The Sailing Bug

Well it was the first proper sail of the season after the long winter of work and all the moddifications and improvements today. The sun was out and the winds where light - perfect conditions for the first sail of the year. We also had the new engine fitted as well which worked very well and certainly made a difference as well as the new lightweight number 1 headsail. Apart from a slightly slow start it went pretty much to plan despite only having three crew members on board and we managed to get the spinaker hoisted and dropped without any problems. We even managed to negotiate the rocks a bit better than Mustard Mitt II did A nice sunset accompanied by the ringing of church bells whilst packing up and a beer on the balconly of the GYC finished off a pretty good sail. So far all is looking good for our sail off to Jersey for the KB race from Jersey next week - more to come on this soon!

Whats the definition of a happy happy happy hour? Well I guess it could be turning up to the yaght club for a quick beer and getting 4 free beers! How did we manage to acomplish this I hear you asking. Well simply volunteer for moving a bunch of wine bottles from the bar to the furthest part of Castle Cornet possibile - thats how! after 20 minutes of labour shifting about 50 crates of wine. A slightly opportunistic bit of barrtering and a bit of manual labour we had a very cheap evening thanks to the GYC and also thanks to Dave for donating his beers to us! If my spelling or grammer seems a bit off then please read the above

Thursday evening saw the crew of Mystere competing in the third race of the GYC Boatworks+ Spring Series. After the first two races of the series Mystere was sitting in first place overall (not including discards) with only one point between us and second place boat Busker.

Given our rather inconstant performance last year we all knew that we were capable of sailing a good race, we just needed to do it. And we need to do it constantly.
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Since my last post I have received all my new computer bits and I have started playing with my new case. I have installed some of the Acoustipack sound proofing material and have put a few pictures and descriptions in the gallery. I am sure I will be adding more sound proofing and pictures in the next week or so. It is currently a work in progress though.

Also I have tried installing the Artic cooling VGA cooler but ran into a few issues! The heat sink on my current VGA card appeared to be connected by 2 push pins only. After removing the fan and push pins I was unable to actually remove the heat sink. Either it has been attached with industrial strength superglue or it has just bonded itself quite well after a year or so of use!! Despite a reasonable degree of force that saw the card bend to an almost banana shape it would not budge which is a shame as the Artic cooler is a great bit of kit and really quiet when connected to a 12v supply. Comments on how to removing it without snapping it would be gratefully received!!!

Today we went out for a Boxing Day sail to the neighbouring Island of Herm for a spot of lunch and a pint. Despite the near freezing conditions and wind chill that left all of us with no feeling in our hands after a few minutes we managed to sail across in a fairly respectable time. Our fist challenge after dropping the anchor was get the outboard motor fitted to the dingy and get it started. This may not sound to difficult but I think it was last started about 5 months ago! Despite our best efforts it refused to start – I even remembered to switch the fuel line on correctly this time!!
After having to row in it was time to queue for drinks and then when we realised that we had to buy food vouchers at the bar, queue again for those before queuing for food. We had just about enough time to eat the partially raw burgers and “poached” sausages before heading back to the boat. With Daves’s engineering expertise we eventually managed to get the motor on the dingy running and keep it running before getting back to the boat.

It was a fairly relaxed sail back with the spinnaker up and almost 8 knots showing followed by the quickest packing up of the boat I have ever seen. Hopefully it will not be quite as cold tomorrow for the Sunsport Marine Iceberg race although the weather forecast shows a wind chill of -1 so that should be fun!

A highly accurate (amusing) look at what’s what in the nautical world. It seems like a very apt entry for this website. It was cut from one of ‘those’ emails that goes around! If you are the author and I think it should not be here, I can only apologise and will of course take it off immediately… however at the same time, I would like to say that you must be a sailor to understand these things… good job!

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Friday 27th May was looking like a pretty good day to me as I left work at 4pm on the dot. I was filled with excitement and expectation as I was due to head off for my first triangle race later that evening. The event in question was the Blenheim Triangle race, which featured three races over the bank holiday weekend. The race featured an overnight trip from Guernsey to Perros Guriac in France followed by a lay day in Perros on the Saturday. (more…)

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.