Kipper Sailing
| Vessel Name: | Kipper of London |
18 November 2010
White Boats
Sailing schools are commercial enterprises and margins are extremely tight, so they typically buy training boats that provide sufficient accommodation for the maximum of 5 students and one instructor at the lowest possible price. These are usually European (as opposed to British) built and on large production [...]
18 November 2010
Jet Skis
I positively hate jet skis, the people who use them and everything to do with them. As far as I'm concerned they're ridden by men with small willies and without the balls to ride a motorbike. And I mean MEN. When did you ever hear of a woman stupid enough to buy a jet ski? Am I being unfair. No. Do I have an issue with other powered recreational vessels (motor-yachts, ribs, ski boats)? No. The problem with jet-skis is that the idiots who ride them will ride round and round and round what, should have been, a quiet anchorage. This is akin to somebody riding a noisy motorbike round and round a park where everybody else is trying to enjoy a quiet, whatever you do in a park (I wouldn't know). If I could legally buy a bazooka, I'd buy one and blast all the jet skiers to kingdom come.
18 November 2010
Big Boats , Small Boats
Once upon a time, maybe 25+ years ago, a typical first boat was a Mirror Dinghy, then a Wayfarer, then a small Westerly, then a Contessa 32, then a 40 footer. All this over a lifetime of sailing. Experience was gained slowly. Nowadays too many people go out and buy (yes you've guessed it) a shiny new [...]
18 July 2010 | Lymington
Back to Work
Back to the day (and sometimes night) job after the (excitement) of the 2-handed RB&I race. And guess what? I'm enjoying myself more working than I was, supposedly, taking some R&R. It's one Hell of a lot more varied and stimulating.
06 July 2010 | On our way bsck to Lymington
Final thoughts on the race
Now it's all over, I've had time to reflect on the experience and to report on what worked and what didn't.
Motion starting to take its toll
You will remember that I said that we'd lost all the water out of our starboard tank. Well the port one has gone too. So we really are on rations. We've got 21L of bottled water and some orange juice. Not too bad. It can't take us more than another 5 days to get to Lerwick (can it?). We're pretty sure that the problem is caused by continually pounding to windward and the water in the flexible tanks surging, causing the seals to weaken. In a similar vein, due to the continuous motion, both cooker exhausts have fractured and we repaired them earlier. We're now keeping the cooker swung back on its gimbals when not in use.
We also seem to have some sort of problem with out domestic batteries, the ones that do everything but start the engine and generator. They have a combined capacity of 220AH but we're only getting about 40AH before the voltage drops below 11.5V and the autopilot starts complaining. We start the generator, which can charge at over 100A but it thinks they're almost full and drops the charge voltage too soon. Maybe they're f*cked? Maybe there's something wrong with the voltage regulator in the generator? Nothing we can do about it until we get to Lerwick.
Lastly there's a horrible smell coming from somewhere around the galley that we can't trace.
