The Sailing Bug

Tonight the crew of Mystere will be hading off to compete in the Blenheim Triangle race 2005. This will involve us leaving Guernsey tonight at 9pm and racing overnight to Perros-Guriac in Northern France. After a lay day in port on Saturday we will be heading to Treguier on Sunday and back to Guernsey on the Monday. I will post a full write up once I get back.

We have also completed the window refit and Mystere is now sporting very shiny new window frames and windows that you can actually see through!! Again I will post some photos and some notes on the procedure when I get time.

I was browsing through the Google blog this morning to see what cool stuff the clever people at Google had been up to in the last few weeks and I noticed that you can now customize the google search page to show your Gmail messages, Wired, slashdot and BBC new headlines, weather and more. As per usual with Google it does work smoothly and is easy to use. You can even drag and drop the various sectionsaround the page to make reading easier. This is another product of the Google labs which have produced some really cool stuff of late.

It has been a while since I last posted so I thought it was about time for an update. I have been pretty busy with my new job and doing stuff aboard Mystere and random other things.

Work aboard Mystere - I have been helping to replace the 15 year old windows that where showing their age quite badly. Unfortunately this has been taking a little bit longer than expected. They are currently fitted in the boat at the moment but need to be taken out again as it was decided to sand the paint layer off to give them nice shiny look. Unfortunately this requires lots of sanding with progressively finer sandpaper to get a perfect mirror finish but it should look spot on when finished.

Racing - we had a race yesterday in poor weather in which we finished in the tail end of the results. Hopefully we will be able to do a bit better next weekend when we take part in the Blenhiem Triangle race between Guernsey and two French ports.

I have also been having a bit of a play around with Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 which I got sent free and I have to say I am impressed with the software. I now have got a win 2k pro virtual machine logging onto a virtual domain controlled by a win 2k server virtual machine. I may get around to writing a proper post at some point about Virtual PC but for now that is all I am going to write.

If you are after pictures of the Little Britain Regatta 2005 held in Guernsey then have a look at www.encaptured.com. I have just been browsing through and there are more than a few half decent shots there.

Today the crew of Mystere (minus Dave) borrowed a Sunseeker and went out to get some photos of the Little Britain Regatta taking place over the Bank holiday weekend. Things that I have learnt today include boats with 2 x petrol V8 engines with 2 sets of Duoprops are pretty quick and mega torquey, the term official photographer is awarded based on the level of arrogance of the individual and manoeuvring a boat at 30 plus knots means you are probably going to get a bit wet now and again!

Today myself and Dave have spent most of today aboard Mystere doing to work on board. We have managed to move the GPS that was mounted in the chart table to where the other and unused GPS was in the cockpit area.

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