Current location for King Malu

Sunday 14 July 2013

Saturday/Sunday sailing to Cape Greco


54 nautical miles
Tim and I decided to have a weekend away at Cape Greco. The weather forcast looked great for sailing (12-15 knots in the afternoon on both days) so it would be a chance for a relaxing sail, but a longer test for the PropEL electric drive.

I also added some extra configuration/code into the HUI for the VDL (Voyage Data Recorder) function. You can see the detail of the logger as we motored out of the marina!


We sailed over to Cape Greco, using the motor only a little. The VDL log shows just past Cape Pyla. It was a really pleasant sail. We only had main sail and genoa up. Although we have a large asymmetric we didn't want to run that as Tim had hurt his back and the last thing we wanted to do was make it worse!



We're pretty pleased with the way King Malu is sailing now, even without the asymmetric we seemed to get quite a reasonable turn of speed. In 8 knots of wind we get an easy 4 knots SOG without really trying too hard.


Just past Cape Pyla we we hailed by another sailing yacht by name. They had seen us show up on their AIS and wanted to know if they were visible on ours. Yes they were, but their name and call sign were not shown. It appears to us that a significant number of the leisure boats don't correctly set their AIS systems up: Very few of them display their ships name.

We're using a Camino 101, which we also sell. It's a great unit and very easy to set up. You can buy in from our website MaluMarine.com

Tim had seen on the weather forecast that there would be an early morning northerly, bearing east and then south east. So... 3:20 am was time to rise (note the times on the VDL are GMT) and creep out of the mooring. This was so cool with the electric drive... almost silent so we didn't disturb out neighbours... well, I suppose the windlass did. But at 3am in the morning it was amazing, creeping along under motor bordering on total silence! It was almost eerie, with with the sea mist. I could see some craft moving about thought AIS and used the radar to check for those without AIS. I must say I love AIS.




The start of the journey back was quiet and I went below to catch up with a few minutes sleep. I had hardly slept at all during the night. I kept waking every 30-40 minutes. We're still testing the system, so although we have seen 5.2 knots, this early morning motoring was at low speed. The motor can do more, it's the power pack that is currently letting us down and we will be ordering new batteries and new power packs this week or next so, as they say... Watch this space!

Saturday 6 July 2013

Testing PropEL

We started really, really early this morning. This is really, really early for me, which is 6AM. We wanted as close to a mirror surface sea as we could get for the next test of the PropEL drive train. The tests confirmed what were were predicting and so on to the next stage of Research and Development...

Some very good news for the HUI (control panel). I had wondered if the CanBus signals from the controller were interfering with the CanBus signals from the Navionics. They shouldn't, but... Anyhow, with the new IDC interconnect board and all the terminations and routing now correct I thought I would try again and... yes... worked perfectly!


So now with a press of a button on the HUI you can change from showing data about the motor (eg battery voltage) to the navionics (eg wind speed).

Need to test further, but seems like we've cracked that at last!