Blue Opal has been in the sea for a year now, and the plant life has taken a distinct liking to her hull. I’ll need to dry her out on the slip in March (when the tides align, and hopefully the air temperature), but for now the club boatman and I took a small garden hoe to the waterline and hewed off some of the more egregious offenders (serious, 1+ cm diameter stalks).
It was a cracking day for a sail Saturday gone; nice breeze, not too cold, home made chili for lunch. The autohelm decided it didn’t want to start up properly on first start, claiming that I needed to enter the code. However, only the ST5000+ was claiming this, so after a bit of ‘net searching and reading of the manual, I tried the first troubleshooting step – turned it off and back on. Worked. Hardware…