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I was feeling pretty anti-social yesterday and it having been a while since I had gotten out sailing, decided to take Sea Puppy out by myself. It was nice to just go sailing alone. Serious recharge the batteries time for me. It was a gorgeous day and though alone on the boat I did get over near Walkabout to get a few pictures of her for Jay. I got a few pictures of the water and clouds that day that I thought were pretty cool also I installed the radio and failed to take one measurement into consideration. 🙁 how deep it is.. I lacked about 1.5 inches to have it flush mount.. lol and I cut the hole out for it already….. However all is not lost… I installed it there anyway and am going to build a spacer to make it right.. this will bring it out a inch and a half but I can use the space as a storage space for sd cards with music on them and usb memory keys 🙂 Other than this it looks nice and works great.. I installed the splitter for the VHF antenna and the reception is amazing.. I get stations on it that my car only dreams of hearing. I guess having a 3 or 4 db antenna 35 feet in the air helps 🙂 The remote control is nice also. I am going to put a mirror in so that I can change stuff from in the cockpit. The new speakers were relatively easy to install also. I got waterproof speakers that matched the hole pattern of the old speakers.. I had to file the edges of the holes for the cone to get it to fit but not much.. Then new speakers sound great. I still have to hook up the inside speakers. I’m not sure how they will sound.. I might need to replace them also.. but im not to worried about that.. I can use normal car speakers in their own inclosures and just mount them on the bulk head. I just got a VRCD400-SDU today at wall mart.. $79.99 New am/fm/cd/mp3/usb key/sd memory card/aux in on face of it car radio I hooked it up to a 12v power supply I have sitting in my office for just such a need. Hooked up the RCA outs to a computer system mic in connector and then started playing. This actually gave me decent stereo sound through the computer sound system. FM: I ran some tethers and misc stuff up while dog sitting for patty this weekend. The tethers came out really nice. I also worked on remounting the radio on sea puppy. It was just bolted to the side of the chart table area. I have now flush mounted it. I is a much cleaner and out of the way install. Solo on Sea Puppy again. I agreed to meet Patty on Pirate Girl so that we could get some pictures of each others boats on the water. 🙂 Patty took some great pictures of me being a goof on Sea Puppy I got a few pictures of Pirate Girl also for Patty It was a race day today but only me and Ben showed up to race. Ben took out his new boat, Winds of Freedom, a Beneteau F36.7. Well regardless of the rest of the slackers in the sailing club we went out. Ben with his 6 or 7 crew persons and me all by my lonesome. I tried to convince him to loan me some crew but he’s as hard hearted a pirate as ever lived 🙂 He went and topped off fuel or some such and I headed out for the Inlet. I hung out till he got there and then we headed for the Sherman, a wreck about 6 miles offshore. Here are some images of it installed on starboard. I went out by myself today… It was a race day on the club scheadule but me and Patty are the only ones that showed up to the captains meeting. Oh well.. we both went out and since we had two boats we tried to see who could go faster 🙂 so I guess we raced. 🙂 there is some argument as to wether she won once and I won once or wether we raced in seperate divisions (racing and cruising) so both won. 🙂 I think since her PHRF is 140 or so that she is in racing and I’m in crusing at 194 or so 🙂 We had a great time. With north winds around 15 gusting to maybe 20 and 3 ft seas it was a beautifull blue sky day. After sailing we went back and tied up at Poo’s and got a bite to eat. Mostly because there was only 3.8 ft of water in Pattys marina and she had to wait for the tide to come back in a bit before she could get into her slip. We slept like the dead through saturday night, even the sound of the band from the deck above the docks as they late into the night didn’t keep us awake. Lack of sleep from the friday nightgale and a long day racing saturday left us exhausted. While many partied late into the night after the race, most of us that had been there for friday night’s storm made an early night of it saturday. In contrast to friday night the water and wind saturday night was calm to the point of flat with the boat not moving at all through the night other than to rock to the wake of the rare vessal that passed by on the inland waterway just yards away. I didn’t think we were going to get to race. The wind was blowing dead on our stern as we sat in our slip at a steady 25 kts with gusts into the low 30s. We had a pole dead behind us that we needed to slide sideways around (about 9 feet to starboard to clear it before we could then back out into the channel). With only a 4 hp outboard I wasn’t sure it was up to controlling us in a sideways slide and then backing against the wind and fetch that was coming at our stern. With all of us on the boat (Jay and Miriam and Me) we did a couple of test runs while still tied to the dock. Each time I was able to take the slack out of the docklines from where we were being pushed into the slip by the wind and waves. So with just a few minutes before our start in the race I made the decision to give it a try. We used a line from the port stern cleat to the piling behind us on starboard for some extra security, just in case we had a problem. However it all went very smooth.. With the poor engine going full out we slowly moved sideways around the pole behind us and then out into the channel. 🙂 I almost didn’t give it enough room before going into forward. With the wind pushing us back at the docks I thought for a moment that it was going to push us into them before I got turned away. The nice thing about my outboard is that I can turn it as well as the tiller and it gives me an increadably tight turning radius. I used it 🙂 You have to wonder about people that sail sometimes. I mean the forcast was for rain and 20 knots all day friday. Thirty to fifty knots gale force winds that night. Mid twenty knots saturday and twenties on Sunday. So what do I and 5 other boats do Friday? head up the waterway from Little River Inlet to Cape Fear River via the Intracoastal Waterway friday morning. 3 of the boats had dogers and or bimini’s but a couple of us didn’t have anything but foul weather gear. The forcast was right.. It rained, it poured, it blew, and we motored on and on through it. Went sailing on sea puppy with Cary Huhr and his girlfriend Michelle. Tested new single line reefing and it seems to work well. |
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