Yesterday, we moved Tortuga from her winter home, 70-miles south to Chicago. The conditions were spectacular, 25+ knots of wind on our aft beam pushing us at over 8-10 knots the entire passage. We put in a single reef early on just to make the trip a bit more comfortable, but as the wind was predicted to come down, we shook it out about ten miles from Chicago, then the issues began.
Adopting my mantra, “do the hard thing”, I broke out the drone with the intention of flying it off a moving sailboat. Janet was a bit skeptical, and my first mistake…not listening to her.
Sailing with the wind masks the actual wind speed, in sailing parlance known as apparent wind versus true wind. So on the boat, yesterday, the wind felt “manageable”…but the featherweight plastic drone believed differently. With the quad propellers whirring we hand-launched the Mavic Pro off the stern. The drone shot straight up in the air, as we sailed away from it.
All at once the drone began fighting 25+ knots of wind. The controller started audibly complaining about almost gale force winds, and it was obvious that there was going to be a significant challenge getting the drone safely back aboard.
As a safety feature, drones remember where they take-off from and label that ‘Home’. When things get rough or power gets low, drones automatically return to ‘Home’. Where we launched our drone and where Mavic now considered Home was now a few miles behind us among the waves of Lake Michigan.
Aside from the stupid decision to even launch the drone in these conditions, I also failed to update the maximum distance that the drone was allowed to wander from its identified ‘Home’, about 2 km. So once we hit that point the drone refused to proceed any further… as we sailed away from it. The last messages from the drone were, “Its too windy, I’ve reached my max distance allowed from my Home, my battery is critically low, I’m going back Home”.
That was the last I saw of our Mavic Pro as Janet stared at me, the idiot husband that she married. Her words, “you’re not buying another one of those anytime soon”. I hung my head…should have known better.