Some gusting winds hit during the night and I woke up a couple of times checking to ensure that the anchor didn’t drag. I’d let out an additional 30 feet the day before, but couldn’t put out any more chain due to a single private mooring ball behind me (which I’ve never seen used). I have 170 feet of chain out in 40-50 feet of water, just the portion underneath the boat is that deep, so effectively I have a 4:1 scope of all chain out. This is less than the 5:1 scope which I usually do. Since I could use the mooring ball just a few feet behind me as a reference I was sure that my anchor was holding after the first strong gusts came through and slept well after that.
This morning I decided to become friends with my SSB again and set up my MMSI number, connecting the NMEA GPS source is going to be the next step. I unlocked the HAM frequencies on the ICOM as well, although I don’t plan on using them since I have no HAM license; but having them accessible is nice in any case.
The winds are howling through the anchorage, with real waves (well, “chop” might be more appropriate) with whitecaps and currently neither the Hobie Cats nor the windsurfers from the Bitter End are out and about. I checked the weather and believe I’ll spend one more day here before continuing on to the next destination.
The stainless on the winches and in the cockpit area needed doing so I proceeded to shine all that up and remove the rust traces from storage; the cockpit area is now looking very nice again. I wonder how long it will be before the skirmish in the never ending battle against rust is fought in that part of the boat. I think later on today or tomorrow I’ll do battle against rust up forward in the areas that I haven’t worked on yet.
I decided to join the forward battle today after all and used Prism Polish on all the forward stanchions, lifelines and other stainless hardware. While the wind was howling through the sound the sun was covered with clouds so I decided to risk a longer stay outside without sunblock and think I got away with it. Tomorrow I’ll have to complete the lifelines and stanchions; but that should be pretty quick since it is only the aft bimini section.
After spending the past days aboard I dinghied upwind to Saba Rock for the tail end of happy hour, greeted Jemma, Josie and the rest of the crew and met Paul from Poet Warrior for several rounds of drinks before returning to the boat and firing up the barbie for the last T-Bone steak in fridge (which I’d set to marinate before I left). I really do need to find a solution for my dinghy engine mounts, since the engine wobbles and threatens to go overboard even at low speeds.
2014-01-06
Arnd
2014 Trip 2014-01-06
My old hosting company, who will remain unnamed although their name starts with “go” and the end rhymes with “baddy”, changed their software with little notice and the original SV-ZANSHIN.COM site stopped working overnight.
Every. Single. Page.
So I’ve transitioned to another provider. These original pages have been migrated, but all the formatting and other features are gone and the will still contain numerous display issues and formatting anomalies.
The manual effort of conversion is too much and not worth the effort involved. Over 1000 blog diary pages like this one are going to remain in this condition. The pictures are full-scale, but won’t expand when clicked. But you can can copy them to view them in their original splendour.