The Sailing Bug

Read on for the full write up of our trip aboard Mystere to Jersey for the Easter weekend. More pictures can be found in the gallery here.

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Finally Shane, Helen and myself are back from our easter trip to Jersey. I will post a full write up at some point soon when I get time. The highlights included fog, more electrical problems, a huge pizza followed by a funny walk, plenty of Guniness, crazy golf, cheap food via some creative form filling and more fog!

I have just about finished my packing for tomorrow’s trip to Jersey aboard Mystere and I think I may have done my usual and over packed a bit… in fact solo artic explorers have probably managed to survive on less than I have packed! Oh well - better than forgetting something I guess. I will shortly be going back down to the boat to try and finish of sorting out the small bit of rewiring we have got to do now as it turns out that the cable already installed to supply 2 x 13 amp sockets is capable of supplying 3.8 kilowatts!!! A bit excessive possibly and also it is very difficult cable to work with. Myself and Phrixus have been down there since 5 PM and will probably be leaving quite late tonight as there is still loads to do. Hopefully on our proper round the world trip things won’t be quite as last minute as this!
I have to be at the boat for 8am tomorrow so this will be my last post until I get back unless I can find an internet cafe somewhere but I will post a write up of the trip at some point when I get back.

Edit: It turns out that the new cable which is half the size of the old stuff is rated at 3.8Kw so the other cable is even higher rated than first thought!!

I may finally be joining the IPOD owners club soon as I have had some vouchers from work today for a local computer store who have got the IPOD mini in for a prety good price. Looks like I will not be able to get down there for a while with the trip away tommorow so it will have to wait for another week or so unless I decide that there is another toy that I want to get from there instead which is always possible with me and computer stores!!

What would you say is the most stupid thing you could possibly do during a big lightning storm would you say? If you answered “go down to a boat and try to figure out why the trip on the shore power supply keeps blowing by taking apart the boats electrical systems in the rain” then you would probably be correct!! That is just what myself and Phrixus decided to do last night before the trip away over the weekend. The sensible thing to do would have been to stop what we where doing as we where directly under a rather large lightning conductor.

After hiding in the aft locker whilst sheltering from the rain and cleaning the electrical terminals in the mains connector block I managed to get out and back into the cabin just in time to see the biggest flash of lighting I have seen for a while accompanied quickly by a clap of thunder that shook the boat - all in all a bit worrying at the time! Despite the less than great conditions for it we did eventually manage to get the shore power working again.

Preparations are now officially underway for a Easter trip over to Jersey this weekend aboard Mystere. The plan so far is to head off to either Jersey or possibly Carteret in Northern France and then to beach the boat on a sandy beach in the neighbouring island of Herm on the way back to give the hull a quick scrub down before the start of the racing season. I will post a write up of the trip when I get back or possibly sooner if I can bear using a dial up connection from my phone to connect to the internet. Last night we popped down to the boat to give it a bit of a spring clean and almost ready to go apart from a few important bits like gas for cooking and petrol for the engine and the lack of sails.

Today myself and Phrixus where going to go back down to Mystere to finish of the installation of the NMEA multiplexer but first of all we had to finish off the reinstallation of the windscreen in his Mini Cooper. Apparently this is a task that should not take much more than 15 minutes but it did take just a little bit longer than that. One of the reasons was that the new windscreen seal was just a little bit bigger than the old seal hence when trying to fit it to the windscreen it kept on leaving a big spare bit that consequently meant the seal kept falling off. In the end we decided to give the old one a proper clean and fit it back in. 20 minutes, a pot of grease and the rather cunning use of a length of string the screen was installed.
Once that was out of the way, all that was left was for us to pop down and finally sort out the NMEA wiring. 2 hours and 2 overpriced coffees later everything was installed, tested and most importantly labelled. All that needs to be done with the NMEA network now is to setup an calibrate the Auto helm which we may get around to next weekend if we go for a sail off to Herm, Sark, Jersey or all of the above.

Today Phrixus and I popped down to have another go at sorting out the NMEA multiplexer on Mystere. After a quick Google search for the correct pin numbers of an RS232 plug we managed to get a homemade cable connected between the multiplexer and our laptop. It seems that we could have saved ourselves quite a bit of time the other night if we had RTFM in the first place! I managed to actually solder 3 joints in the cable without making a complete mess of it like I did the other night - soldering is definitely not a skill of mine!! As soon as we connected up the GPS to the NMEA talker port we started seeing data in Hyper Terminal on the laptop which was very welcome news.

After connecting up some of the other instruments and the Navtex unit we saw that information was being passed between units nicely. We have not yet got around to testing out the Auto Helm but that should be a fairly straight forward job. All that is left now is to properly label all of the cables, shorten or extend as necessary and wire everything up neatly and go out for a test sail. Hopefully we will be popping down tomorrow to make good and tidy up and make a start on some other things that need sorting out. I have also put some more pictures in the Gallery if you want to have a look.

I would have written this earlier but due to the aforementioned database issues I have been a bit busy. Myself, Phrixus and Gringod went down to the boat last night to have a look at the wiring for the NMEA multiplexer. Our main task for the evening was to connect the multiplexer to a laptop to check that it was sending out data. This involved connecting a home made RS232 port to the multiplexer then using an RS232 - USB converter to connect to the laptop. Unfortunately due to some confusion over the pin configuration on the plug we did not manage to actually get this working yet. The plan is to pop down tomorrow with new cable (Category 6 UTP cable is not very user friendly!!) and some proper notes on RS232 pin outs to get everything setup. This time I will actually remember to take my camera down and get some pictures as well.

For those of you that have visited in the past few days, you will have noticed that I have been having a few problems with the site. The problems where caused by me installing a plugin that looked useful before reading the instructions. What I found out very quickly was that the plugin was meant for an old version of Wordpress and it completely FUBAR`ed the site. Fortunately with a little bit of database editing from Phrixus things are now back up and running smoothly.