Escape Expedition 30 April 2013

In this blog, I’d like to take advantage of the rainy weather and give you some additional information about Alwoplast, the company that built Escape, and the process used to build it.  It’s been raining cats and dogs for two days and nights so we haven’t been able to get out of the marina to continue our training and evaluation of the hardware and software.  We did get the new injector pump installed on Monday so we’re ready to go for more sea trials, but we need a break in the weather to do it and we don’t expect that break until Saturday. 

Alwoplast was founded in 1987 by Alex Wopper who, as a young man in his twenties sailed around the world in a 22 foot sailboat, with no instrumentation besides a sextant and a compass.  Alex was, and still is, a “real sailor”.  The rest of us try to enjoy the excitement of sailing by using high tech boats loaded with electronic gear such as GPS and radar that can tell us in an instant where we are anywhere in the world and the radar can point out obstacles even in the heaviest of fog.  In fairness to us wimps, however, we’re probably safer today, than were the sailors of yesteryear, and we can go into harbors in conditions when the sailors in those days would just have to heave to outside the harbor and wait for daylight or for the fog to lift.  At any rate, I have a great deal of respect for Alex, because he can build these fantastic boats, he can sail them, and he tries his very best to give you the boat of your dreams at an affordable price.  His whole company follows his example and does the same.  Alex came from Germany originally and Valdivia is where he ended up at the end of his voyage.  He fell in love with the breathtaking beauty of the area as well as the people and set down roots here.  Alwoplast, is a Chilean company but is managed with typical German attention to detail.  I’ve been here now for more than a month and I’m impressed every day that every employee has a meaningful job and they’re going about it expeditiously without constant direction.  Roni Klingenberg, is also of German decent and is the production manager here at Alwoplast.  He’s typically managing the details of at least three boats being built and sometimes more.  Right now, he’s trying to finish my boat and produce three more at the same time.  He's one of the best natured guys you'll ever meet, is exceptionally qualified in boat building and mechanical and electrical issues of every kind.  He's a hands on guy and he leads by example.  His son, Sven, is his right hand man and is responsible for many of the more difficult tasks associated with each of the boats.  Alwoplast is located in Valdivia, Chile several miles up the Valdivia River which is the only navigable river in the southern part of Chile.  It’s at about 39˚ S latitude right at the entrance to the “roaring forties” so the weather can turn nasty here in a heartbeat.  You gain respect for the weather very quickly here in Valdivia.  Their stated objective is “to produce the finest custom built multihull, or the occasional monohull up to 100ft, delivering exceptional performance, robust durability, lower maintenance and superior standards of finish and fit out for a very competitive price”.  

Chris White, the designer of the Atlantic 57 and 47 series started working with Alwoplast in 2007 or 2008 and produced the first Atlantic 57 in June of 2008.  They built eight of the eleven Atlantic 57 catamarans at Alwoplast and Escape is the first in the Atlantic 47 series.  It’s been a great relationship with Chris White and Alwoplast.  It’s been more of a team effort.  When I said I wanted to have Lithium Ion Batteries, Alwoplast said they didn’t have a lot of experience with Li Ion and asked me to come up with the original electrical system design.  I did and it was a real struggle because I found out that there are lots of component designers but very few folks who do a whole system.  Anyway, once I got the initial design done, Roni jumped on it and fleshed out the wiring diagram with frequent e-mails and phone calls to coordinate.  Chris White made a couple of trips down to Chile to participate in design meetings and sea trials to finalize the design and both Chris and Alwoplast kept me in the loop to make sure my desires were incorporated in the final design.  It’s been a great relationship and I feel like Alwoplast and Chris have done everything they said they would do and for the price they originally committed to.  Not the typical relationship you see at many boat yards. 

So, with that as the background let me take you through the building process for Escape.  In my first blog, I showed you quite a few pictures of the finished boat, so in this post, I’m showing the boat in various stages of being built.  The process starts with molds like the one shown below.  Hulls, decks, bulkheads and pilothouse are constructed from vacuum bagged Epoxy-Vinylester resin and high performance glass fiber laminate cored with PVC foam. All exterior surfaces are spray painted with Alexseal (TM) linear polyurethane coating. Interior joinerwork and floorboards are cored panels to provide rigidity at low weight.  There is a lot more detail on the Alwoplast web site at http://www.alwoplast.cl/interior.php?direccion=fondoA57.php for any of you who want more details than I provide in this post.  Once they've laid up the two halves in molds like this one.  The halves are  joined into a single hull and then the hulls are joined together and aligned so that the hulls are parallel to within a millimeter or so.  Like in the photo next under.

