Just wanted to share my thoughts and learnings from
ARC 2018. It was a great event with approx. 170 boats leaving Gran Canaria on the way to St. Lucia. A few boats had technical issues but at least 165 boats completed the transatlantic journey successfully. I was part of a six-person crew on board of a 58 ft
Beneteau and we placed around position 60. Here are some observations and learnings for the benefit of the forum members.
Weather
We had amazingly good
weather, typical
trade winds 15-20 knots. The
weather forecast was spot on. We saw a few squalls with winds gusting to 30 knots but only for 30-35 minutes, then it was back to 20 knots. Typical 10 ft waves. My take is that you can cross an ocean along the
trade wind route many times and never see weather as bad as your home waters (Santa Monica Bay / Pt. Conception in my case).
Weather routing is very important in ocean crossings and there is some good
software available. We used Raytech Navigator and SailGrib WR, with the latter being a lot easier to use. A couple of clicks, send to
Iridium Go, get the updated
forecast, make adjustments, transfer
route to the
chartplotter, done. In reality though, having good polar files for the particular
sails on board is far more important than the
software. From this point of view, Raytech is amazing as it allows the creation of a polar file for different sail combinations and wave conditions for an individual
boat. I wish there was a more updated software that integrates easily with modern chartplotters. I have heard Expedition is the way to go.
Downwind sailing
My overall conclusion is that downwind sailing in moderate waves is harder than it seems. We had a
gennaker without a pole and the best we could do was 150-155 true. This required constant gybing which was not ideal. Further, the
gennaker was relatively large for the
boat and it required a lot of concentration to steer above 19-20 knots, especially at night. After the first week we got tired and started using a yankee at night which was safer but lowered the angle to 145-150 true and reduced our VMG even further. Looking back, we should have had a pole and/or a bigger
genoa but my general question is, what is the optimal downwind sail combination for a cruising boat, with leisurely crew that allows easy sailing in the range of 15 to 25 knots of
wind? It seems that all spinnakers have an inflection point around 18-20 knots which means, raise it during the day, put it down at night which is a sizable amount of
work, especially if you are late bringing it down and it becomes a mess and then the crew says, no more
spinnaker sailing for the next two days.
Some smaller boats with poled out genoas or smaller/heavier spinnakers overtook us on many occasions (typically it was
Beneteau Firsts). We averaged 7.6 knots speed, 6.8 knots VMG and I thought this was low for a 51 ft waterline. We had only one or two 200+ mile days but the boat was definitely capable of being pushed more with the proper
sails and more willing helmsmen. Interestingly, the weather routing indicated 16 days at start and we did the course in 17 days, including not following the optimal route nor employing optimal sails.
Boats
Most of the boats in the
ARC are 40-55 feet. My explanation for that is that it is typically a social affair with 6-8 crew and smaller boats just do not make sense for such large crews. Very few of the boats were cruisers who would proceed to the West. Most were planning to spend the season in the
Caribbean and then sail back to
Europe in May/June. Thinking back, I believe my 31' boat could have easily done the crossing, especially with a poled 155%
Genoa, applying one reef at night and two
reefs on squalls. I am really curious what people would say would be a good estimate for a
Hunter 31 crossing in similar conditions (15-20
knot winds, 10 ft waves, 155% poled Genoa). The routing gave me 19 days, which seems optimistic. Any thoughts?
Autopilot and radar
Our
autopilot (X30 via a linear hydraulic drive) quit right before the trip, so it was replaced with ACU-400 unit one day before the start. Then we realized that the ST70 control heads cannot fully control the ACU-400. Nevertheless, the
autopilot worked better than expected and it improved with time... may be the autoadapt function did its magic. In any case, never change the autopilot one day before a rally. Also, there was some incompatibility between the old
chartplotter and the ST70 heads, so the only way to align the
compass was to steer a straight course for a few seconds which is not possible in sea waves. It took as 10 minutes of trying to get one successful run. Then, as we were progressing along, the change in deviation was not being sent to the
compass which confused as for a while. We had fun but sorted it out eventually.
Radar was less useful than I thought. Most of the time you could see the coming squalls before the
radar, even at night when there was some light from the moon. Then the radar (Raymarine digital, non-HD) would not see another boat that was just 0.5 nm away. I am not sure if that was a problem with the radar (it was sent for
service recently) but I was quite surprised.
Even the chartplotters were not that useful. Ideally, what one needs is an experience to what is possible with the Raytech Navigator - plot different routes based on different polars, show target boat speed and actual boat speed, enter the coordinates of your class competitors in the software, show all of this on the display, overlay the GRIBs and do what-if analyses. This is somewhat possible with the Raytech but difficult to use and totally not possible with
current chartplotters. I do not understand why, it is not so difficult to integrate an app such as SailGrib in the
current Android based
Raymarine Axioms. If they can integrate Spotify, they should be able to do the same with SailGrib.
Systems
The systems on our boat were a disappointment mostly because of lack of
maintenance. The owner uses the boat for week long vacations in the
Med where the systems are not stressed as much. We had a current leak somewhere, so
consumption was typically 20-30 amps @ 24V, ridiculously high. Ended up having to run the
generator often. The
electric system was so complicated that I did not know where to start and the current meters were not accurate in my opinion. The
watermaker quit after the second day (some hoses got disconnected due to the repetitive waves, the PO has used chlorinated
water to clean the membranes, etc.) plus there was also a
water leak that we could not identify which emptied the
tanks on the third day. Anyway, we took the boat apart and fixed the
watermaker but it was producing 6 gph instead 25 gph for the remainder of the trip.
Cleaning up the membranes in St. Lucia increased the output to 15 gph. We also experienced a lot of chafe and had to replace a few lines that snapped. Had to go up the
mast three times - not fun in 10 ft waves on an 85 ft
mast.
My conclusion on the systems is that 1) simpler is better; 2) systems need to be used often to make sure they run as expected, i.e. no point in having a great watermaker that only gets used once a year - of course it will not
work when needed; 3) redundancy is key. This applies to everything, tools, chargers, multiple sources for everything. For example, the boat has two expensive 24V 60A chargers. One of them burned out. If the other one had gone two we would have been without electricity.
Solar and wind are useless on such a large boat (e.g.
electric stove) and the
engine alternator was not that big either. Redundancy also applies to tools. It is less important to have a complete socket set than to have multiples of the same mostly used bits since you end up losing them to the ocean every other day or so.
Time to cross vs. time to get the boat ready
We spend a lot of effort on this forum discussing optimal sails, systems and setups but my firm belief is that the actual crossing typically takes a small amount of time vs. preparation/provisioning/getting the boat ready. For example, we spent two weeks getting the boat ready (and it was not actually ready as you can see above), the owner spent months getting the boat ready and then we spent one week fixing the boat after the crossing. So, if we really want to enjoy the cruising part, we need to find a way to spend more time sailing. Most of the other boats had similar experiences.
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