Saturday, December 5, 2009
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Last night the winds really blew hard through the anchorage. Gusting to over 30 but sustained quite high made for an uncomfortable night, as the boat would roll and jerk around in the wind. I am going to have to rethink my snubber line, perhaps a double line of a bit more “springy” material going to each side of the boat. I hope that these are the “Christmas winds”; that means that they will be over with soon and the rest of the time the weather will be more settled. I used the slow Iridium to get my e-mails and will be getting visitors from Germany in a couple of weeks. I think that with the wind and waves being what they are today I will do some work on the boat, the fiberglass on the decks and cockpit area are a bit chalky and could do with some rubbing compound and waxing. Thankfully the batteries seem to be doing well, I am using about 60 Amps of power per day on average and a lot of that comes from the anchor light (which I need to replace with an LED as soon as practicable), fans in the bedroom and the reefer.
I’ve just spent 2 hours drinking coffee and working on the web pages, the wind is blowing hard up on deck and the temperatures down below are still acceptable, so I haven’t done anything outside yet apart from a quick look to ensure that I didn’t drag anchor during the night (no problem there, I anchored in 20 feet in sand and put out 100 feet or so of chain, then dived on the anchor to make sure that the hook had set.
The day was a productive one, mixing work on the boat with swimming and walking around. The wind was still strong and picture taken from the hill on the north side of Colombier doesn’t really show it; those breaking waves were being whipped up over the hill by the wind. After my short walk (the path was rocky and I’d neglected to take my shoes ashore) I went back to the beach and swam back to the boat. I used some “Never Dull” to get the rust spots off some of stainless steel fittings forward, spent about an hour with light rubbing compound and wax on the fib erg lass in the cockpit and then, after reading for a couple of hours, opened up my Whipping box (for those of you who conjured up an image of a trunk full of latex, black rubber and whips & chains you are on the wrong track) as show above to do some rope work; the term “whipping” is used aboard for the securing of ends of lines so they don’t unravel. You’ll have to zoom into the big after picture above to see that my whipping work is leagues above my sewing work – you won’t need to zoom to that picture to see that I stand no chance of an alternate career as a tailor. But at least my sewing handiwork on the broken zipper in the bimini will hold.