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.

Escape Adventures 24-25 April 2013
This is a continuation of the last post to show the rest of the Huilo Huilo area and the hot springs area around Menetué.  While we were in the Huilo Huilo area, we stayed in a conto at the Club Nautica in Puerto Fuy.  The picture below left will give you an idea of what the kitchen part of the condo looked like as we pose here with Pinky,  the manager of Club Nautica, with her husband Rafael who is also a boat builder.  We showed pictures of the balcony of the condo in my last post and below right is a very creative bird house on the balcony just outside our sliding glass door to the balcony.

From our condo, it was a short 1.5 km drive to the main hotel at Huilo Huilo where most of the board walk hiking trails started and where much of the activities were located.  The first activity of the day was the four-hour hike through the botanical garden in the rain forest.  I included several pictures of this hike in yesterday's post.  Here's one more of some small flowers we saw all along the trail.  

After the botanical garden tour, we drove south to see some more water falls and then drove back to the Huilo Huilo hotel to see some of the wildlife on display there.  On the walk back through the meadow, our guide pointed out the volcano in the picture below, which I believe is Volcano Choshuenco.  It used to have a triangle-shaped peak, but during the last major eruption, several million years ago, it blew off the top, and then in more recent erruptions the cone on the left formed.  

Once we got back from the botanical garden hike, we walked right through the main hotel, out the side door and down the boardwalk below to the location where the Javalina wild pigs and deer were located.  

The deer were advertised as being miniature deer about one and a half feet high that are unique to this area, but the deer we found, shown in the picture below, looked like the deer we find in the rest of the world.  Fine deer to be sure, but not miniature or special as best I could tell.

 The Javalina, shown below looked very similar to the Javalina I've seen in California and other parts of the United States.  When we first got to their location most of the Javalina took off and we were afraid we wouldn't be able to see them, but they shortly returned and Jay and I were even able to feed them some grass or weeds we picked near their pen.  Here's Jay feeding the Javalina.

On the way back from seeing the Javalina and deer we came across this pond with small Hobbit-like rooms along the way where you could stay.  Sort of like camping in complete comfort in the middle of the deer field beside this pond.  Very peaceful and quiet.

The next morning after breakfast we drove north toward Menetué, about a two and a half hour drive through some breathtaking views and, of course many blackberry bushes.  Here's just one handfull from one of our many stops along the road.  Much of the road was a dirt road and we were the only car on it for miles so if we saw a good blackberry bush or a scene we wanted to take a picture of, we could just stop along the road without holding up traffic.

We also saw numerous unique houses and buildings that were built out of the native stones and timber from the local area.  This was one example that caught my eye as we drove north from Huilo Huilo. 

Toward the top of the pass along the dirt road, I saw this rustic cabin in a meadow through the trees.  You can't see from here, but on the other side of the cabin was a good view of the volcano Villiarica  shown in the next picture down.  Clearly a cabin with a million dollar view.  

We got another view of the volcano a short distance down the dirt road as shown in this picture.  The road was gravel, but it had good sized pot holes so we had to go along at about 20 mph, which was fine with us because we were enjoying the views.  

We stopped in a small town called Pucan on the way north to Menetué and had a picnic beside Lake Villarrica.  There were lots of stray dogs around the lake and along the road so I shared some of my lunch with those poor hounds that looked like they needed a meal.  I took this picture of the volcano from our lunch spot.

Once we got to Menetué, we were assigned to cabin #5 shown in the picture below.  It was a two story cabin with a wood stove for heat, a kitchen so we could cook if we wanted to and hiking paths that started at the front door.  The main hotel, restaurant, and thermal pools were about a hundred yards down the road from our cabin.  Here's a picture of Jay jumping up in the air (pretty high actually for a big guy) along the trail down to the lake from our cabin.  

