Ramblings
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Meet Blue Opal
I purchased Blue Opal, a Victoria 34, in September of 2016. I had made the trip over to Conwy on the fast ferry, met the broker, looked at the boat, and promptly asked my parents to go take a look at her as well. This is after a year+ of thinking about a larger boat,…
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Building better bases for the coachroof winches
After I sailed Aslana for a while, I decided to re-fit her for single-handed sailing. This meant leading lots of lines back to the cockpit, and upgrading the captive winches to self-tailers. The ones on the coachroof were installed at a bad angle relative to the triple clutches ahead of them, so this winter has…
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Finishing off the rudder for Aslana
With the primer on, I picked one of the bright white Toplac paints for the upper half of Aslana’s rudder. The first coat had to be sanded back off, as the roller brush left a bunch of “lint” all over the surface. That’ll teach me to use a cheapish roller when using gloss paint. The…
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Priming the rudder
With the damaged portion of the rudder repaired, it’s time to paint the rudder. Priming coat first, second priming coat in two days if needed, and then I need to decide on a topcoat colour. Mind you, since I’m selling her, I might stop at primer and leave it to the last moment to put…
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Patching up the rudder
Towards the end of the last season, it was mentioned to me that a dinghy from the local sailing school had been observed colliding with Aslana. When she was lifted out, I discovered that a chunk of the rudder was no longer present. Today was the day to get the chunk repaired. A bit of…
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Stripping out audio tracks from MKV files
I have some MKV files where the default audio track is non-English, though there is an English audio track in the file. Some research led me to MKVMerge, part of the MKVToolNix collection. A bit more research led me to some Python2 code that’s able to identify the tracks in the file, apply a filter,…