Vendee Globe 2012

Vendee

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Thanks capt vimes-sorry I got the wrong team-I'll have to track that down.
Found this on Scuttlebutt Europe this morning:

Vendee Globe

* Zbigniew 'Gutek' Gutkowski (ENERGA), bowed to the apparently inevitable on and announced his retirement from the 2012 Vendee Globe on Wednesday at 1330hrs (French time) after days trying to find a fix for his autopilots.

Gutek, almost 2,000 miles behind the leader, Armel Le Cleac'h (Banque Populaire) had been sailing east, running tests on his two autopilots after his wipe out on Saturday. He said that electronic issues and the autopilots have been the problem from the start and he and his team have been working with B&G, the makers, who also have their autopilots on Gamesa, Hugo Boss, PRB, Acciona 100% EcoPowered, Initiatives coeur, Akena Verandas, Virbec Paprec 3, Synerciel, Mirabaud, Banque Populaire, Macif and Cheminees Poujoulat.

"Today I need to officially announce what I've been thinking about for days," Gutek said. "Being brave is not only about fighting, it is also about knowing where to stop. I know I did everything I could, working on my electronics issues for many days. I know my team and friends did their best as well. And I am extremely grateful for the huge support I got.

But I can't carry on like that. When there is big wind and when the boat is going over 15 knots the autopilot starts to live a second life, doing whatever it wants.

"Having no autopilot means I can't race, and if I can't race, I have to retire. When I joined the Vendee Globe I was not interested in being the 15thth skipper to finish. That's a tough decision, one of toughest in my life. But that's Vendee Globe, that's the power of the ocean and you can't fight it.

* Jeremie Beyou (Maitre CoQ), who had to retire from the Vendee Globe after nine days of race, may have found a good explanation for what caused the breakage of his keel jack head: " It probably happened as we were leaving the front off the Canary Islands. There was a 40-knot wind and a very rough cross sea. As I was going down after surfing a wave, I must have hit a UFO with the side of my keel bulb, because you can clearly see an impact there. This probably put an unusual pressure on the keel head. And then time passed and a couple of days later, the jack head broke because it had been weakened by the shock. After a thorough analysis of the part and discussions with experts, that's te likeliest explanation."



vendeeglobe.org

 

Interesting that he sails with one autopilot. No redundancy.

 

Vendee

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Read my previous post(76) again: Gutek had two autopilots and both failed.

 

How...doesn't sound redundant. Must be more to the story.

 

to all who follow sanso's 'no-fossil-fuel-effort' - like i do (*waves* to josephT and doug):
http://www.vendeeglobe.org/en/news/...so-and-the-return-of-the-flying-spaniard.html

but he has stopped now to take his penalty:
http://www.vendeeglobe.org/en/news/article/4209/sanso-takes-his-penalty.html

"After losing his appeal to reopen the hearing for his two-hour penalty, Javier Sansó (Acciona 100% EcoPowered), took his punishment immediately at 1750hrs (French time). But so fast has he been and so slow those he had just passed, that he did not lose significant ground. See Sansó’s video in the trade winds here.

Tanguy de Lamotte (Initiatives cœur), who also lost his appeal, has decided not to take his penalty yet and gained some ground on Sansó. De Lamotte, who move into eleventh today and is even further east than Sansó has until Friday 23, 1200hrs UTC to make his penalty turn.

The nightmare continues for Arnaud Bossières (Akena Verandas), who is a long way out of the Doldrums but is still in a hole to the west, heading in the wrong direction just to get 7 knots of boat to try and get out of there. It will be a small comfort that Bertrand De Broc (Votre nom autour du monde) is joining him.

The rankings were unchanged at 2000hrs (French time) and saw little movement, with the chasing pack of five still on the shoulder of the leader, Armel Le Cléac’h (Banque Populaire).

245 miles behind them to the North-west, Mike Golding (Gamesa) is leading Dominique Wavre (Mirabaud) and Jean Le Cam (SynerCiel) closer to the coast of Brazil in the search of a better breeze."

 

Does anyone use a mechanical wind-vane anymore? Perhaps the issue is they're not reliable downwind?

