Crossing the Equator (and more on Amel Super Maramu sailboats)

Today may well be our last full day at sea on this crossing.  It’s 9am and we just crossed 1 degree north of the equator which means we are 60 nautical miles from the imaginary line bisecting the globe into Northern and Southern halves.  

We’re motoring on a course of 238 degrees (so only 32 degrees south of west), so it will take us about 115 nm to get there but we’re barely hanging on to the Northern Hemisphere by a thread.   

Our toilets (aka heads) are all electric and don’t have much water in the bowls and what is there gets sucked straight down so we don’t get to test the changing of the rotation of the water around a drain (if that would work on a rocking and rolling sailboat anyway). 

We generally don’t put anything other than rinsed soap bubbles down the sinks as all of that water ends up in the grey water system (aka “the bilge”).   

The Amel’s have a great system where the toilets go to their own holding tanks which can be drained out to the ocean through ball valves (so inshore, we keep the ball valves closed and the sewage on board, but offshore, we open the valves and let the macerated sewage drain overboard one poop at a time.  (Human poop is guppy shit on the bottom of the ocean compared to a whale, shark or dolphin - or even a Parrot Fish).   

The electric heads use salt water to flush the toilets and that’s why when there is phosphorescence around, we often get glow in the dark toilet bowls.  That really freaked me out the first time I saw the bathroom was lit up just by the toilet bowl. 

All of the “grey water”, sinks, showers, dishwasher, washer and anchor locker as well as any of the various floor bilges where water would collect in the event of a leak, drain (by means of isolated valves) into the main bilge at the bottom of the keel.   Because it’s a very yucky job to clean that bilge, every Amel that I’ve sailed on has instituted a rule that nothing goes down the drains except “soap rinse water”.  

This means, all kitchen plates, etc get washed in a plastic tub in the big kitchen sink and we throw that water overboard as soon as it gets dirty and the only thing that goes down the drain is the rinsing you do to get the soap off your hands and dishes.   We don’t even spit out our toothpaste into that water (we use the toilet for that). 

Baz told me it took him 5 minutes to clean the bilge after 2 years of use.  Not much worse than hanging upside down scrubbing out a 6’ long tube of years of accumulated crud.  Small sacrifice to have to carry the little tub up into the cockpit and throw it over board.  

Anyway, enough about the bilges and septic systems (but it is one of the reasons that I’ve never smelled anything like a musty smell or anything foul inside an Amel).  The bilges are so dry that we use them to store all of the canned goods (we take off the paper labels) and they don’t get the slightest bit rusty.  Might as well be sitting on the supermarket shelf.   

Some Amel owners store their paper towels down there but I think that’s a horrible idea because if you ever did get a leak, the paper towels would clog up your bilge pump and stop it from working to drain the problem.    That’s why we take the paper labels off the cans and jars (also certain bugs like to eat the glue holding them on so by removing those, you remove the food source and don’t get the bugs in the first place.  

Same reason, we don’t bring cardboard on the boat (they lay their eggs in the corrugated tubes and come out to breed).  We also wash all the veggies and fruits with a mild vinegar solution (and a quick fresh water rinse).  

Talking of veggies and fruits, wow.   They just taste so much better down here.  I’ve always loved mangoes (and peaches) but these are out of this world.   Same goes for the pineapples, papayas, avocados, watermelons, bananas, plantains, peppers, etc.  They just seem to burst with flavours.  Oh, and those plantains?  You haven’t had a desert until you’ve had an overripe plantain, cut in slices and fried in butter until it is almost blackened straight off the pan.  It’s like melt in your mouth candy without being sickly sweet.  

Back to the voyage, last night when I was doing one of my two night watches (4-8 and midnight to 4), those birds were flying around the boat, often in formation with us riding the invisible waves we create with the sails looking for small fish and plankton.  Because they’d drop into the ocean now and then to grab some morsel, they would pick up phosphorescence on their feathers and would then glow in the dark as they were flying along.  The moon didn’t come up until late so it was very dark but very odd to see these glow in the dark brown boobies flying alongside us often chasing flying fish that our hull spooks into flying away from the boat skimming the tops of the waves leaving their own phosphorescent trails.  Very cool.

Today, it’s fairly humid as you’d expect by the equator but it isn’t hot.  The water temperature has fallen to 74 degrees from the upper 80’s and low 90’s around Panama (23C from 29-32C) so the air temperature has fallen as well.  My iPhone says the temperature is 75F/24C with a high of 26C today here (although how the hell it knows that is beyond me).

