More on the GPS malfunctions - Help wanted!

As previously mentioned, we've experienced two GPS failures in the past few weeks.  I've been trying to google the issue today, with little luck.  There is a lot of chatter about different sources of GPS signal disturbances, and it seems to be picking up the pace, but there's nothing specific relating to our region.  Here's a detailed description of the problem:

We have three GPS systems on board.  They are all completely separate, from the power supply through to the antenna.  The signal loss occurs suddenly and simultaneously on all three devices.  The signal strenght drops to zero for all sattelites, and the units lose their fix.  The first incident (off the Brittany coast) lasted for about ten minutes, the second (in the northern part of the bay of Biscaya) approximately twenty minutes.  During the second incident, we were out of sight of land, and there were no other craft on the radar, nor were there any aircraft visible.  When the signal comes back, it appears just as suddenly as it disappears.

Due to the separate nature of the affected units, I'm certain that the source of the problem is some sort of signal disruption.  After the first incident we assumed that we were the victims of a jamming signal, but given our remote location during the second signal loss, that would have to be a long range signal indeed.  I'm also reasonably certain that the disturbance doesn't originate from anywhere on board, as no equipment was switched on or off during or previous to the anomalies.  The TV antenna amplifiers on board have all had their power supplies disconnected, as the system is decommissioned.

So far I'm drawing a total blank on this, and I'm getting a little worried.  The Man expects a definitive answer to the problem.  Any help or feedback wanted!

The Surprise Enema Machine

We departed La Rochelle at 3:30 on Sunday morning for St. Nazaire. There was a bit of a westerly coming in as we made our way out through the approach channel, and Daphne stubbornly dug her nose into the chop and sent huge sheets of spray flying in all directions. I had the con with Bart until eight o'clock, and we fought our way through the drowsiness until the time came to hit the bunk.

I fell into an uneasy slumber, and was more dead than awake by the time George gently called from the doorway an hour and a half later. The alarm buzzer was beeping on the bridge, and it was my time to shine. At this time the ship was rolling heavily over to Starboard every few seconds, and when I came up on the bridge I realized that we'd been hit by a serious Biscayne squall. The sea had turned an ugly, leaden shade of gray, and patches of spindrift were skipping from crest to crest. George quite calmly reckoned that the wind wasn't much more than thirty knots or so, but the conditions looked alarming to me, especially as he told me that the wind had only been up for fifteen minutes.

None of the lamps in the alarm panel were lit, but the buzzer didn't respond to either the reset or off buttons. I was jabbed by a jolt of concern for my baby, rumbling steadily away in the engine room, but apparently unhappy about something. I rushed downstairs and scanned the gauges. Temperatures: Normal. Oil pressures: Normal. Air pressure: Normal. As I went through my list, my heart rate slowly settled back to normal. All the while, we kept rolling fifty-odd degrees over to Starboard, so that I had to constantly brace myself on the scorching hot pipes around the main. This is why you keep the engine room floor clean at all times; If it had been covered in oil, I wouldn't have had a chance of keeping my footing.

As it turned out, there was an intermittent fault in the bilge water alarm circuit, so I deactivated the buzzer (Snip!) and told the bridge crew to keep a sharp eye on the red light signifying a main engine alarm condition. At this happy conclusion I suddenly felt the urge to take a leak, so I made my way down to the port side toilet. There was an awful stench in the air, and the whole area was fantastically dirty. Too tired to give a fuck, I simply took my piss standing up, as opposed to my custom of sitting down when the sea is up. Thank God for that, or I would have had my first surprise enema. The toilet slurped, gurgled and without further warning spewed its contents forth in a deluge of flying shit that reached at least a couple of feet above the bowl.

Applying my engineering mind to what was essentially a hygiene problem, I concluded that the waves slamming us on the port side created a pressure spike in the pipe, with said spectacular results. Oh well. I should probably see about freeing up that frozen valve so that we can shut it while at sea. Exhausted and disgusted, I stumbled back to my bunk and unsuccessfully tried to get a nap before it was my time back at the con. On the bridge for the final leg into St. Nazaire, I received the news that the GPSes had failed yet again. Same symptoms as last time – all of them had suddenly lost their signal. This gave me a bit of execise with the little Raymarine back-up radar, using ERBL/VRM to plot a more or less accurate track until the GPSes magically came back on line.

The harbor approach was somewhat tricky, as the ocean swell surging into the dredged channel conspired with the two knots of tidal current to make the autopilot near useless for maintaining a steady track over ground. Still, we made it without incident, and I handed the con over to The Man to go through the lock and to our assigned berth. That part went smooth as silk, even the lock certainly wasn't too big for us. In the picture (thanks, Gwen!), you have Bart and myself grinning at the clearance. In an instant we transisted from the noise and commotion of passage making to the surpreme calm of a ship on the dock, the generator quietly purring away in the engine room.

