Got out on Valkyr today for a few hours with Miriam, Angela and Zasnic. Nice sailing though very hot on the water today. Went out little river inlet and sailed on the ocean for a while. Saw Jay on Walkabout and Patty with Pirate Girl on the water.
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Jay invited me out sailing on Walkabout wednesday. I had just pulled Sea Puppy out of the water for the year the day before and was feeling pretty down about it. He’s a good friend.. He came and helped me put Sea Puppy on her trailer and take the mast down. The next day he took me out sailing to cheer me up. 🙂 It worked. The wind built from about 8 knots till it was blowing a steady 15 to 17 knots true. Walkabout just dug in and flew, as the wind built we did a steady 8 to 9 knots boat speed…. with flat seas that built to about 2.5 ft or so as the wind built it was a nice ride. I stayed on Sea Puppy this weekend and early week. I know she will be coming out of the water soon.. Just a matter of days really. I don’t really want to think of it. Everyone one I know has invited me to go sailing with them when I pull Sea Puppy. Sometimes I wonder at how fractious our sailing club is. Times like this makes me see it for the family it tries to be. Though the only blood binding us is that spilled on our boats and taken by the ocean to pay our dues for using her it is still a powerful binding. There is a brotherhood not really spoken of but it is felt. So for any of you that read this…. Thank you brothers and sisters! It has continues to meant much to me. Miriam and the kids went out with me today and we motored out to Waities Island and anchored near shore. The kids had been wanting to go putt putt golfing but I didn’t go along with that. I know how much they like it but I really wanted to spend as much time on Sea Puppy as I could before she comes out of the water next week. It ended up being one of those glittering days that all goes well on. William and Emily had a great time playing on the beach at Waities. I played with them some and the rest of the time spent scraping Sea Puppys bottom. Over all she was really clean. Nothing but a handful of barnacles. I ended up snorkling with a the while plastic handle that heavy duty scrubby pads come glued to. I had one I was going to wipe the bottom with but the glue fell apart in the sun while in the cockpit. The plastic scraper I had bought, broke within a few minutes and Miriam had started using the handle. It worked great. Protected the hand and was hard enough to scrape with but malleable enough to not break. I took sea puppy out sailing today.. not many more days sailing left for her this year. I will be taking her out of the water this coming week. 🙁 The final results are in. I have had the boat back out several times now and with the 6 pitch prop it performs the same as the old 4hp engine. With the notable exception of one day it not being able to quite run at 5knots over the water.. I am done with with it. There is something wrong with the engine and I am going to send it back. I have put two months of effort into working with tohatsu on it to no result. I bought this engine because it was supposed to be more 50% more powerful than my old one, quieter and more fuel efficient. It is less powerful, it is almost as noisy as my old one, but the fuel consumption is impressive (better than factory claims i think). All in all though it is a failure it simply doesn’t perform to the factorys specs. The dealer that sold me the engine has never tried to contact me again. I am going to contact the credit card company and dispute the charge today. I really hate doing it but it’s just to much money to accept a product that is so important to my boat that does not perform to the manufactures specs or to my boats needs. For some reason I thought I had written up the story of me going up the mast and fixing the topping lift and replacing the bulbs in the perko masthead light with LED bulbs. I couldn’t find them by searching on the site so I grabbed what I had written on http://www.beneteau235.com and am posting it back to my site. Sea Puppy has a perko mast head light unit. It has two bulbs one for steaming and uses two for anchor. I just used two bayonet 12 led bulbs that are a bulb for bulb replacement for the stock bulbs size wise… I was worried that It would not give me enough light compared to the old bulbs but it seems to work.. a friend out with me at night on the ocean this past week when looking or it could see them from 3 or 4 miles away with no problem he said. We didn’t take Sea Puppy out sailing. Actually we were tired and just heading home but Miriam decided we should just go sailing with Angela on Valkyr if she hadn’t left the dock. 🙂 so we did 🙂 pictures here 🙂
Noseeums invaded in force and we decided to motor back. So it wasn’t a long morning on the water. Went out and anchored overnight behind bird Island 🙂 very nice. Tohatsu USA sent me a lower pitch prop to try on the boat free of charge in their efforts to try and help me with the performance issues I have been having. I got out yesterday and put the new prop on and got some preliminary static thrust measurements. The prop on the engine goes on and off super easy. Pull the pin on the nut and it just turns off with two fingers easy as pie. The prop then comes right off and the new one slid right on. We just turned the boat around so with the engine up I could sit on the edge of the dock and reach the prop with the engine in the up position. Maybe 2 minutes to change it out. In talking with some of the guys on the forums at http://www.beneteau235.com we were recently talking about single handing and tiller tamer setups. As well as other single handing topics. Here are some of my comments on my experiences in that line that I made. Bungee worked pretty good for me for a while 3 wraps around tiller handle. If you have trimmed your sails right and don’t have to much pull on the tiller it will hold course for a while. under power it works even better. Still not great for when a wake hits you and your on the bow and the boat takes off in a new direction. |
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