[p]kudzuu1114

[s]
pos: 37 31N 006 20E
d: 08/07/2019 1530 GMT+0
w: WARM ENOUGH FOR SHORT SLEEVES AT NIGHT

Pasagemaking is full of surprises. However well prepared one might be, some new and unexpected lesson or experience invaribaly presents itself for our problem solving enjoyment. I'll tell you about two absolutely new things we've experienced on this passage.

First, this when we were at the eastern end of the Alboran Sea, south of the SE corner of Spain.

It was an evolving story, so I'll give it to you in stages. After entering the Strait of Gibralter, we assumed an easterly course at 36 degrees north, taking advantage of the tattered remains of the westerlies that blow much on the time into the STrait from the Atlantic Ocean. Then at about 30nm off the coast, where the north coast of Africa curves northward, we turned NE to follow along the coast at that distance offshore. We had just crossed the Morocco/Algeria border.

PART 1. 0400 local
POS 36 05N 001 19W
This, we thought, was not an emergency yet, but could become one. Briefly, our heading for the past several hours had been about 37 degrees to port of our actual course. The autopilot would hold a course if set to drive the boat at a specific degree of the compass, but became hopelessly confused if locked onto a waypoint and told GO TO. In that case it grew a gradually increasing crosstrack error.

We suspected, and didn't know if this is even possible, that the rudder may be turned on its post, meaning it must be loose. The only reasonable thing to do was to head to Spain for assessment and repair. Best choice would be Palma, Mallorca, where we understand there are superior marine services, but Palma was 285nm away, too far to go in a yacht in even the slightest danger of losing its rudder. Next best choice, and only about 50nm away would be someplace along the Spanish coast.

PART 2. 0800 local
This was sooo weird.... We turned on a northerly course assuming we'd head either to the Spanish peninsula or to the Balearics, and things promptly began to resolve themselves. The autopilot cooperatively locked on a waypoint and held the waypoint, keeping crosstrack error to zero. The heading reported by our nav systems was now only about 10 degrees off our course over ground, believable in the SE setting current that had drifted us earlier at 2.5kts while we stopped for a pow wow.

If we hadn't recently seen our own radar jammed by vessels hiding from pirates, visited 2 countries who jammed our satphone, and heard on the news that Isreal accuses Russia of buggering GPS systems at Ben Gurion Airport, I wouldn't even THINK this, but now I began to wonder if the nearest North African country has disabled nav systems along their coastline. What a crazy world.

Our tentative thought at that moment was to proceed in a generally NE direction and watch our systems closely for the next several hours, with the intent to head either to the Balearics for a troubleshooting session or to Greece where we'll do the same later (and at a lower cost).

PART 3. 0930 local
This is soooo weird, we thought again. We came to the tentative conclusion that our navigation problems were related to being in the coastal waters of that nearby North African country. Since turning more northerly and building some distance off the coast, most of the anomalies disappeared, although our heading still appeared to be slightly miscalculated, now off by only about 5 degrees whereas at the point where I felt things had gone seriously amiss it was off by 35 degrees.

Since the Balearics were ahead and still east of our current location, we tentatively decided to continue on toward Greece, knowing the stop at Mallorca would continue to be an option for the next 200nm, giving us more than 24 hours to reconsider.

We determined to remain away from the coast, out with the big guys again, hanging onto the right edge of the general flow of traffic. At 38 18N 001 07W we still observed a small distortion in our heading, as was obvious when a nearby ship crossed our heading vector on the chartplotter while he was clearly actually off to the left ahead of us. The heading error seemed to be improving, though, with the nearest coastline about 40nm away.

It's unlike us to place our confidence in preposterous possibilities, unlike Robbie in particular, but it's a strange world we live in these days and I guess that might be more apparent in North Africa than it might be in, say, Sweden or New Zealand. Looks like somebody may have buggered GPS satellite reception in their coastal waters.