Much of the forest was covered with moss as seen in the picture above left.  It rains a lot here so the whole area is pretty lush.  We also saw this old cart and set of wheels in the grass near our cabin so I took pictures of them to give you an idea of the surrounding area.  It's kind of, not just the scene, but it gives you a sense of time that was from long ago, unhurried, purposeful, practical, and a time when self reliance was an important part of life.  A time when we didn't believe that everyone else and the government owed us something.  A time that, if we used these implements, not just the cart and wheels, but tools built with our own hands, we could prosper and be happy.  Our constitution just guarantees that we can "pursue" happiness, it doesn't promise that it will give us happiness, if we don't achieve it on our own—this is a point that seems to be missed by much or our current population in the U.S. today and for sure is completely lost on our Government.

Our cabin was heated by this awesome wood-burning stove.  It's a lot like the stove we had in our house when I was a kid.  We didn't have electricity or central heating in our house until my dad died when I was nine and we moved to Salt Lake City from the Jackson Hole, Wyoming area.  So I was well versed in how to light a wood stove and use the damper to regulate the rate of burning.  Everyone was enjoying the stove, but when we went to bed, Elaine said to let it die out because it was pretty warm already.  She stayed downstairs because she still has a cast on her foot from recent surgery and the rest of us went upstairs to hit the sack.  In the middle of the night, she called out requesting that I "turn the heat back on".  I yelled out from my nice warm bed that there was no way I was climbing out of the sack to relight the fire until daylight.  When daylight finally came, I climbed out of the sack and went downstairs to find some kindling in the wood crib beside the cabin and with a paper bag I dug out of the trash can, I relit the stove.  From her place under the covers and wearing Heather's long coat besides, Elaine explained that she didn't thoroughly understand the implications of her previous instructions to "let the fire die out" the night before.  

I'm sure she won't make that same mistake again, but instead will be a proponent of stocking the fire the night before and putting a few sticks of wood on it during the night.   Well, that's it for tonight's blog post.  It looks like more rain is coming in tomorrow and for the next few days.  I'll see if we can get a break in the weather to try out the new fuel pump and to get some sailing experience in.  I'll try to do some anchorages in the local Valdivia area and take some pictures I can share with you of the forts and other places of interest in the area.

Escape Expedition 22-23 April 2013
In my last post I told you that we had to get a new injector pump for our starboard engine because the springs in the injectors broke.  It's under warrantee, and better that it broke here in port than a thousand miles out to sea, but still—we're here in the middle of Chile, so it's not like you can run down to the local hardware store and get a new injector pump for a Nanni-Diesel engine.  Since it was going to take a few days to get a new pump, we decided to take our adventure inland to the mountains and hot springs area.  This central part of Chile has a string of many large lakes in the foothills of the majestic Andes and the hot springs of which I speak are fed by the multiple volcanoes in the area that are a constant reminder that the tectonic work that is constantly pushing the Andes upward.  We didn't have internet during the four days we were inland so I may end up breaking this post into two parts to cover the two areas that we went to.  The first area we went to is called Huilo-Huilo at approximately 39˚ 40'S latitude and 71˚ 50'W longitude.  It's approximately 250,000 acres of recreational area.  Go on Google Earth and look this place up along with some of the pictures there because it's much more scenic than I can describe here in a short post and a few pictures.  The entire area is owned by Mr. Petterman who built it into a magical area with multiple hotels that are built from the old growth timbers and then built boardwalks (many kilometers of boardwalks) around the area so you can walk along them and see the local flora and fauna.  It's expensive, but incredibly beautiful and it makes you feel like you were walking through the forrest and stumbled upon the village of the hobbits.

The drive to Huilo Huilo took about two and a half to three hours from Valdivia but we stopped along the way to look at the sights and to sample the local food.  We met this lady dressed in native clothes in the town of Panguipulli.  Elaine chatted with her in broken Spanish and lots of handwaving to make sure it was OK to take the picture.

Continuing on down the northern shore of Lago (lake) Panguipuilli you get a good view of the volcano at the end called Vocan Choshuenco which is 2,415 meters high.  Just a breathtaking view all along the lake.

 Looking back the other way along the lake from the same spot is very scenic too.  It would be great to have a boat that we could put in the lake and drive around, but alas, our boat is back in Valdivia and there's no way we're going to get it in this lake.  I guess we could have brought the dinghy, but even that would have been a struggle.

