for an exploration style boat, but for us the important thing is been learning the skills to fix the system when it fails (its on a boat). We are no experts, but we thought we would collect together some stories and learnings that might help other owners.

Here are a few things that were not immediately obvious to us:

Most of the lights and fans are on lighting blocs. Your light switches talk wirelessly to these lighting blocs and you can have fun reconfiguring them to switch on the things you expect them to switch on.
The navigation lights are on a lighting bloc. If the bloc fails, your nav lights fail. You need to have a plan. Ours did fail when we were in port and we wrote about it here.
Bloc 9s are used for most of the power distribution. These have some configuration options that can have unforeseen and expensive consequences. You can read about one such experience here.
One of the options you can configure on a Bloc 9 is to automatically power on when the system restarts. This might be set for a Fridge/Freezer so that they come on after a power outage. Perhaps somewhat less obvious is when you leave the boat for a few weeks, turn off the fridge on the Navicolor, and leave it propped open. If there is a power out event whilst your are away, the fridge will restart and run flat out as it is open, and therefore using the same amount of power as a small town.

Here’s some things we would have told ourselves to do when we picked up the boat, based on our current 6 months of experience:

Get the Scheiber English documentation. There is not much, but its worth having.
Make sure you have the Schieber schematics from Garcia. These will tell you which bloc runs the ‘chart table light’ and where that bloc is physically located.
To do any configuration on the Navicolor you will need a 4 digit code. Get this before you leave.
Reconfigure a light switch. This will practice using the schematics to find a bloc. Also we like that the switches now make sense to us!
Check the options on the Navicolor for the autopilot. Try to bypass the CAN switching using the fuse on the Bloc 9 for the autopilot. If the Navicolor fails you might need to do this.
Write down a plan for navigation light failure and Navicolor display failure

Lights out

April 3, 2022 / fiandadrian

After we returned from our canal boat trip we noticed some lights in the boat were not working.

In this brave new CAN bus world we need first to find the Scheiber lighting bloc:

Look at the Scheiber schematics and work out which lighting bloc is responsible for the failed lights
Look up the location of the the lighting bloc in Scheiber schematics boat layout page

The lighting bloc for the failed lights was behind the chart table and a quick inspection showed it was flashing red, but not green which indicate the bloc number in the network. When we looked at the Navicolor display the bloc was missing from the display.

We noticed that a second bloc was missing from the Navicolor display. Reviewing the schematics we discovered the second failed bloc managed our navigation lights. The icons to turn on the navigation lights had also disappeared from the Navicolor display. This bloc was also flashing red with no green lights.

Two failed Blocs together in the chart table. Co-incidence? Both have power an no visible damage to the boards.

Garcia asked us to check the power and to bypass each failed Bloc in turn on the CAN bus. As the voltage was good and neither Bloc came alive when the other was bypassed, Garcia determined that the blocs had failed and needed to be replaced. Garcia noted that they had been using the blocs for 7 years and 98% never failed.

We got 2 new replacement blocs and transferred the wires from the old blocs to the new bloc. One of the wires tells the bloc what number it is in the network, but the configuration, and light switches need to be configured. We understand the configuration can be recovered from the last backup, but we chose to do it manually. The Scheiber schematics show the function of each slot and the relevant icon can be configured on the Navicolor screen.

Light switches can be assigned to functions on the lighing bloc by (surprisingly you can find English documentation on this on the Schieber web site):

Long press (1.5sec) the left switch on the lighting bloc – this will make slot 1 turn on and off (ie if its a light it will flash)
If you want to assign a new switch:
- Press the light switch that will turn on that light/fan/other
- Then press the light switch that will turn off that light/fan/other
Press the left switch on the lighting bloc again to move to the next light/fan/other on the bloc and repeat

Our observations from this experience are:

As the Scheiber lighting blocs are used for our navigation lights, a failure is a safety issue.
It would be possible to substitute another bloc to get the navigation lights going again – this is likely the quickest option
With some fiddling and some spare wire we could bypass the bloc and turn on the navigation lights (even if the Navicolor was dead)
It took Garcia about 6 weeks to get us a replacement bloc
Knowing how to reprogram the blocs and light switches is a necessary skill

We now carry a spare lighting bloc and could install it. In hindsight we think it would have been very useful to have reprogrammed a few light switches when we got the boat as this process uses most of the steps we need to replace a bloc.

Autopilot resigns

April 3, 2022 / fiandadrian

When we are on autopilot, and the waves get over 1.5m and are not directly on the beam, the following happens:

1. An autopilot alarm goes off accompanied by a ‘No Rudder Response’ message

2. The dog rises from his slumber, barks and starts running madly around the boat trying to find the cause of the beeping

3. The autopilot switches off

4. Panicked people start diving around the cockpit trying to regain control boat control

We have a single NAC-3 autopilot running a Jefa steering arm with an RF25 rudder sensor. The problem, however, turned out to be none of these, but was a configuration issue on the Scheiber electrical system.

Our diagnosis of the autopilot issue took several months:

1. We did the dock based calibration of the autopilot. No change

2. Garcia ‘fixed’ the problem. Based on the boats track we suspect they ran the dock and sea calibration of the autopilot. No change.

3. Garcia contacted French Navico (B&G provider) who suggested changing some autopilot configuration parameters. No Change.

4. We contacted Navico UK (brilliant service & knowledgeable people). Over the phone analysis suggested a slipping clutch on the Jefa steering unit could be the culprit. Jefa confirmed it was not slipping.

5. We finally worked out that the voltage getting to the NAC-3 autopilot dropped as soon as it attempted to move the Jefa steering arm. The NAC-3 didn’t have enough power to move the Jefa arm, detected that the rudder hadn’t moved when instructed, and chose to give up and go home.

Steering components require smaller agile person access.

The power to the NAC-3 comes from a Scheiber Bloc 9. Its not hard to open these things and with a multimeter we could confirm there were lots of volts (14) coming in to the Bloc. We measured the output voltage which was an okish 12.5V. But when the autopilot was engaged and attempting to engage the Jefa arm we could see the voltage drop from 12.5V to 3-5V.

The Bloc 9 for our autopilot was in the tech room near the inverter/chargers.

We moved the NAC-3 to another port on theBloc-9 and it worked fine with no voltage issues. It seemed like the output slot was fault.

We later discovered that the ‘faulty’ slot had the ‘Soft Start’ option turned on and this was causing the drop in voltage. This option can be selected on the Navicolor display. Once reconfigured, the original port worked with the autopilot.

We learnt that:

Always check the Scheiber configuration if there is a hint of an electrical issue (or not)
Its simple to open the Bloc 9 and test voltages with a multimeter
Neurotic dogs do not like boat alarms