Well, I’ve been quite the poor correspondent about what we’re doing. And…that’s because we’ve been pretty doggone boring with no fun sailing trips to gush on about–and not even any scary wind storms at anchor either!. Pics of the cat are about as good as it gets these days.
Upcoming–It’s been two years since our last haul out and we’ll be doing another in late May/early June. It will be along the lines of haul and look at prop, thru-hulls, all that stuff and touch up the bottom paint if it needs it. The paint is CopperCoat, a 10 year life paint so only if we have movement between keel and deadwood or something like that should we need to add bottom paint. When we hauled out two years ago, we raised the waterline and added a boot strip so we had to do a bit then. I suppose we’ll touch up the black boot stripe this haul out. I’m compiling a list of things to install during the haul out and things to inspect–like the FLS sensor which hasn’t been working since install…da… and getting a new spinny thing for our Airmar DST (Depth, Speed, and Temperature) as we’ve had D no problem and T no problem but S, well, the Speed paddle died about a month after we launched the boat and, well, we keep just looking at our GPS Speed instead or using the little speed thingy which you hang off the taft rail and drag behind you. I love that thing! It is a little calibrated spring (which tells you how fast you’re going) with a line/string and a disk that you drag in the water. I love it because when you adjust the sails, you can immediately see the improvement (or no improvement) in your speed through the water. It’s great. The main reason we wish to get S working on the DST, though, is because when used in conjunction with our speed over ground per the GPS we can learn something about the currents we’re in. If S on the DST = S on the GPS then, no currents. But if S on the DST is higher than S on the GPS we know that we’ve got some currents working against us. Similarly if S on the DST is slower than what the GPS says we’re doing, we know that the current is working WITH us. See?
Well that’s about it.
