After heading down to Rock Hall after work on Friday for a nice dinner at Osprey Point, we exited the restaurant to this bucolic post-sunset scene. I spent a few minutes capturing some photographs and then ran across Frank (our dock neighbor) who was testing his navigation lights. After his reminder, I texted Vicky to turn on the lights and captured a few late-evening photos of Seas The Day.
Saturday morning called for a sunrise walk (partly to calibrate my new Apple watch) followed by going out into the bay. As we headed out from Swan Creek, there was a nice breeze and it looked like a nice day of sailing. For some reason, the wind stopped right as I pulled out the mainsail.
So we sat...
and bobbed...
Eventually we got a few puffs of wind and soon we were holding onto our hats barreling down the bay at 1.0 kts out of 2.8 kts of wind.
(Yes, I'm being sarcastic.)
Wow... what an experience. As I released the drone off the back of the boat I saw it rapidly fly away aft. I quickly realized that the boat speed would add to flight speed and then turned the drone so it would chase the boat. But it couldn't chase the boat and I was having trouble understanding why.
The Mavic Mini has a top speed of 29 mph or 25 kts. We were maybe moving 3 or 4 kts at this point and the wind speed was maybe 7 kts. But there was no way I could get the drone to follow me. I quickly tacked and started chasing the drone with the boat. Everything seemed sluggish. I'll have to check the modes (I may have had it set for better videos instead of top speed) and the propeller guards (shown below) limit the speed somewhat as well.
It was maybe 15 minutes of sheer terror as all I could think of was "I just tossed $500 overboard" which is not THAT unheard of in boating, but still... I'd rather not be so blatant about it.
I gave up on grabbing photos and just concentrated on getting the drone back on board. Vicky captured a funny video showing my rising panic.
In the end I was able to find a point of sail that allowed the drone to approach, but I missed and it ran into the back of the boat. Luckily, I had the propeller guides on and it just kept flying against the boat which allowed Vicky to grab it and hand it to me to turn it off. Unfortunately she brushed a propeller and got a mild cut.
Clearly we need to work on this.
Sunday morning we took apart Seas The Day to try and find a way to replace the remote mic cable. That had failed last summer and I have been slowly researching and laying in all the parts ever since. I confirmed from Catalina and their contractors that these wires are laid during the build out of Seas The Day. There's no way to use the existing cable to pull the next one through since everything is wire-tied together and it all has to go behind the aft head.
We couldn't find a solution that we thought will work so I put everything back together for now and sought advice on the 425 user group on facebook.
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| Black cable in middle is 10m long and needs to get threaded to the cockpit. |
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| Unfortunately, its a rats nest of wires. |
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| The cable runs from the main radio all the way to the cockpit |
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| You can see the broken/seized pin at the 7:00 position. |
After all this effort, lunch on Sunday was "Creative Leftovers" (pork chop from Osprey Point, sautéed Brussel sprouts, and fried noodles).
It was a seemingly simple procedure but the convoluted nature of having to find the CO2 cylinder and then turn the vest inside-out required multiple youtube viewings.
I decided to test the old units. One of them I dunked in a bucket of water... nothing seemed to happen initially, but we later found the unit halfway across our yard.
I decided to try pull-string inflation on the second one. Vicky recorded this video.
This must have struck a nerve with her... the rest of the evening I heard this video replaying over and over again with double sounds of her giggling.
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