After making sure Frans car was MOT'd and I had introduced Freddie to the Doggie Day Care Centre for those times that he can't go boating with me and Sorted out the insurance details for the carpet in the lounge and all those other day to day problems we all have to face, I was ready to go to the boat for the last lot of preparation about two and a half weeks of work. I left home on Wed 6th April and I swear the roads are getting busier. Wednesday mostly taken up with packing the van / motorhome and driving. Being able to live in the camper whilst working on the boat is a real bonus. Although the van has some frost damage from over the winter period for the first time ever! The pipes leading into and out of the bathroom taps have both burst. More work. Arghhh.
After a really thorough jet wash which removed all the barnickles a very smooth hull appeared and the annodes still look like new. Result! The boat was ready to be moved in to the cradle ready for the rub down and anti fouling.
The only bit of work which I havn't done is the anti-fouling as I felt I was running out of time because I still had so much to do from wiring to gates in gaurd rails. So I employed the skilled help of George Hunt to do this job.
I met George on the Satuday morning and whilst he busied himself with the rubbing down / priming etc I continued wiring in the chartplotter and instruments. As on the friday I had to make a visit to Garmin headquarters and speak with one of the marine support engineers. I took the chartplotter with me so that I could see how they went about wiring it up so that the position fnformation could be sent to the DSC radio as I had followed the instructions but the position info would not appear on the raymarine DSC radio. Anyway I was very pleased to find that the marine support engineer at Garmin was extremely helpful and had wired the chartplotter exactly the same as I had. This was good for my ego but still meant that I had another problem to sort out back at the boat.
All day Friday and Saturday I tried to wire the final bits of the chartplotter but still could not get the plotter to send the position info to the DSC. In the end I had to follow every single wire from the chartplotter to the control panel and the ancillaries only to find the green and yellow wires had been cut then attached to an electrical block and continued the rout as brown and white wires! Why!!!!!!!!! as soon as the brown and white were connected every thing began to work Yipppeeee. But this took two hole days, I can't afford to waist this amount of time!!
But I think you will agree, worth it in the end.
Thanks to George the Antifouling was completed over the weekend and I found myself Fender kicking so to speak until the boat went back into the water on Thursday 14th April. However it gave me time to do all the little jobs such as cleaning the fenders, tidying up all the rope ends whith twine, programming the chartplotter with its first routes which I did using Garmin homeport software on my laptop and then saving the route on an SD card and transferring it directly to the GPS750 chartplotter. I also inflated the dinghy and cleaned the carb out on the outboard engine as it had not been run for well over a year.
And then it was ready for the sea trials to begin. After all this time it is ready to sail. Yes yes yes!
Saturday saw us leaving Port solent and traveling to Cowes IOW. The weather was perfect blowing from the east at about nine knots. once outside portsmouth entrance we found the transit line from the war memorial and once clear of the sand banks we raised the cruising shute for the first time. This shute went up relly easily almost without a hitch, however I can emmediately see a few improvements in rigging it to make it even easier for single handing.
This is what its all about, if the weather is as good as this as I go around the coast, I will be very happy. It was great going through the Portsmouth entrance as we were accompanied by the royal navy on some sort of manouvres and we felt like we had a personal convoy with them. Even Freddie took an interest in them. As they all stood to attention on their boats I could see them pointing at our little yacht anf Freddie in particular.
We stayed at shepards marina up the madina river and had a very enjoyable walk around Cowes and got some shopping done. Showed Fran how to Plot a course so that we could follow it the next day to the River Hamble.We got caught out a bit at Mercury Marina up the River hamble, (maybe the sunny weather made me complacent) But I turned the boat beam on to a 6knot tide which carried us on to a finger of the pontoon. OUCH! But lucky enough barely a scratch. I hate it when it goes wrong but hey it was only the second time out this season, so worse could have happened. Finally we completed our three day round trip by sailing back to Port Solent the following day.
Things I learnt during the Sea Trials
- Crusing shute halliard gets bound up with Jib when furling the jib in
- Electronic nav aids work really well
- Solar panel pretty much keeps Batts up to full charge
- Some pulleys need lubrication / freeing
- Cant lift Freddie over guard rails whilst on some pontoons
- Dinghy necessary but also gets in way / adds drag when being towed!!
