On A New Tack

 How to use the Storm Sail on a Vision 444 My fellow Visionary Pierre on Umbono reached out recently wanting to review the steps for deploying the Storm Sail, since he was forecasted to be in less-than ideal sailing conditions in the next day. What better opportunity to write a blog article! This is going out quickly to support Pierre, but I will come back and add pictures and maybe link a video later. Preparation Keep the Storm Sail and everything you need for it somewhere where it is easy to get. We keep ours in the large lazarette under the Cockpit table seating. If you think you might need the Storm Sail, you probably should have the jacklines put out too.  The system we use to deploy the Storm Sail reduces the time we need to be forward, but wearing a life vest with harness and being clipped into the lazy jacks is the way to go here. Our Storm sail is in it's own bag with the following: A port sheet attached to the clew with a bowline A starboard sheet attached to the cle...

The Davit System The Vision 444 comes with a Carbon Fiber Davit system that is used to hoist a dinghy.  As time has gone on, some of the exact specifics of the davit system have evolved and changed slightly, but for our boat (Hull #11) and the ones near to it, this is how it operates.  Two Main Steps First, after attaching the dinghy to a forward and aft attachment line, the davit arms are raised; pivoting on axles which mount the davit to the transom of the boat.  This step is accomplished by attaching a line which runs through several blocks to the starboard, aft power winch.  Pressing "2" (low speed) on the winch power buttons and raising the davit into its full upright position, where it can be lashed to the boat with Dyneema loops. Second, is to raise the dinghy to be close under the horizontal beams of the davit arms.  The dinghy attachment lines, that are attached to the dinghy's bridle, run up through a fixed block at the end of the davit arms and then t...

After a little over a week in The Abacos, we waited for a good weather day to make the trip from Little Harbour to Spanish Wells. Wednesday was the day. The wind was forecasted to swing to northerly, which meant an entrance through the narrow and exposed-to-the-north Ridley Head Channel would not be a great idea. We instead pointed for the further but safer Little Egg Island passage.  We were still with Umbono, Mira’s sister boat and her owners, Pierre and Kris.  We left at about 8:00 am with a light breeze from the west. Before long that picked up and we hoisted the main and Code 55 and motor sailed for an hour or so. Then the wind swung as forecast and built more. We put away those sails and raised the asymmetrical spinnaker with 15+ knots almost right behind us.  The wind continued to build to 18,19, with gusts to 22 knts. The asymmetrical is good to about 20 knots, but since we were downwind running, surfing down waves and generally hauling ass, our apparent wind neve...

 A few people have asked for more details about out network on-board.  Instead of trying to describe it, and because I should have one anyways, I decided to create a Network Diagram. So far, the network has been working great.  On occasion, the 2.4 GHZ radio in the MNC-1250 stops responding, however I am working with their tech support to get to the bottom of it.  We have that device mounted upside down to the "ceiling" of what I call the network area in the owners cabin.  I have a suspicion that it maty be overheating as it it not sitting in the orientation it was designed to be in.  As it turns out, I have a spare 12v computer-type fan that I am going to wire into the 12V fuse block in there and mount it to the router and see if that makes a difference.  I also went into the configuration settings and turned down the output power of both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz radios, since the signals do not have to go very far to cover the boat.  This should also...