It’s strange being now only 57 nautical miles (106 km) at the equator and having temperatures at sea level in the 70’s.  All that cold water coming up from Antarctica on the Humboldt Current.  The current picture on the Windy app is straight out of a horror show with the currents coming up from the south disappearing into the depths at the equator (showing the lack of effectiveness of the Coriolis Force at the equator).  All that cold water is being mixed up with the warm waters and generates all sorts of wildlife.  

The cold water coming up from the south intersects the east to west flowing South Equatorial Current on the surface which is quite warm.  This causes the colder, more dense water to “dive” and it goes down to the Eastward flowing Crombwell Current which flows 50-200m down underneath the SEC going in the opposite direction. This cold water feeds the Crombwell Current which we’ve been seeing signs of on our depth sounder for a few days now as we go parallel to where it runs.  We’ve been seeing depths from 35-45m on the depth sounder despite being in 1000’s of metres of water because the sharp thermocline layer (temperature gradient) between the warmer surface waters and colder Crombwell Current reflects the sonar like light reflects off water droplets to form a rainbow.  

This may explain why a few minutes ago as I was washing up the lunch dishes, I was called to the deck to see a large pod of dolphins that were racing to the boat.  Just as I got on deck, one jumped immediately ahead of us and cleared the top of the pulpit with his whole body before neatly turning over and executing a perfect dive with hardly any splash.  I had the phone in my hand but hadn’t yet turned it on (one hand for me and one for the boat).  

These were big dolphins, 6-9’ long and we saw one baby with them struggling to get into the masses of them fighting for room to surf our bow wave.  Just as we were fascinated with them, we sailed right by a huge pod of pilot whales!  They were feeding on something as they were clearly bunching it into a ball and taking turns going through it.  Pilot whales are about the size of killer whales but look more like dolphins and are mostly black.   They often ride the bow waves of ships (hence the name “Pilot” Whales).  I did manage to get some video footage of the dolphins and Pilot Whales (further away unfortunately).   I’ve put that into the shared album.  

Coincidentally, just as I was typing this a couple of dolphins jumped right beside the cockpit, and Laura and I raced up front to see four of them playing in the bow waves again.  One rolled over to show off his belly.  I also got some video of that that I will put into the family album. 

I’ve added a few photos showing the instruments we use to navigate and understand the environment we are sailing in.  The large screen is our chart plotter.  We have two of those, one at the cockpit and one downstairs out of the elements at the Navigation Table.  We use this to show us where we are, where we’re going to and it also shows the navigation charts (with depth information) as well as our Weather Radar.  Any ships show up on it as little icons with a direction of travel indicating line much like the ones in front of our boat at the centre of the screen.  

The length of the line shows how far we will go (and in which direction given current heading, boat speed (over ground) and drift).  Other boats show up with similar lines so it makes it very easy to see if you are going to have a conflict but the chart plotter is smarter than that even.  It uses the Automatic Information Service which is like the similar ADSB service used for aircraft to gather information about other vessels.  

They broadcast over the VHF radio in code continuously every 15-30 seconds their name, size, position, heading, speed over ground, and depending on whether it’s a commercial class A system or a recreational class B system, other perameters such as port of origin, destination, etc.   

The chart plotter takes this information and plots it on the screen and then uses it to project closest point of approach and will highlight and alarm on boats that fall within set warning thresholds.    

It also broadcasts our position to those same boats so they can see us.  Because we are only using a Class B Recreational system, our range isn’t as far (about 15-25 miles to transmit but we can receive their more powerful transmits up to 40 miles away).  Works pretty well except for military vessels and fishing boats - which usually turn theirs off when fishing because they don’t want to be seen (both from other fishermen as well as the law).  Luckily they turn theirs on to receive mode so they can see us at least.

A couple of days ago we got passed by a Canadian Warship (#413) and he didn’t show up on our AIS at all - but he does show up on our radar.    When on watch, we look for these targets both on AIS as well as on radar in addition to using the old Mark 1 Eyeballs every few minutes to look around.   

Cargo ships and tankers generally cruise at 13-15knots so are doing a nautical mile in about 10-15 minutes so we look around every 10 just to be safe.  You generally can’t see another ship until they get to within 5 nm unless they are all lit up at night (the ones with just Navigation Lights burning are particularly

hard to pick out).  Cruise ships you can see from 30 miles away as they light up the whole sky.

