The Picaroon Blog

Byline: Pip

Just a quick update - the Picaroon should be out of the water now. She was supposed to come out on the 15th of December, but Larry's winch broke. I haven't checked since, but I would guess she's out now.

I was intending to paint during the holiday break, but the weather has been very cold--too cold to apply paint--so I will have to keep her out another month and hope for less hideously bitter weather. 42°F is the minumum temperature any of Interlux's paints can be applied.

In other news, the engine is still unworked upon, but I will get started soon enough.

Byline: Pip

I wrote a longer post here, but when I published the formatting was awful, so I have cut it short. The important thing is it's sitting on the bench in the workshop waiting for me to work on it.

I gave it a quick hose-down of WD40 to keep out any further corrosion, but I am not going to start work on it until I have a better understanding of what I'm doing. I'm perfectly happy to bumble through a petrol engine like the one on my motorcycle, but diesels are sensitive, and have precision components all over the place.

I now have to sign up for some diesel engineering courses.

Byline: Pip

Sunday was a gorgeous day for a sail, at least once the morning damp cleared up. Sunny, high 70's, south-westerly winds at a steady 10 knots. Perfect.

Even more perfect: the outboard started first time every time (with make-it-start spray, but we'll let that one go); we didn't hit, or nearly hit, anything; nothing broke and at no point were we even slightly uncomfortable.

Even better than that, we had marvelous company, in the delectable shape of Maggie and Jeff, who were taking a break from their hectic schedules to grace us with their presence. To further awesomnify (real word, Google it) the day, we had L de Lyeth Cabernet, and El Rey Del Mundo (king o' the world!) cigar.

So. Yums all round.

Well, except for Jeff, obviously. I mean, nice guy and all that but not my type, I guess.

Anyway, for what I think is only the second time this year, we sailed out into the open Bay. We haven't really done this for two reasons: until we had had a reliable (heh) engine, we didn't want to stray too far from home, and we've been having far too much fun pottering around the river.

It was a whole lot of fun, and Jeff got to take the tiller for a bit without hitting anything too expensive.

At anchor, HB grilled up some lamb kebabs and we chilled out until dusk when we steamed home (I know, crazy with the functional engine thing yeah?).

Having a couple of issues with the blog.

Specifically, tracking codes are no longer commented out (just ignore the garbled nonsense at the end of each post for now), and all image formatting has been stripped out.

I will go through and deal with the tracking code (it'll take a while), but the images will have to stay the way they are for now.

Thanks.

Pip

Byline: Pip

The benefit of all our divers engine malfunctions is that we have been forced to really sail all year. Every time we go out, we are learning something new about how to handle the boat in close quarters, or in light air, or maneuvering in and out of our dock. This is a Good Thing, and we are now quite comfortable sailing into and out of our slip at the marina (another reason we love our marina - most wouldn't let us do that, for reasons that should be apparent by the end of this post).

That said, it doesn't mean that things don't still go pear-shaped once in a while.

Yesterday, we were faced with a new situation: a decent breeze was coming from dead ahead of the boat as we sat in the dock. If you know the rudiments of sailing theory, you know that sailboats cannot sail straight into the wind. Our plan was to let go the docklines, and then push ourselves clear of the pilings and then fall off the wind and, er, sail away. Or something like that.

In the event, the letting go of the docklines and the pushing clear of the pilings went smoothly. Once clear of the dock, I pulled the tiller to port, and the boat started turn gently into what should have been a nice port tack.

What actually happened was that the wind followed us around, which it likes to do at such opportune times, so instead of sailing off into open water, we were drifting slowly astern with no steerage way.

I decided, for some reason that remains a mystery, to try and gybe around. There was not enough room to do this.

What there was enough room to do was sail at gathering speed straight back towards the dock, and the other--more expensive--boats parked there. And so this was what we did.

With the wind on our quarter, there was no way of depowering the mainsail, so I did the only thing possible (notwithstanding crashing into someone else's boat) and steered us back into the dock, head on, at about five or six knots.

Fortunately, there were four of us on board, and with everyone desperately grabbing bits of line and dock and heaving for all we were worth, we managed to haul three tonnes of speeding boat to a halt before--miraculously--it hit anything.

The moral of this tale is: don't sail with us, or near us, because we are completely incompetent.