 

Mechanical Wind Vane

Would you have a link to a mechanical wind-vane?

Thanks

 

http://www.selfsteer.com/windvanes101/index.php
http://www.hollandwindvane.com/
http://www.hydrovane.com/

Perhaps this is the answer to my question [from here]:

Can windvane self steering be used on a multi hull or fast mono hull?

Windvane self steering can not cope with constant acceleration followed by slowing down.
When the boat accelerates to a significantly higher speed, the direction of the apparent wind changes. The windvane will steer the boat away from the wind, changing the total balance of boat and windvane.
The boat can then easily lose power from the sails and the system starts to steer back in to the wind.
This means that it may not be possible to steer an ultra light displacement boat or multi hull.
Especially on fast accelerating boats this will lead to unsatisfying steering. This is why we will not guarantee satisfaction when you install to a multi hull or a boat that has the ability to plane.​

​

 

Electric autopilots need sensor Data in, computational interpretation , then signal out to power the electric motor.

Normally a backup would duplicate all components of this triangle.


Would be interesting if a Boatdesign net contributor investigated leading edge autopilots.

 

There are alternatives to coupling the vane to the rudder. In the early 1950s, a Boeing engineer named Francis Reynolds was experimenting with radio control model yachts. His problem was how to sail with only one channel of control. His solution was a vane controlled sheeting system in which the vane "read" the apparent wind and sheeted the synchronized jib plus main accordingly. This allowed the single channel to be devoted to rudder control.

The device worked so well that the early radio control classes expressly outlawed it as unsportsmanlike.

Several years ago the US Vintage Model Yacht group published an article on this and other of Reynolds' innovations. PM me if you'd like a PDF.

Cheers,

Earl

 

Great to hear from you Earl! For those who don't know, Earl is an authority among model yacht sailors, esp. on the "metacentric shelf" method of designing a monohull that tracks well with a well behaved helm even as heel angle changes.

 

Thanks for the kind words In a possibly futile attempt to head off the umpty-ump iteration of the Great Metacentric Shelf Debate, let me make it clear that there are two parts to Adm. Turner's work: the method and the explanation. Like Marchaj and Phillips-Burt, I am convinced by experience the method produces balanced hulls. The explanation, well, that's another matter

Cheers,

Earl

 

vincent riou on PRB lying in 4th place had collided with a harbour bouy and delaminated his hull...

"At 0700hrs (French time) on Saturday morning, Vincent Riou (PRB) warned his shore team that he had collided with a floating object. The skipper was at his navigation station at the time was able to get on the deck immediately after the impact and see that the object that had struck PRB was a harbour buoy (a large metal buoy). Following the collision, Riou found that the hull of his boat was torn and delaminated for about one metre. The impact was on the starboard side of the boat and the torn area is three metres from the bow. Riou was not injured in the collision. He will wait until daybreak to assess the damage and the possibility of repair. Conditions in the area are good and the wind between 12 and 15 knots. At the moment of impact, Riou immediately called the race office in order to report the position of the buoy to other competitors."

also interesting because it was riou who saw all these flotsoms as the main danger and even experimented with a sonar system before the race:
http://www.vendeeglobe.org/en/news/...-damaged-after-collision-with-metal-buoy.html

 

Bad luck. Lots of junk floating in the sea. Heavy Polypropylene mooring lines, lost overboard from shipping, are invisible and treacherous. On one transatlantic I became entanled in a big plastic poly tarp. Took very long to escape.

I'm not sure if this was posted . Its an interesting read on the class.

http://www.accionasailing.com/wp-co...en-on-the-IMOCA-60-Acciona-The-Daily-Sail.pdf

 

Great article! The lighter weight Verdier-VPLP boats look to me like they have an edge, though:

Riou’s PRB is a new VPLP-Verdier-designed boat, one of four who are dominating this race and which before his collision were in the top four top positions in the fleet. The four boats are all lighter and faster than previous generations, with PRB’s thought to be the lightest at 7.5 tonnes.​

From http://www.vendeeglobe.org/en/news/...-damaged-after-collision-with-metal-buoy.html