Ramblings
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Holiday – July 2018
The original plan for July’s holiday was to sail Blue Opal to the south of Ireland in a series of day-sails, do some exploration and relaxation, and then either leave her in a marina until I could find a crew to bring her back, or do a longish sail back up on the flood tide.…
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Sailing to Pwllheli – Navtex log
Unfortunately, I forgot to turn the Navtex logger on when we were alongside the pontoon, so the log starts somewhere out past the Burford Buoy. More reason to write the code for the ESP8266 and build my data logger. Day Day/time (IST) Latitude Longitude SoG (knots) Heading (True) 2018-07-06 2144 53° 14.811′ N 005° 57.360′…
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Sailing to Pwllheli
Blue Opal was delivered to Pwllheli yesterday afternoon, after a pleasant 16 hour trip from Dun Laoghaire. I brought her alongside the club around 1700 on Friday, and left the engine running under load to chill the fridge. Put supplies away, tidied up – all the stuff you do right before making a passage. We…
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Dun Laoghaire -> Pwllheli
Having called around to the local yards and engineers, all of whom have said “yes, we can do that in winter” or “sorry mate, I’m more on the commercial side”, I consulted with the gent who acted on my behalf in Conwy when I purchased Blue Opal. The suggestion was a yard in Pwllheli, and…
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Cutless bearing – hypothesis
As far as I am aware, Blue Opal was kept in Conwy from when she was launched until I bought her. Conwy happens to be at the mouth of a river, and the marina gets a fair bit of fresh water flowing into it – I’m not saying it’s fresh water, but it’s almost certainly…
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Cutless bearing troubles – mitigation
The local yard have put Blue Opal’s stern gear back together, and applied an epoxy job to keep the top bolt in place. The anti-foul looks pretty good against her blue hull, but no one will ever see it. Research continues.