Sunshine, Hull Cleaning, Sailing, and Music

Posted on by Brenda under Musings

Oh, yes, it’s been a great weekend. I spent Saturday morning in the dingy with a long telescoping pole and scrub brush cleaning the hull near the waterline after Mahdee’s winter of limited hull cleaning. Only the waterline really seems to gather much bio-film luckily. Squeaky clean now.

If having that done and over wasn’t enough for the happy dance, David and I went out for a lovely little day sail. Mildly sun burned, we feel squeaky clean, too.

Into spring and new things, I picked out some “new” sheet music/midi files for David’s clarinet playing–and we’ve had some great evenings of music. David is now learning Cold Play’s Every Tear Drop Is A Waterfall. This is a song that my sister-in-law, Alina, does a great cover of. You can see/hear her on YouTube here: Alina and Cold Play

David had been previously playing Yann Tiersen’s Comptine d’un Autre Ete l’apres which is a really lovely piece from the movie Amelie. It also happens to be a song that the cat does love–she purrs and comes running to me when he plays it. So, ever glad to have a happy cat, I went in search of other music by Yann Tiersen. I found La Valse d’Amelie which is another great Yann Tiersen composition. Also, I found a cover play by the very talented duo Pasdetrois. I hope to hear more from these two guys. Here’s the cover

Boring Things

Posted on by Brenda under living aboard, Projects

DST

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.