The other four screens are from left to right:

1. The Boat Speed/Depth.  The Boat Speed shows our speed through the water and not over the ground.  This means if we are headed into a current or tide, it will over read our speed over the ground (SOG) by the amount the current is pushing us backwards.  I remember Dad and I taking my old sailboat into the end of the Severn Canal in the spring run off the day they opened the canal and we were doing 7 knots of boat speed but barely crawling over the ground as the river flow was fierce.  The depth gauge works well down to about 250m but after that shows nothing (usually).  As you can see in this case, it’s showing 32.7 m but this is reflecting off the Thermocline as I explained above.
2. The Wind Speed.  The A stands for Apparent, and the T stands for True.  This shows the where the wind is really coming from (True) and where it SEEMS LIKE it’s coming from (Apparent).  This is different because of the motion of the boat.  Imagine if we had a 5 knot wind on the nose but had a 5 knot tailwind on the butt.  We would have an apparent wind of zero with a true wind speed of 5 knots.  AWS is Apparent Wind Speed, AWD is Apparent Wind Direction, etc.  The red and green areas show the areas where you really can’t sail because sailboats can’t sail straight into the wind.  The Super Maramu is good for about 42 degrees either side (not great) while America’s Cup boats got this down to about 11 degrees.  The reason Super Maramu’s aren’t great upwind is that the genoa car (the attachment point for the sheet (line) to the genoa is on the outside rail of the boat where you can’t trip over it but racing boats will put it as close to centreline as they can get it.  Some sailors will use a block and tackle setup to drag the foot of the genoa inboard but with the massive genoa we have (a 135%), it overlaps the stays and you’d have to furl part of it in to pass them and it’s just not worth the effort.  Real sailors (aka cruisers) don’t sail upwind much anyway. LOL.
3. The next one is our Navigation Info Screen.  It shows our current position.  You can see we are at 1 degree 0 seconds north which is exactly at 60 nautical miles north of the equator.  We’re also 87 degrees, 19.313 minutes West of Grenwich England Longitude.  Our Course over Ground (COG) is 236 degrees (Magnetic) and our Waypoint Bearing to Santa Cruz is 238M (so we have a 2 degree crab on).  That was reflected in the two lines on the chart plotter in front of our boat. (One showed the heading of the boat and the other the projected path over the ground).  This crab is to address the current and wind that is pushing us a bit further west than we want to go.  Our local time was 9am and we are showing an ETA for Santa Cruz at 14:39 tomorrow.  The SOG is Speed over Ground (6.8 knots).  You compare this with the boat speed on screen one (6.3 knots) and see that we are getting a half knot push by the currents.  Finally the WPT DISTNM is Waypoint Distance in nautical miles (201.9).  At 6 knots, we are doing a mile every 10 minutes so we have 2019 minutes at that speed to get to our waypoint.  I just round it up in my head to 7 knots and divide the distance to get roughly 30 hours (the real answer is 29.67).  
4. Finally the last gauge is the autopilot screen.  It shows our set heading track (230M) and boat speed (6.3 knots).  At the very top, you can see our actual heading at that moment was 236 and we have a bit of port rudder on.  It also shows that the rudder has moved only 1% which means the boat is very nicely balanced and could basically hold that heading without the autopilot or any pressure on the wheel.    This is an important thing to watch in a big boat like this as the forces can often build up invisibly and you don’t realize how hard the autopilot is working against unbalanced sails and the like to keep the heading.  A six degree crab with the kinds of currents we have around here is nothing to worry about as the rudder isn’t having to work hard to keep the boat on the desired track (230) even though we have an actual heading of 236 on to counter the current and wind. 

It sounds complicated but it’s all second nature and I can glance at the panel and understand in a second what the boat is doing and what the ocean is throwing at us. 

I’ve been picking away at this journal entry all morning and we’re now down to 47 miles north of the equator (86 nm on our course as we are going more west than south) and about 177 miles from Santa Cruz. We’re still doing 7.5 knots over the ground.  I was hoping that we would cross the equator in daylight so we could have stopped the boat and have a swim in 2000 meters of water for our initiation ceremony.  Unfortunately 86/7 is 12 hours so that means midnight so no swims unless we get seriously drunk.  We’ll have to settle for a cool bucket of water over the head on deck. 

The upside is at this speed we’ll make Santa Cruz just after lunch tomorrow but this is the ITCZ and I’m not taking any of these conditions as final no matter what the forecast says (stable). 

The last pictures are of Baz down in the engine room under the cockpit floor doing his daily checks. (He’s an aircraft mechanic by training so is very thorough).  The big grey thing beside him and in the other picture is the engine.  