St. Nazaire is perfect for this month of maintenance. It's a seriously industrial little town, with a major shipyard servicing the big cruise liners, and it has everything you might need to repair a ship. It's also working class to the bone, and I'll have no problem fitting in with the locals. To top it all off, there are several HUGE German submarine bunkers in town, which look perfect for exploration. Look forward to an illustrated update if I find the time for that.

(Note the 20-odd thousand horsepower MAN diesel abaft of the two tugs)

You got the con, dude!

Bart (our new deck hand) and I really do make a good bridge team. I gave him an introductory course on the Decca radar, and in short order he was tracking all targets and calling out interesting CPA's as they came up on the screen. In the first day he pretty much mastered the rest of the essential bridge electronics, and my role was reduced to sitting with my feet up, calculating course changes on the Transas and calling out heading changes. We're both still getting a kick out of conning a proper motor ship. Good times all around.

We departed St. Malo for Brest on Sunday morning with only a few meters per second from the north-west, the North Atlantic lapping gently on our starboard side. As we approached Cap Frehel across the bay, Bart called the whole crew to the bridge for the magnificent view. It got quite crowded, with oohs and aahs nearly blanketing out my steering commands.

Given the extreme tides combined with a chaotic bottom topography, keeping the ship on course has been a bit of a challenge along the coast of Brittany. The autopilot does a brilliant job of keeping the ship's head on track, but the currents keep pushing us off, sometimes by as much as thrity degrees in a short moment.

After we rounded Cap Frehel, the old Decca Bridgemaster radar's screen went blank, and the set issued a nasty burnt smell. At this, José decided to cut our journey short, and we put into St-Quay-Portrieux. On the approach, the door to the bridge suddenly decided that it wouldn't open any more, and shortly thereafter the four GPSes on board suddenly lost their signal. We later figured out that one of the French fishing boats in the vicinity must have put a jammer on us (Motherfuckers!), but at the time we had more than enough with making the rather tricky approach on visual nav only.

We stayed in Portrieux just long enough to re-provision, and set off the next morning for Brest. Once we got into open water, we hit a moderate but short sea straight ahead, and some of the guests got uncomfortable.

Yet again it was decided to cut our journey short, and we made our way down to Lesardrieux. It proved to be a fantastically idyllic little place, but the town had nothing to offer, save for a sad "Bar du Yacht" filled with arrogant locals who clearly didn't like the looks of Bart and myself in our working clothes. Thus, we made another early morning departure, making for La Rochelle.

At the time of this writing, we are meeting a Force 7 head on, with 2-3 meter waves, but these are not the conditions when I get my camera out to document it. The inclinometer doesn't lie, though. It has been decided to put into Roscoff for the night.

...

So we finally made it to La Rochelle. The sea got almost spectacular, developing into a solid 3.5 meter chop, rising very steeply as the Atlantic met the continental shelf on an opposing tide. At last I got to see the wave plow do its bit, a fantastic sight as the ship picked up a ton or two of green water on the fore peak, then dispersing it into a heavy spray that made the bridge shudder with the impact as she pitched back. Further into the Bay of Biscay the sea settled down to a solid five meter swell, giving us almost dry decks, but presenting challenges of its own as we turned south-west and took it on our starboard quarter. The autopilot really had its work cut out for it then, but the Yaw and Rudder settings on max kept us on a zig-zag course for the goal.

Luckily, it all passed without mechanical calamity, aside from a little scare as the Kubota generator dropped a phase. Thank god for backups! Now we're settled securely into the locked harbor, Bart and myself busy with all the little jobs that accumulate at sea, planning for our upcoming layup period, when The Man will be away and we'll be working hard to get her ship-shape for the dash south into the Med.

Hello from St. Malo

We've spent the past few days in an anchorage in Dinard, across from St. Malo. I was planning to write an illustrated update about the old town, but sadly I've hardly had time to go on shore, and have only spent a few hours wandering around the old fort. It is a monument to the allied efforts to crack Hitler's Festung Europa, bearing the scars of battle where armour piercing rounds have impacted the old pill boxes. Now it makes a stark contrast to the quaint town across the bay with its (to me) exotic trees and haphazard French architecture.

In a bout of generosity, José bought us a lightweight dinghy to play with. It is a Suzumar FIB (Floppy Inflatable Boat) with a 9.9 Suzuki on the back, and it makes a fine combination for riding two up. Most of my free time has been spent sightseeing by dinghy, a delightful pastime, cruising around the rugged cliffs and the old forts guarding the harbour approach.