At the same time, the roof of the main cabin or bridge deck is being constructed in an adjacent bay.  This way multiple teams can be working on key parts of the boat at the same time.  The parts get painted like in the picture of the bridgedeck next below.

The bridge deck roof is mounted on the hulls using the huge mobile crane Alwoplast has and once, they are perfectly aligned they are joined together like in the picture below and the final paint job is applied.  At the same time the engines are installed, the sail drives (which connect the engines to the propellers), the rudders, etc. are installed and conduits for running the many wires throughout the boat are installed before the furniture is installed.

The boat is fitted with brass folding props so that when the engine is running, they are deployed like in the picture below, but when you are sailing they fold back like in the picture next under.

The mini-keel on the bottom of the hull helps keep the boat from being pushed sidewards or to the lee as the wind blows on the sails or body of the boat.  The fin on the back of the mini-keel can be set from the bridge deck to trim the boat to make sure it stays on the coarse you want.  The rudder is mounted far back in the hull on both hulls so it is in the direct prop wash and gives you good control under all wave conditions.  As big as these protrusions look, Escape only has a 3' 6" draught so we can go into pretty shallow anchorages.  

During this period, the carbon fiber masts are built and they're very strong, light, and stiff.  When ours were tested, they only flexed about an inch when supported at the ends and with 600 pounds suspended in the middle.  Our masts are 64' above the water line when mounted on the boat.  The small ring you see on the mast in the picture at the right below is the bushing on which the mast foil (the part that looks like an airplane wing) rotates when fitted to the mast.  

Halves of the mast foils can be seen in the picture below.  They're made of carbon fiber too and are very strong and light.  When they're put together as a single foil approximately 64 feet long, I can easily lift one end of them with one hand.  They feel light on the ground, but when you think of them being on end, it's like holding eight sheets of 4' X 8' pieces of plywood up in the air, so they produce quite a bit of power just by themselves.  I'm hoping to get more data on their performance if the rain ever ends, but in our initial sea trials we could get 3-5 knots of speed using just the mast foils with 8 - 10 knots of wind.  

The boat gets lifted into the water using the crane shown below and then the masts are mounted on the boat.  

The final stage is putting in all the instruments and electronics.  The picture below is just one snapshot of the massive amount of wiring required to run all the systems on the boat.  The green rectangular blocks are our four Lithium Iron Manganese Phosphate  batteries that provide approximately 540 Amp hours of power at 12 volts.  We typically draw about 5 amps when both navigation computers, the radar, all of the instruments, and radar transponder are on.  If the refrigerator or freezer come on, they draw an additional 5-7 amps each.  So, if all of these things were on for an hour that would be around 11 or 12 Amp Hours.  The big blue box in the picture is the inverter/charger so if we're plugged in to shore power it can charge the batteries or if we're not, we can still run 110 Volt AC devices from our battery power.

Finally things like the solar panels and wind generator get added on.  On Escape, we have six 140 Watt solar panels and if the sun were right overhead on our best day we could generate 70 Amps of power.  The wind turbine is capable of 350 Watts or about 30 Amps.  Of course, if we have a period like the last couple of days, when it rains continuously and there is little wind, we don't generate a lot of power to recharge the batteries so we would have to run the engines.  We have two engines with a 100 Amp alternator on each one.  We carry about 90 gallons of diesel on board and the engines take about 1.3 gallons per hour so you can figure out how long we could generate power and propulsion.

Well, that's the small tutorial on our boat, how it was built, and some of the subsystems we have on board.  Now all we have to do is get some good weather and get to sailing.  There are lots of things to see and do, but when the weather is bad, we're paying attention and giving proper respect to mother nature.  

In the next post, I hope to have some info on the local history, forts, museums, and sailing results.