Along the way we stopped to pick blackberries that were everywhere along the highway.  I just wish there were more pullouts.  It didn't really matter though because for miles and miles we were the only car on the road, so if we wanted to take a picture or pick more berries, we just pulled over on the side of the road.  In fact, I was amazed over the last four days at how few people were partaking of these beautiful areas.  In most cases we were the only people at a restaurant and at our hotel in Puerto Fuy near Huilo Huilo, we were the only people staying at the hotel which had five huge rooms with kitchens and facilities for families or groups.  Here Elaine is picking some berries and then a close up for you to look at.

These two shots are from the balcony of our condo.  As you can see, it was right on the lake with a fantastic view and it's only about a kilometer and a half from the hiking trails and activities at Huilo Huilo.  Once we were settled in, Jay and I set off to hike on some of the elevated  boardwalks while Elaine and Heather explored the area around our hotel in Puerto Fuy.  

There are at least ten kilometers of elevated boardwalks so we went as far and fast as we could before it got dark.  We got a good feeling for the size of the area and the activities that were available and then we drove back to pick up Elaine and Heather for supper.  After supper we attended a briefing in both Spanish and English about what was available.  We signed up for the botanical garden hike the next day and then turned in for the night.  Here are a few pictures of the boardwalks and one of the waterfalls we saw on the first day at Huilo Huilo.  Large parts of the boardwalk were built as miniature golf courses so you could spend a whole day chasing the ball if you wanted too.  

The next day, the botanical garden tour started at ten AM so Jay and I went there early to see if we could get some coffee.  We found a buffet breakfast instead so we tanked up before setting off on the hike.  The botanical garden hike was about a four hour hike through rolling terrain in a rain forest.  We had a guide to explain everything and our own translator to explain in in English.  Jay and I were the only ones on the whole tour so we got to ask as many questions as we wanted and spent as much time at each place as we wanted.  It was great for taking pictures.  Here is a shot of the Chilean national flower called the Lapageria Rosea.  It's about three inches long and looks like a pretty red bell.

 This other little red flower was hanging in bunches from the branches along the trail.  This particular one had fallen off so it was OK to handle it.  In fact all along the trail, the guide pointed out the plants that were edible and usually picked some of the berries or pods for us to sample.  Not like in the U.S. where you have to stay on the paved trail that's specified for handicapped people and stay behind a barrier.  On this trail, you can go off trail and pick the berries if you want to.  This place is awesome and is probably like the U.S. was 50 to 75 years ago.  I remember going to Yellowstone Park when I was a kid back in the '50s and you could do things like this.

 This big flower, which in some cases is several feet across grows in many places, but especially on the Ulma tree.  The guide told us that the honey that is made from the Ulma tree flower is the best there is.  We didn't get to sample it, but several people recommended it.

 It didn't rain the day we were on the tour, but the guide told us it rained an average of 5 meters per year.  Many of the trees were covered with moss like the one seen here.  It was overcast and cool the whole day, and the diffused light was great for taking pictures.

 There were mushrooms of every type, like the ones in the picture below.  Jay asked which ones were edible, but the guide said most of them were poisonous.

One of the highlights of the hike was the Darwin Frog.  It only exists in this area of Chile and we were lucky enough to find a couple of them.  Actually Jay found the first one while the guide and interpreter were off looking in another area.  This frog is only about an inch long and looks like a leaf from the back.  He's very hard to see, but he gave me a good excuse to drag out the macro lens that I was carrying with me.

 After the hike, Jay and I stopped at this dwarf-like coffee shop right at the end of the trail to have a cup of espresso and some chocolate.  We also took these pictures of the two hotels right at the center of Huilo Huilo.  I'm sure they had special features that our condo didn't have, but they cost about twice as much so we didn't stay there.

Maybe we can do that next time, but right now, we have to pay for our boat and get on to the next part of our adventure.  Tomorrow, we are heading north to the hot springs in the vicinity of Menetué.  I'll report on that in the next post.

The inside looks like this picture and has glass all along the sides so you can see the boardwalks outside as well as the flora and fauna along the way.