Meanwhile, I've been well and truly busy in the engine room. It is a fact of life that when you're operating a fifty year old ship, surprises will happen. Meanwhile, the deck hand I recruited in Oostende has had his contract confirmed by José, as he makes a fine addition to the crew. It is a great relief not to worry about keeping the decks clear when I have to deal with miscellaneous engineering concerns.

A love story

When I stopped updating my blog, months ago now, I was in a pretty bad place. I'd just survived a harshly depressing winter, landing myself in a pit of unproductive self-pity. To top it off, I lost a good friend to hate, which is unspeakably worse than losing one to death. Then, in a flash of time so brief that it doesn't register on the great scale of my life, I found myself traveling the world in splendid fashion. Here is how it happened.

I was moored with Oscilia in the south end of the Moss canal, strictly against orders by the harbor authority, quietly hating my inability to take positive steps in my life, when the most beautiful ship moored astern of me. My heart was taken at the first glance. If you're not into ships like I am, this will be difficult to understand, so let me paint you a picture:

You see a woman, and in a flash you realize that she's the most beautiful being you've ever laid your eyes on, as the freshness of your impression shames the fading memory of those before. All you know in that moment is that just HAVE to go introduce yourself, to maybe know her beyond looks. In a short few words you know that she's not gorgeous, but also has tremendous strength of character, and in those moments you fall helplessly in love. If you're lucky, you'll talk yourself into some intimacy, and if you're good, you might get a more permanent engagement.

That's pretty much how it went for me with the Daphne. The spring of her deck line along her thirty meters of length, leading up to a high bow, a covered fore peak with a purposeful wave plow perched on top, presided over by a towering bridge atop a narrow superstructure, and the half rounded, pointed stern – it all added up to the most beautiful ship I could remember having seen. I walked over and introduced myself to the crew, and learned that she was originally built as a fishery inspection vessel for the sub-arctic environment, ice classed and solid as a rock, now being used for cruising around the world for the pleasure of her owner. I mentioned that I was an out-of-work marine mechanic, and might they have a few odd jobs for me? They did, I handled them OK, and suddenly found myself engaged as chief engineer.

Thus, very quickly indeed, my life changed in ways I wouldn't have believed possible. I was catapulted out of my hopeless self-loathing, into a brilliant, glamorous future of making lazy doodles on the world map. Of course, there were prices to be paid, in the form of turning my back on everything I knew, and most notably the end of my relationship with Lisette. This is the perfect example of the old adage: TANSTAAFL – There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Still, this lunch is so sweet tasting that I pay my price with an easy heart.

Glimpses of Belgium

We're steaming quitely into the fishing port in Oostende, Belgium. In the streets across from our berth, a motorcycle race is in progress, crowds milling about and bikes of every description tearing down the dockside at close to 300 km/h. I'm stunned. This would never happen in Norway, I'm quite sure, as it is precisely the type of activity that The Nice People would like to pretend isn't going on. Let them do it at their race track in the woods, so far away that we can't hear the noise, but in the streets downtown? Surely not. In fact, I thought that the Isle of Man TT and the Macau GP were among the very last road races remaining, but apparently I was mistaken. And the best thing about it? The locals just don't understand why I think it's strange. That's true grass roots motorsports for you.

Fast forward to The Jolly Sailor. I'm hanging out with Erik and Ludvig, local marine engineering maestros. Like myself, they're right off work, still dressed in overalls. Right next to us is a group of businessmen in suits, and the rest of the crowd is made up of everything in between, all interacting freely. This is a true melting pot for the social classes. My lifestyle has quickly branded me as "interesting", and the retired cop, the barmaid, the shipping coordinator, the down-and-out fisherman, they're all buying me drinks at a faster rate than I can responsibly down them. When I realize that I must either get out of there or compromise the next day's productivity, producing my wallet only generates a quick shake of the head from the barmaid. Like most nights in The Jolly Sailor, I leave without paying anything. Oh well.

Fast forward to the motorcross track. Erik has taken it upon himself to ensure that I'm not alone on my Sundays, and he is the perfect guide to the local motorsports culture. He used to be something of an MX star back in the day, and it seems that he knows everyone. Like everywhere in Belgium, this place is lubricated by beer, and the day hardly gets started before I have to politely decline offers left and right. Being Norwegian, that is not an easy thing to do. Where I come from, declining the offer of a drink from a stranger is tantamount to spitting him in the face, but here it's apparently OK. Erik provides me with a running commentary of the events, so that I soon know who to cheer and for whom to hope for a big mouthful of dirt. The day passes in the incessant din of high performance engines, with enormous clouds of dust drifting across the field.

