Month: July 2017
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An afternoon by Lambay
Yesterday I decided to sail to Lambay Island, north of Howth, mostly because it’s there. The tides were just right, with a low tide at 10:30 in the morning, and a high at 16:45 – perfect for catching the flood to Lambay, and the ebb back to Dun Laoghaire. Dun Laoghaire to the Bailey lighthouse…
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Pondering the head sea-cock
The sea-cock under the head, the one used for the outlet, is pretty darn stiff. This was noted on the survey, and the prior owner indicated that they had addressed this issue (I assume by putting grease up the hole from the outside while she was on land). However, K can’t operate it, and my…
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Leaving the pontoon
Blue Opal was alongside today so that I could get some shore power to run a steam pressure cleaner (a simple Kรคrcher one) in the head to get rid of some of the dirt on the fittings and piping. Alas, I couldn’t get actual shore power, because her 16A -> Marinco cable isn’t long enough…
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Slowing the engine down
Modern cellphones have some neat tricks built in to them. In this instance, the ability to record at 120 fps, and then slow down the replay to 30 fps, resulting in a slow-motion video. This makes it easier to capture the motion of things like the belt on the front of Blue Opal’s 3GM30 engine.
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Boat network sorted
It turns out the last cable that I could not trace could not be traced because it didn’t go anywhere. Anyone with the older Raymarine/Autohelm gear can tell you that instrument displays like the VMG have a triangle of connections – two are for the SeaTalk1 bus (in and out), and the top third one…
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New site icon
I decided that I’d like the site favicon for this blog to be the silhouette of Blue Opal. The creation process was: grab the image from Sailboat Data that shows the profile view, set it as a locked layer in Illustrator, trace over the hull and deck shape, throwing away some bits that won’t be…