That’s a 4 cylinder Yanmar 110 horsepower intercooled turbocharged diesel.  With the sails we have up we are doing 7.5 knots over ground at 1800 rpm’s burning about 3 L per hour. We have a 600L tank and two 25L plastic tanks so we’ve barely touched it so far. 

The white engine in the other picture is our diesel generator. We haven’t used that at all this trip but it can put out 7 kWh of power at 240 Volts AC (50 hertz). This is a French boat so shore power is 240V/50 hz. We have several inverters on board that change the power from 240v/50 hz to 110V/ 50 hertz. We know that laptops, phones, etc don’t care about the voltage or the frequency but some motors and microwaves don’t like it so the boat is powered by European appliances such as the dishwasher and washer/dryer. 

The boat actually has four different power systems.  The first is a 12 Volt DC battery which is used to start the motor and the generator.  That’s all that is connected to that. The motor has a 12v DC alternator that keeps that charged and Baz and I added a plug so that he can hook up one of his four portable solar panels to also charge it if needed. 

The second is his 24V DC main battery bank. It’s made up of three massive Lithium Iron Phosphate 230Amp batteries in parallel. Baz put this in over Christmas at Shelter Bay and it’s a huge improvement over the previous 8 60A lead acid gell cell deep discharge batteries.  

You can’t discharge lead acid batteries below 50% so although he had 480 A of capacity, he could only reasonably use 240 A of that but in reality not even that because they can’t be charged (or discharged) quickly so you are lucky to get a full charge as that doesn’t do them any good either. 

The Lithium batteries on the other hand can be discharged down to 20% and can easily be charged up to 100% with a few hours of running his 200A alternator on the main engine, his 1200W of solar power or the 7kwh generator. 

We often find that we can make a couple of hundred litres of fresh water, charge up all the laptops, phones and tablets, run the Starlink, all the lights and navigation equipment including the radar and have another 36 hours of use at the end of a day’s charging. It has transformed the way we are living.   I think when they get to the Marquesas they will be able to run the A/C at night to help them sleep if there isn’t any breeze. 

The 24v DC system runs all the lights, navigation systems, the electric winches, the anchor windlass, the roller furlers on the sails and even the dual voltage water maker. It keeps all of the critical systems available to run directly off the ship’s batteries with no other electronics that could fail. 

The third system is the boat’s 240 V AC system which can run from shore power, the big generator or one of the big inverters off the power stored in the batteries.  It powers the water maker, dishwasher, washer/dryer and the ship’s three Air Conditioning systems (aft, fore and main cabins).  If we lose the inverter and the generator (and aren’t connected to shore power) we lose some of the luxuries but nothing critical.   If you have a European plug you can charge your laptops, phones, etc but they are most efficiently charged from the 24VDC bank unless you are running the generator. 

The last is a Baz addition of a 120V (but still 50 hz) inverter which can run a few US power tools, appliances and we use it to charge the laptops as none of us have big 5VDC chargers and it would take forever. 

Basically the routine is if we are running the motor anyway, we switch on the big alternator to charge the bank in about two hours. While doing that, we run the water maker to keep the 1,100L tank full. This gives us plenty of hot showers and water for rinsing the salt off the boat (amazing how sticky it gets) as well as all the drinking water we can drink. 

Every two days or so Baz will cook up five gallons of kombucha (a fermented tea/ginger beverage) which we all love to drink as it’s tasty, fizzy and goes down well on an upset tummy even. 

If it’s sunny, the solar panels can charge the batteries to the point where he only needs to run the motor or generator every four or five days.   We really are self sufficient. 

Baz had put the fishing rod out and we just got a tease on it. When I looked to see what it was, it looked to be about a 6-7’ Mako Shark. He followed it and snapped at it but wasn’t fooled. Jen and I saw one in NZ when we chartered a sailboat to take us out into the Bay of Islands and he was just lazily swimming along. This was quite clearly the same thing.  

I also saw a flying fish take off near the boat and he skimmed several big swells and travelled at least 500m before diving back into the ocean. Lots of sea life. 

Baz and Laura are busy making a King Neptune costume for tonight’s celebration of our crossing the equator. I’m trying to be somewhat surprised but I’ve seen a huge crown and a trident.  We’re 62 nm away so it looks like we’ll be there after midnight. It’s cloudy so will be quite dark.  We’ve decided that we are going to put the ladder down and will do dips at least if we can’t work up the courage to jump or dive in. We’ll have to wait and see what the wind is doing as we definitely don’t want the boat to sail off without one of us. 

Anyway, there will be lots to write about tonight on the celebration so I’ll put that in tomorrow’s journal entry.  It’s time for me to do my Spanish Lessons.