Sunshine sailing and a few more jobs completed

We've just had a great weekend with Rich Fetherston aboard. Rich raced on Graham's boat, Daily Telegraph, in the Round Britain Challenge way back in 2003 but has since sailed with us from Oban to Petehead, via Orkney, on our last boat. An all round good chap, so it was lovely to have him aboard Maunie. The last time he saw her was just a couple of weeks after we took ownership and, bless him, he spent a full day in the two huge and pretty filthy cockpit lockers, cleaning them up to full naval inspection standards.

No such hard graft for him this weekend - we had two excellent day-sails with plenty of good food and drink in between. La Farandole, another Vancouver 38 from Brixham, was in Dartmouth so we had drinks with owners Susan and Carlos on Saturday night and met them again for breakfast at the Cafe Alf Resco, a Dartmouth institution. The town was really busy for the annual Music Festival; we really enjoyed this classical Spanish guitarist playing on the 'double steps' pontoon.

Back to the sailing and we enjoyed near perfect conditions - bright sunshine and a steady Force 3. Ideal for Rich to hone his excellent helming skills...

 Dianne, meanwhile, adopted a supervisory role from the afterdeck:

Richard left on Sunday evening but we stayed aboard for a further day to complete some more jobs aboard. We installed a new cooker to replace the excellent but slightly old Force 10 that came with the boat and for which spares are no longer readily available (we could just foresee some nightmare in the middle of the Atlantic without a working cooker); the new one is much better insulated and uses a lot less gas. The croissants were certainly perfectly warmed!

An even more vital bit of kit is the new satellite phone so we made some mountings (offcuts of hardwood that were used for our garden hammock spreaders) for its 'brain' in the locker which also houses the autopilot computer.

The rest of the kit will be fitted next weekend, all being well.

Finally, a job we didn't want to do but had to... The diesel generator which produces up to 4kW of electricity to recharge the batteries, run the water maker and chill the fridges developed a water leak in its cooling circuit last year and I just couldn't find the source. So we called in the professionals today who unbolted the engine/alternator combinations and hefted up and out from its sound-proof cocoon, leaving just the base in the generator room:

It's currently being checked over in the Darthaven workshop and will, we hope be back aboard by the end of the week, restored to health. I suspect that the process won't be cheap!



 



First sail of the season

Maunie usually stays afloat through the winter, with just a weekend of hard graft on the scrubbing grid to clean and antifoul her bottom. So we get some winter sailing and enjoy that slightly smug feeling of watching everyone else struggling to get their boats ready for re-launching at Easter or even later. This year it's come as a bit of an unwelcome novelty, after all the winter work in the boatyard, to make our first sail as late May!

Actually we did think about it last weekend but the forecast was lousy and Dartmouth was hit by a full gale on the Saturday night. Anyway, our first daysail this weekend was worth the wait - lovely sunshine and a gentle but slightly chilly Force 3 north-easterly to allow us to remember how to sail. There were quite a few boats out and Maunie went very nicely indeed.

The only downside is that from on board we can't see her shiny new paintwork so we both did a slight double-take when mooring up alongside our new neighbour on the trot mooring. We climbed aboard 'Caicique' and looked down to see the new white hull where we're so used to seeing dark blue. We need to get some photos of her on the water!

Hands on safety training

We had a useful day at the Hamble School of Sailing a couple of Sundays ago, taking part in an Ocean Safety course. As well as lots of theory and discussion on how to deal with eventualities one would hope never to encounter, we got to fire distress flares and fire extinguishers. Useful stuff we hope never to need but another tick on the ‘things to do’ list.

 

 

Launch date!

Friday 13th passed without misshap and Maunie is now back in her natural environment; the engine started on the first push of the button and none of the new skin fittings leaked, which was good!

We launched just before high water at 11.00 and had to get a wiggle on to get down the river on a very low neap tide.

We're really pleased with the new colour scheme!

One Week to Launch

The countdown clock is ticking, so Easter weekend saw us removing Maunie's winter covers and refitting kit; a full-on four days! With a wash and polish, the dust and dirt accumulated in the yard has gone and Maunie is looking great.

We refitted the mainsail and book cover and fitted the new front boom cover that we made a couple of weeks ago.

We'll be back to Totnes on Friday to see if she still floats!

Long range communications at sea

When we bought Maunie she came with this SSB (single side band) radio as well as the normal VHF 2-way radio carried by most boats. The advantage of the SSB is that it uses medium and high frequencies which allow the radio waves to bounce off the ionosphere to deliver very long range - we've received transmissions of propaganda news from China - where the VHF only has a range of about 50 miles at most.

Because of this world-girdling range, the SSB requires a special Long Range Radio Certificate so Graham has just completed the course and has passed the exam. Over the summer we'll be practising with the radio and it'll be used for daily radio 'nets' during the ARC transatlantic. The radio allows multiple boats to listen at the same time and, of course, provides another safety channel whilst we're at sea; we'll carry a satellite phone, as well, which will enable us to share emails, photos and, of course, to keep the blog up to date..

Working through the pre-launch jobs

We plan to re-launch Maunie just after Easter so the focus is on a few important maintenance jobs that can only be done whilst she's out of the water.

We've decided to replace all the seacocks. These are the below-the-waterline fittings for the water intakes for the toilets, engine, generator and watermaker and the outlets from the sinks. Over time the bronze fittings can suffer something called de-zinctification in the salt water environment (particularly if there are stray electrical currents around) which can make them brittle - not a good thing! So this is a selection of the new fittings; it's not a cheap operation to replace them but provides very valuable peace of mind.

 

The other job was to polish the clever Brunton feathering propeller - we've tried a new coating called PellerClean which is supposed to prevent barnacles adhering to it. We probably won't have the boat out of the water for another 2 years so we just hope it works.

The list of jobs is slowly diminishing, thankfully, and we're really looking forward to Maunie being back in her natural environment.