Braesail is on the move again —— December, 2021

It’s been a long time—the months of COVID, a wonderful year in Sewanee, Tennessee, and two years of hard work for Braesail carrying charterers around the San Juan Islands and Southern Gulf Islands, but now she is joining us in a years’ adventure and is leaving her life (at least for 2022) as a working girl and going on a new, big adventure.

But before we tell you about the adventure, let’s catch up on the boat projects. Since that last post, two years ago, here’s what we’ve done to keep her young and beautiful:

• Replaced the keel bolts, completely recoated the keel with epoxy and bottom paint
• Replaced the standing rigging (the wire ropes that hold the mast up)
• Purchased and installed new sails from Port Townsend Sails (Carol Hasse’s last pre-retirement set as well as the new crews first post-Carol sails. They are wonderful, strong, and set like a charm
• Repaired the SSB radio so that it now works (and works on the ham bands as well). Now I just have to get my General license so I can use it properly
• Upgraded communications tools:
  • Replace the stereo so that it now works off the telemetry network
  • Added an Iridium GO and are actively using Predict Wind
  • Added an internet router which works on both WiFi and Cellular 5G. Braesail now has faster internet than we have at home
  • (and in the very near future:) Replace the VHF with a newer model. DSC (the digital part of marine VHF that transmits things like location and the name of the boat) has greatly improved over 20 years, and we are finding that some commercial operators (and more importantly, the traffic control system) don’t get enough info from our signal for effective communication
• The biggest job has been rewiring. When the bilge pumps were installed in Marina Del Rey, they were wired incorrectly–they bypassed the main circuit breakers, and the breakers were too large for the wires. One of the switches at the pumps failed and the wires were too small. There was a ton of melted wiring that I had to replace.
• The good part of rewiring is the power system is now modernized. We replaced the old Lead-Acid AGM battery system with a Lithium Iron Phosphate system by Victron Energy and now have almost four times as much available battery power available. The batteries now talk to the instrumentation telemetry.

There’s a bit of work left to do before we are ready for our grand adventure—outside the Salish Sea!

This year we are going to Alaska!

We’ll keep you posted, and there will be ways that you can follow us. However, you can use this link to track Braesail on the Marine Traffic website (assuming we are within communications distance of their network, as it works on our AIS tracking data):
FIND BRAESAIL
Sometime later on, we’ll embed the tracking data from our Iridium GO satellite router which will show our position.