...and he's out...

Finally..

Yeah - not often I say I'm glad to be out of the water at the end of a season, but I was for this one...

The work party on Saturday I was due to be on got cancelled (somewhat serendipitously, as it meant I got to see England doing the dirty on the All Blacks), heavy weather was forecast, and indeed appeared..  solid 7's and 8's with rain - disgusting weather.. as it was, the club lift out party managed to lift extra boats on the Friday, but there were still 20 or 21 boats on the list for Sunday when I was due to come out..

With the clocks going back, I at least got a little extra time in bed, but the HT was still 10:30'ish so I was down the club for half 7 stroke 8...  and I wasn't the first!

Cup of tea and a natter, and I dragged the tender down to the foreshore (the launch trolley really is at deaths door and needs looking at this winter - one wheel is seized again, but more irritatingly the support struts for the pad the dinghy sits on have rusted away completely on one side) for that last row out to the boat..  to be met by this....

F**king wind!  

..that's it - I give up - I am not buying another windex - I'll make do with a burgee, or bits of wool on the stays, or whatever - I refuse to buy any more of these expensive shoddy plastic pieces of cr*p..  the arrow was there when then mast was taken down - clearly the design can't handle the lateral forces (of wind) we had on the Saturday..

Bolted the engine on the back - the Mariner/loan'er rather than Suzy - and that was playing up..  wouldn't start, then would, rough idling, then cut out, restart, repeat...  finally got it going and with additional rev's and a word to one of the club support boats that I was having problems, dropped the mooring and motored under the bridge to pick up  mooring on the Langstone side and wait my turn..

..not a bad place to sit and wait..

During the storms one of the club boats had broken free of it's mooring and ended up against the bridge on the foreshore on the right in the above picture, but with a 5 and a bit metre tide, two of the lift team got a rope on her from one of our big carriers, plenty of throttle, and off she popped - her mast is down but she really has had a very lucky escape - just scrapes on the rubbing strake down one side..

The boats were going ashore in a steady stream, but as a tiddler with less than a metre draft Sparrow was clearly well down the list, and sure enough on hour or so after HT one of the lift leaders asked me to put her ashore on the shingle next to the slipway where she could be recovered at leisure later..  once again the engine was giving grief, but after multiple starts, finally started and kept going...

Either way, job done, safely on the shingle, though it isn't ever going to be something easy to do when it is so counter intuitive! 

Ready for picking up later..

While I waitied for the tide to disapear, and me be lifted, I cadged a lift for me and a bucket of tools back to my tender which had been left on the mooring...  time to recover the mooring gear, and somewhat amazingly, as per last year, the shackle again came undone! Waterproof grease on the thread clearly the way forward, but after two years it had had it's day anyway - new one for next season..

Back to shore - tender away for the winter stored upside down - put the mooring gear away and then nothing to do until Sparrow got lifted..  which finally happened about 2 or 3 hours later - think I was the last but one boat. Getting on for evening, swift rinse of the outboard - same issue again with starting, until it had warmed up when it ran fine (I'm thinking spark plug.........) - tidy up on the boat - removed the boarding ladder and did my first repair of the winter on that (sheared bolt on one of the support legs) - chocked up the boat, and home for a long shower...  knackered...

I'm down again on Thursday for a trial fit of Suzy, and a pressure wash of the hull..

Has he sunk?

...no..  still here...  bowed but unbroken.. 

...so what the hell has been going on?? Very little sailing for sure*, but enough activity in other directions to offset it...

First, the search for a replacement for the stolen outboard is now complete with the purchase from a fellow club member of the beast above..  it's a Suzuki 6HP long shaft 4-stroke, somewhat spookily it is a 2007 model as per the Tohatsu it is replacing. It was kept in an outboard well for a number of it's years so is not in as good a condition as the old one..  the leg in particular needs a rub back and paint, but all in all it is a good engine, it runs, it's quieter than the old Tohatsu, and had a good cooling water stream.

The only concern is the size of it compared with the outboard scoop..  the Suzuki is unusual in that the steering arm/throttle is central to the front of the engine rather than hinged on one side..  it's on a wishbone type arrangement and my concern is that I won't be able to fully tilt the leg due to the wishbone getting in the way - we shall see once the boat is out of the water... if it doesn't fit, then I may well move it on and continue the search...  what would be perfect is a 4HP 2-stroke in good condition..  much lighter/smaller power head..  easier to move about..  it also has a charging coil and I thought one of my winter projects may be to plumb in a permanent socket to attach the output to - the following is what's on there, I suspect this is Suzuki proprietary as I can't find anything similar anywhere on Google so I will probably just hack it off and replace with something else...

 ..thoughts then turn to security - but I'll face that issue once I know it fits the scoop - I really don't want to be fitting an outboard pad just to keep the engine...

The other thing occupying minds is lift out - yup - that's it - no more opportunities to sail this year*...  went out to Sparrow last Saturday (which I worked out was the first time in 5 weeks!) and took off the boom, mainsail, and genoa, and fitted the mast crutch...

Going...

....going...

..going...

...ready for Monday when the jolly boys once again convened for alcohol and pork pie fueled fun dropping the mast and getting her ready to fit under the bridge...

...gone!

Superb drop - we had the mast down and everything put away, with the mast tied down and secured insde of 45 minutes...  where we then showed our true colours and legged it nto the cabin to drink tea and eat biscuits rather than quaff foaming bumpers of ale..  we're getting old.. 

Stay tuned - she come's out Sunday, and it'll be time for the annual most boring video award contender...

*without a shadow of a doubt I would say that this has been my worst sailing season probably since I bought Pap all those years ago...   my little'un reckons it is a simple ying and yang thing - last summer was so brilliant that it really is no surprise that this one would be so rubbish..  multiple reasons..  having my engine stolen certainly kicked me in the mental nuts, but in addition it was just one long succession of poor weather windows (gale after gale, rain after rain), poor tide times, and other priorities on those weekends where a sail was an option..  so it is that the 15th of last month was the last time I sailed..

Southampton Boat Show 2019

Shtandart [clicky]

Much overdue, but I've been busy.. 

A good show this year again I thought.. my feet certainly told me it was the next day anyway..  I refuse to get excited about going on the big expensive one's, but I never tire of looking at them, and there were some crackers to look at.. 

Given my usual sailing experience I am far more interested in the smaller boats..  less of the newer/development one's this year (though the tried and trusted Cornish/Bay were there in force as usual, and also some smaller boats I've seen before in the main arena)..  this one did catch my eye however.. BTC-22 from Buckley Yacht Design [clicky] entirely British made..  and in Southampton as well...  more here [clicky], but I had a long and interesting conversation with one of the builders/designers (for which kudos, as it was the last weekend of the show, he'd been there a week, and still took time out to talk to a 'tyre kicker'.. )..  reasonable price, and from a quality builder (they build the Hawk 20), I do hope they do well..

They usually have a tall ship at the show (Kskelot last year) but this years was a bit special..

The frigate ‘Shtandart’ is a full-size replica of the flagship of the first Russian Baltic fleet built in 1999. There were no plans so they used naval historian, Victor Krainyukov, who had been commissioned in 1987 by the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg to find out everything possible about the ship.

After extensive research in the archives and records for multiple nations, and with the discovery of an 18th Century which showed the Shtandart in action, they had enough to go on to rebuild the ship. She's made in larch and is stunning..  the web site [clicky] has some shots of her under full sail that are superb..

From old style to old school..  Gypsy Moth was also at the show looking good..

Top it off with good company, and a couple of pints of Guinness in the Guinness bar and there's not a  lot not to like..   roll on next years show...