So, on to Greece, we decided, with a potential diversion toward Balearics kept in our back pocket just in case. 40nm offshore seemed to be the magic number, at least it put us out in the midst of the shipping traffic and nobody seemed to be going in circles out there.

PART 4.
Over the next few days we watched the situation and have confirmed that if we stay 40nm offshore everything works properly. Our rudder is probably as firmly attached as ever it was and when we tack closer to shore, a very unattractive option but if you're going to tack, you've got to go somewhere, we ignore the bad data and sail the old fashioned way, using magnetic compass and the boat's wind instrument, and ignoring all the data involving satellite output. We're still in the area of buggered satcomms and have grown accustomed to working with less data and more common sense. It's a funny world. And we learned about sailing from this.

Oh my! We learned about sailing from another experience, too, on Saturday evening just as it was growing dark.

In keeping with the "All the Exciting Stuff Happens on Bev's Watch" principle, the light easterly wind shifted VERY suddenly, blasted me with hot air, at least a 15F warmer, rose instantly to 30kts from the NW, spun Mersoleil around 160deg and laid her over to such a degree that it threw His Off-Watch Robbiness out of bed. That was exciting indeed, as can be seen from the bow-tie shaped knot in the track laid down on our chartplotter at 17 02N 002 38E. Knowing I couldn't trust anything at the helm except the magnetic compass and wind speed made recovering and controlling the boat an interesting challenge. After that the wind alternated for a couple of hours between brief periods of NW 4-7kts and NW 13-15, these higher winds including more blasts of hot air.

Once things were back under control I checked radar. There had been nothing on radar except vessels and land before the wind shift and after there was only a small patch of scattered rain about 7nm away to the SE and that was gone moments later. I felt a couple of drops of rain during the wind event, but not enough to even call it a sprinkle.

This was completely new to me. I've experienced something similar with the passage of a cold front, but this air was hot. I asked Bruce Buckley, our meteorologist, "What the heck was that?"

I quote some of Bruce's very interesting reply. "What you experienced is what is called a micro-burst. There was a high based shower from the middle level cloud with a bit more oomph than normal. Almost all the rain evaporated before it reached the ground but the winds accelerate with the cooling of the winds. The perfect micro-burst evaporates the last drop of rain right at ground level as this maximises the evaporational cooling. The rain originated from the desert (the winds above the surface were from the SW. The micro burst passed to your NW - but it still contained the desert air - hence the sudden warming as the air came from the Saharan desert). You really need to have Doppler radar to see them at all - with a narrow beam width.

"This is the very same weather effect that hit the US Air Force 1 as it landed at Andrews Air Force base around 3 decades ago and produced a gust near 100 knots. President Ronald Reagan was on board at the time - the event literally scared the Cr@@#$# out of him - and so he funded the nation-wide US NexRad radar program - which lead to something like 100 high quality S-Band Doppler radar being installed across the USA. These high quality radar are the only thing that can warn of these events as they last a very short period of time and the computer models to date still can't predict them. Luckily your micro-burst was a small one."

A small one! It was big enough for me!!!!

We've been sailing almost all the time for the past 48 hours. Two days ago we feared we'd have to make a stop in Tunisia for fuel, hugely inconvenient to clear into a country just to stay for an hour or so. But now that nice sailing has returned, we're, as Robbie would say, cautiously optimistic that a stop will be unnecessary. The seas have been calm and flat, delightfully blue under clear skies, and we're eating well on this passage. I made time in Rabat to stock the freezer with individual servings of chile con carne, turkey osso bucco with parsley gremolata (lots of recipes online and definitely worth a try), red beans and rice, and other things we can easily scrape together if we tire of the other choices.

All is well. The rudder is fine. The micro burst didn't wreck Mersoleil. We know our nav data will be miraculously cured in another day or two. And we're having fun, even without beer or wine which we'd have purchased in Rabat if we could have found any!
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