The Sailing Bug

After finishing my course on managing and maintaining a Windows Server 2003 enviroment last week, I have decided it will be very useful to get myself a spare PC to use as a test server. I had some old bits and pieces around but in the end ordered a barebones system with a 2800 Sempron 64, 1GB RAM, 2 x Maxtor 160GB SATA harddrives with 8 MB cache. That should run quite nicely then! I have also ordered a new router as I have been so close to drop kicking my old Linksys router over the past week. Next challenge - find an area for the server in my room but I have a cunning plan for that..!!

Today was the first of the Autumn series races and with the sun shining nicely it was looking to be a good day. We where a bit short of due to other commitments so it was just Dave, Aidy and myself out for the race. The winds where light causing a course shortening for our class but it did help us as we had a relative shortage of foredeck experience onboard. We managed to finish fourth of seven - a good allround result given the situation. Hopefully the weather will hold out for the duration of the series and wecan improve on that result.

As of late we have not been out on the boat too often for various reasons so my sailing posts have not been as frequent so I thought I would put a post up about what has been keeping me busy and what will in part be keeping me busy through the quieter months of the sailing calendar - namely I will be studying for the Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator certification. I have already brought a set of books for the core requirements - in total over 3200 pages!!! That should certainly keep me busy for a while.

It was that time of year again last Saturday for the annual Carey Olsen pursuit race to Alderney from Guernsey. We where placed 22 out of 51 with a start time of just after 1PM. On the day we had a good south west wind behind us which made for a pretty quick time of 2 hours and 27 minutes with the spinnaker up all the way. We managed to hit a peak speed of 12.7 knots according to our GPS when surfing down waves and for most of the race where seeing speeds in excess of 9 knots. We managed to overtake quite a few other boats and only get overtaken by one - a Melges who pipped us as we neared the line after they had been hitting 20 knots on the way up, so it was a solid result for us all round topped off with a few beers in the Alderney Sailing Club afterwards courtesy of Carey Olsen’s beer vouchers!

The journey back home the next day was fairly relaxed with a good breeze and calm seas once we got past the south of Alderney with a game of I spy for entertainment before a fry up at the Blue Moon Cafe which I must add was much better than the Boathouse as previously discussed!

It has been a bit quiet on the sailing front recently due to work commitments and crew shortages etc. Next Saturday should see a return to the water with the Carey Olsen Pursuit race from Guernsey to Alderney. Hopefully the weather conditions will be more favourable than last year where it started off with no wind for the begining of the race and then plenty of wind after arriving in Alderney.

We have not long got back from a weekend trip to Herm aboard Mystere. The weather has been absolutely stunning with temperatures in the mid to high 20s. Myself, Shane, Dave, H and G went across on Saturday evening for a rather nice meal in the Whitehouse and a few drinks. Despite making it to the boat to get it out of the marina with literally minutes to spare and also having to make a somewhat impromptu stop at Rosaire steps to make it to the restaurant on time, things went reasonably smoothly. The perfect compliment to an evening of lots of beer, good food, the resurfacing of the Audi vs. BMW debate , me managing to slice my foot open running across rocks and more beer was a relaxing day on shell beach with a Frisbee before heading back

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…)

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.