Passage Panama to French Polynesia, day 10, Wednesday 29-March: AIS blues
After a windless evening of motoring, at midnight a light breeze comes in. Not a lot, but at 4-5kts just enough to drift along at 3-4kts boat speed. And more importantly enough to turn the engine off – always a nice moment when you first get that silence. For the rest of the night, we ghosted along like that, and I slept like a baby – 20 minutes of deep sleep followed by 1 minute look at the screen for shipping followed by 20 mins sleep. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
At dawn I was awoken by both my nap alarm and AIS error alarm. Over the least weeks we’ve had similar transmitter alarms, but only randomly and with apparently no effect on the AIS data we are receiving or sending. And to check, we often radio call a passing ship to check they can see us on their AIS OK.
But right now, each time I cancel the alarm it immediately pops back on again. Rebooting the system gives the same result. And the error code points to the antenna and/or the coax cable to the antenna, which is mounted up the mast on the upper spreader. I check all the connections I can, leaving only the actual connection to the aerial. But I have no intention of going up the mast while at sea. Such an act would need to be a do-or-die situation.
Hence my next move is to plug the VHF antenna into the AIS. This time I get no errors. On the other hand, I don’t see any shipping on the AIS display. But maybe there is no shipping to be seen? It’s not like we’re in a busy area here. And being a VHF signal, AIS only has a range of 20-30 miles at best.
So we have no choice but to rely on the radar to spot shipping and hope, if and when we see a ship, I also see it on AIS. We’ll just have to wait and see.
In the meantime, this gets marked up as the first official failure of the passage. Not bad for 10 days, but still leaves me feeling a bit bluesy. We suddenly realise how much we take the AIS for granted. Not being able to see all shipping around you, before you physically see it, is a tad disconcerting. Still, we at least still have radar. Plus, of course, the age-old method: keeping a good lookout! Not something we are used to doing, frankly.
For the remainder of the day the wind gradually builds to a pleasant 10-12 kts and we are nicely moving along at 7kts through the water. Still on our trajectory to the trade wind zone.