March/April – refit after survey

We finally launched Spring Fever at the end of April, though not without hiccups, because the crane needed to put the mast up broke down.

On the way in, without a mast

We launched the boat mastless anyway, and used the time to collect a new cooker – the gas survey for our insurers had brought the expensive news that the cooker was condemned for corrosion and age.

Luckily there was one available at the marina near Newport, Island Harbour, so we chugged up there to collect it, and the gas engineer came to fit it the next day.

The boatyard where we wintered at Kingston managed to hire in a crane. so we went back there. The mast was put up three days late by a very efficient and patient team from Spencers of Cowes, which had made our new standing rigging. Spencers replaced the rigging last time we did it as well, in 2009.

Apart from that, we had the usual long list of bits and pieces to do to commission the boat, but because of the delays we had no time for a trial sail.

Just finished another updating project, this time of David Fairhall’s Pass Your Day Skipper, with cartoons by the late Mike Peyton. It will be published in the New Year. My update of Pass Your Yachtmaster was published last year.

April – sea fever

It’s the time of year when we recommission Spring Fever, paint the bottom, ready the gear and sails, update the charts and clean and polish the hull. These essential rituals lead up to that perfect moment when we head out from the harbour and the bow first rises to the swell from the sea – a cliché, I know, but it is a spring-time experience always  to savour.

That’s impossible with the boatyard shut and we, the owners – as a slightly-older category of person – banned from leaving home. It’s only when I can’t get on a boat as the summer approaches that I realise quite how much it still means after all these years. Sitting here in Suffolk, 20 miles from the coast, the east wind smells of the sea and, if I’m not careful, I’ll soon be reciting John Masefield.

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January – satellite scares, and getting ready for Biscay

At the Royal Institute of Navigation’s small boat conference in Lymington earlier this month, I learnt a lot about  new risks of error  in satellite navigation : I did not know, for example, that it is possible with quite cheap local equipment to fool the GPS on a plane, ship or even a missile into thinking it is somewhere other than its real position.

There are now tens of thousands of reported incidents of errors, deliberate, accidental or of unknown cause, with a substantial number of them unsurprisingly in sensitive areas such as the Gulf, and the Black Sea near Ukraine, suspected to be hostile activity.

Reports of accidental errors include a couple of local failures when US naval vessels arrived in the port of San Diego, apparently forgetting to switch off unspecified electronic equipment, which interfered with satellite-derived positions for miles around.

Continue reading “January – satellite scares, and getting ready for Biscay”