Fast forward to The Barbeque. I'm with a bunch of people I just met. They're not really into the music, but they brought me here out of curtesy. Let the stranger have his heavy metal. Do you know how to spot a genuine heavy rock pub? It's not the music, the bourbon behind the bar or the biker insignia decorating every surface. It's the toilets, and not just their smell. Cobwebs in the urinals is the true mark of seriousness for a place like this.

Fast forward to Gent on a friday night. The scene is like something out of a movie. We're walking between all kinds of cathedrals and other historic buildings, and everywhere you look stages have been erected, with DJ's performing or live bands playing. Every hundred meters or so there is a booth selling drinks, one selling fast food, and a block of porta pottis. It is just as well, because the crowd density is out of this world, and moving anywhere fast is completely out of the question. Basically the whole downtown area is one big party, with different sections catering to different tastes. There's even a "quiet" corner, not in the sense that it is sparesly populated - the crowd is just as dense, but the dancing is a little less crazy, and the noise level is down to a point where you can actually maintain a conversation. It is a night of pure poetry in blurry motion. The party goes on and on, and when I give up at seven o'clock in the morning, it is still going strong. Yet again I fail to explain just how different this is from home, and I'm given the answer I'm starting to expect: "But this is just normal, no?"

Fast forward to the beach off Bredene. We're skinny dipping at midnight. This one was actually my idea, but if I'd hoped to shock anyone, I was in for a disappointment. They just quickly agreed that yeah, that's a good idea. Now we're back crawling lazily into the incoming surf, illuminated by the ever present phosphoresence in the water and the odd flash from the lighthouse at Oostende. We try to body surf, but the waves just aren't big enough, or maybe our movements aren't quite coordinated. When we finally crawl back up on the beach, freezing and utterly exhausted, I'm left wondering how I can be in a developed European country, and still so very far from home. It's beautiful, all of it.

Okay, so I realize that all of this calls for something of an explanation. I'll get around to that. Maybe.

SNAFU

Ha ha, "Situation Normal", that's rich! Still, I thought things had stabilized right around a low point for me. How very wrong I was. It started with a phone call, while I was hanging around Chris' camp and having a good time. It was Kjetil from Kambo Marina, who called to tell me that my boats were northbound with the current, headed out to sea. With Chris assisting I had Jonas started up within half an hour, and we made our way out to the boats. The mooring lines had indeed broken, sort of like I had intended, but only after dragging the mooring and buoy out to deep water. Damn.

With the only solid point in my life gone, I did what I usually do in those situations: Moored the boats in Moss (where I am forbidden to visit), curled up in a ball of apathy and cried about it. That got old after a week or two (I've sort of lost track of some of the time), so I started sanitizing Nemi for a spot of illegal dumping. While I was extracting the last drops of diesel from the tank, a guy turned up and bought her for 15k. That's less than 10% of what I've spent, and I haven't seen a cent of it yet, but I do have a piece of paper saying that she's not mine, which is worth a hell of a lot to me.

While I was still giddy with the joy of having one of the deeper shadows lifted from my life, Dad offered me a job in Hundested, Denmark. I jumped at the chance, and got busy readying Nemi for her first major voyage. I enlisted Chris as crew, which turned out to be a major mistake. He's been fucked up in the head lately, I think from getting dumped repeatedly by Kaja, and he had no inhibitions towards taking it out on me. It started with bitching about everything, to disobeying direct orders while taking his turns at the helm, etc. It ended in Hundested, with him on a train and me single handing it home.

Meanwhile, the recent turn of events has given me back my urge to write. Sadly, my internet hardware has yet again committed harakiri, in yet another interesting way, so I've been prevented from updating since I left Moss. I'm now in Rörö, where The Nice People have made a spectacular entrance, shitting their idea of architecture all over the waterfront. While the looks of things are nearly enough to make me puke, at least they have given me a plethora of Wifi connections to choose from. I guess there's a silver lining in this one, too, but the weather it's brought is such that I don't care if it was solid gold. So-called progress can be an abhorrence.

I finally figured out what's wrong with the Autopilot. The fluxgate sensor, which for some reason was mounted in the mast, was half filled with water. Amazingly, after I drained it, shook out a few components that had corroded off the PCB and let it dry out in the sun for a few days, it's started generating a signal again. Sadly, the resolution seems to be about ten degrees, which is hardly sufficient for autopiloting. So far I've done most of the helming inside, using the wheel for steering and the radar as a turn rate indicator (it is more accurate than the human eye), but today the weather was so spectacular that I steered most of the way from the flybridge. With push button steering and no rudder indicator i've made a shamefully meandering track, but it was worth the extra fuel spent. What a day!

When I checked in here today, I expected my readership to have imploded on itself in my absence. Strangely, that was not so. I thank you for your patience. Twelve hour days take their toll, and the local hospitality is outstanding in the off-season, so I shall now proceed to hit the sack. I will be back, though. Promise.