Mast head instruments

When we sailed with Simon Farley and his Drascombe Drifter Damson on the "Viking Cruise" in 2014, I was impressed by his wind instruments which allowed him to see what the wind speed and direction was doing during any passage.

Having seen Simon's instruments I thought that I could fit something similar to Tra Bhui, not that we really needed them as I like to sail by watching the sails rather than by instruments, but knowing what the wind speed was I thought would be handy and if we sailed at night wind instruments are beneficial if you cannot see the sails clearly – OK I admit it they are really just a “toy”.

When choosing the instruments, I wanted to keep things a simple and cheap as possible. This being a winter project (winter at end of 2014) there were a lot of cut price offers as dealers cleared their shelves of year end stock.

I chose to install NASA Clipper 11 wind instruments as they had good reviews, but more importantly they were on sale at a very attractive price.

The system consists of a mast head unit which is hard wired to the display unit in the cockpit.
With the mast now mounted in a tabernacle mast wiring was now easier as any hard wiring could remain in place and did not need to be connected and disconnected each time the mast was raised or lowered.

Fitting the mast head instruments necessitated running another cable up the mast which meant that the track that I had previously cut in the mast for the aerial and lighting cables had to be re opened. This time as well as the cable for the wind instruments I ran a spare 2 core cable - just in case!

Adding additional masthead cables to the existing aerial and lighting cables

Cables fitted and mast insert replaced ready for varnish

With the cables run up the mast and the mast insert replaced, I re varnished the mast, something that I do each year anyway.

Fitting the masthead instruments was pretty straightforward as they come with mounting brackets.

Instrument mounting brackets

The top of the mast now has a VHF aerial, a Radar reflector (fitted on a separate halyard which also is used for courtesy flags), a NASA SuperNova Combi Tri Anchor LED Navigation Light and the NASA wind instruments head unit.

Masthead Instrumentation

The cockpit display was accommodated in the upgraded centre consul - see separate post. The consul was upgraded to accept the NASA wind instrument display and a NASA repeater display which is linked to the GPS unit and which shows boat speed on a large format display.