Ramblings
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Boat works 2025 – round 1
Blue Opal was scheduled to lift today at 10 am, so K and I came up the night before with bedding, replacement lithium battery (for the house bank), and a few other odds and ends. The drive up through Dublin was a right pain in the ass, with road works and long queues (due to…
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Boat works 2025 – prelude
Blue Opal was built in 1998, and has a Raymarine navigation electronics suite from that era. On our trip in 2021, I used an Android tablet (with OpenCPN and a few other bits) as a cockpit-based MFD-like tool for charts access etcetera. This didn’t work out too well, due to the power consumption of the…
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A new soldering iron
K asked me last year what I’d like as a present, and I pointed at a Fnirsi HS-02A soldering iron and a GAN USB-C power supply for it. Several months later, I’ve got around to actually trying it. Room temperature to 350 degrees C in under 10 seconds (according to the screen; I don’t have…
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Holiday 2024 – Dun Laoghaire to Girvan
An easy drive north, though working out how to get a 2024 Seat Leon reconfigured for miles per hour instead of kilometres per hour took longer than it should have – Enterprise apparently believe their customers do not need the manuals for the vehicle, and it wasn’t in the car. Stopped off in Belfast to…
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Responding to a Mayday Relay
The other Saturday, K and I decided to make the most of the warm weather in Ireland, and sailed to Killiney Bay, dropped the hook, and had lunch. As the tide turned, the movement became a bit uncomfortable, so engine on, anchor up, sails up, and we started heading back. Glorious wind and boat speed…
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Solar upgrade
As noted a while back, the solar panel I have on Blue Opal wasn’t working well with the Votronic MPPT solar charger. The panel I have is a 55 Wp panel, and the testing I did led me to the conclusion that it basically can’t put out enough voltage that the Votronic can buck down…