On the road again

We checked out with customs this morning , upped anchor at 11.20, and
set off for Ascension. We had conducted all the tests we could think
of around the anchorage, and Fred passed them all. The only one we
could not try was endurance! So we decided to do our sea trial in the
direction of Ascension, and set cut off time of 15.00hrs. If Fred
behaved until then, we would switch from "trial" to "Passage"! Its now
15.45hrs, and Fred is fine on his TELUS T37 ! We have now done 25 of
the 691 nm to our Ascension approach point, and have chosen to make
life a little more comfortable with a series of broad reaches, rather
than straight downwind. Our stb tack is more productive, as we can
hold 355deg ( with 331 being the Rhumb line). We also hope that as we
get nearer to Ascension, the wind will back to a more easterly
direction.
Roy had asked me about our sat coms equipment, so this is primarily
for him, but others might also be interested. The Phone is a Motorola
9505, with a data connection serial plug to the computer. This
connection cable costs +/- R1100 before vat at Radio Holland, but
Chris Sutton has a contact in Johannesburg through whom I bought it
for +/- R580. The Time package was the standard $750 for 500 minutes,
which I foolishly bought from GSM, thinking that they could also help
me sort out my SSB problems. I should have used Chris' contact Tom
Naude, as he is incredibly helpful. GSM did refer me to AMOS Connect
for the Emailing softwear, and that is what I am using. We had a few
initial hiccoughs, but Chris was fantastic in helping to sort it out.
We send off our Grib file email requests to saildocs, which generates
an Email data file to be sent to us, which we open off line on Ugribs.
On the subject of SSB, I found a fault in the one RCF plug, where the
shield wire was not making contact with the plug casing. The centre
wire was continuous from tranceiver to tuner, but not the shield wire.
I traced the problem to the one plug. I have now fixed that, and hope
that it could be the reason for my poor reception and transmission. As
I sign off at 16.15, Fred is still going strong, and we are doing
7.4knots!