We've been on a journey

Twilight in Pwllheli

The marina descends in to darkness...

.. and our berth is cloaked in night.

... In the boatyard

It about 1850 and dark outside. The wind has picked up, which is driving the wind generator and charging the batteries, it s a bit noisy but at least I can use the cabin lights without worrying. It's very cold, and I may go bed soon, just to be somewhere warm.

End of the season - back on the hard again !

That's it - that's all there is.
We'll be out of the water by the end of the week and up on sticks in the customary place. Many thanks to those who sailed with us - we slipped more than 600 nm under the keel - and those who helped in so many other ways. Here's to the winter work !

Weather tracking again...

Don't get excited - an easterly blowing all week and has been quite strong at times.

With that amount of fetch from the east, you should be able to surf up the channel at Pwllheli  !

Sunday 03 October

...of course Sunday was a beautiful day.
Sun shining and light airs not strong enough to turn the wind
generator.

















 

Drying out time

Regular readers will remember that drying out a long keel boat against a wall has featured before on this blog.

Although this boat is local, I don't know the name but the crew made a splendid job of drying her out. They chose a spot where the bottom was both fairly flat and solid and were leaning in to the wall  by a generous amount.

I'll be making a note of the location, in case we ever want to use it.

Lights and shapes at night

Whilst on our mooring on Saturday night this boat came down up the channel and was showing these lights:



















At the time the weather was a bit excitable, so I was interested to see who was operating at that time on a stormy Satruday night !
*
Would you know what it was doing without reaching for a book or a set of flash cards ?
To clarify the photo a bit, the white light on the left is a fixed light on the shore side and the lower, brighter white light turned out to be obscuring another red light above it. 
*
Seeing lights in context, at night, makes them so much easier to understand and then recall later.

Look at the size of these jellyfish !

These jellies were stranded by a neap tide in the harbout at Pwlheli yesterday (11 July.)
They are easily the biggest I've seen in the harbour - and no, we weren't using miniature oars !

No-one knows if jellyfish have a concept for luck, but as it was close to the neep tides they were covered by the sea again pretty quickly. They were gone by the next ebb tide - lets hope they survived okay !

Lunar Perigee

This was low water springs on Sunday 13 July in the outer harbour:

I think that this was just about as low as I can remember it being. High pressure coinciding with the lunar perigee - or so called 'super moon' - when the moon is closest to the earth.

Sailing on line

Spent Saturday sailing with Dawn Smith of  www.sailingonline.co We tried to make it over to Porth Madog but, although there was a great F4 from the south, visibility was very poor. This would have made buoy hopping a chore and - more importantly - ruined the approach to PM, which is visually spectacular in even moderate conditions, so we went back to Pwllheli.

Sailing with Dawn is always a pleasure, and there is always something useful to learn and - visitors please note - she brough cakes to the boat.

Windlass on the bench

Getting the windlass (a Simpson Lawrence Hyspeed) off looked like being the easy part. My problem was that the gypsy wheel had become ceased against the clutch cone and wouldn't slack off - hence not possible to surge chain through the windlass, only hand over hand which looked dodgy to say the least. (Those of you with electric windlass stop reading now - you will need all your resources to save up for an extra battery...) 
On the bench, the big problem was how to brake the shaft in order to get enought purchase on the clutch nut to unscrew. Fortunately my new best friend at SLSpares (http://www.slspares.co.uk/)  was not phased by this. On his suggestion I led a short length of chain over the gypsy wheel and secured between / under the platforms of a workmate style bench to which I had clamped the body of the windlass. Using my improvised handle and a bit of BFandI, a few moments later the gypsy was free and I had a fully functioning windlass again !
It seemed a shame to stop there, so a bit more maintenace will be undertaken, but it does seem that one of the big culprits was the lack of an O ring seal on the shaft under the gyspsy wheel. It was also quite gratifying to find that the grease nipple, although quite badly corroded, was quite easy to remove - up for replacement though in any case.

Heavy weight maintenance..

There are two items of heavy weight maintenance which I needed to do before the end of October.
The first was to remove the opening portlights, which were starting to corode, and to carry out some preventative maintenance to stop that. I had expected that getting them out would be quite difficult - but was pleasantly suprised So far the score's one - nil then.
This weekend's task - part two - was to lift the windlass for some on bench style in depth maintenance.

Success ! the windlass came free suprisingly easily

I'm not saying that this was an easy thing to do - but was just a bit awkward and required a bit of heave ho to lift it clear. Most importantly - no damage to boat or boater - other than a grazed knuckle.
Still, that's a Westerly for you, you know!

Last weekend of the season

Much better than last weekend, but consistent easterlies mean the entrance to the harbour will be too tricky to contemplate without a better reason.

Still, a lovely day and got a few things sorted out on the boat. Lift out in the morning!

Grizzly day in Pw

By contrast north of caernarfon it's a lovely sunny day, but here...

...which reminds me of a scoobydoo seaside episode! No sailing due to restricted visibility, but some useful work carried out on the boat.

Good company and some succesful work

A great weekend in our home port - even if we didn't leave the mooring. It was mainly spent upgrading and repairing some of the minor damage suffered last weekend !

We had an excellent Saturday night with Joe and our neighbouring berth holder, who un-fortunately arrived too late for dinner, but not too late for a glass of very passable claret and some good conversation.

It was good to see the Autohlem successfully power up (just a minor tweak there)  The wind instrument problems seem to relate to not carrying out the linearisation of the anenometer during the calibration process (whatever that is ?)  Next time out, we need to do the bumps and turns required for to properly calibrate.  

New mooring lines fore and aft have at last been respliced and fixed on, and the main sheet traveller has been repaired and modified to give us some more control - as shown in the photo.

The new traveller / control lines

I think this should see us out for the rest of the season (...although if Santa was passing the Barton store on his way to our house!)

Most importantly of all, the loo brush is now also  fully secured in the heads - all crew please note.

An action packed return to Pwllheli

Something for everyone in return leg.
Starting out sunny and flat it soon became  overcast with winds freshening, backing and some squally rain.
A maginficent dolphin encounter as we passed Sarn Baedrig - with a pod of four breaking the surface line abreast swimming alongside and diving under the bow wave. Sorry - no pictures this time.
Many thanks to Bill for excellent work at the helm.
The weather closed in from this point onwards, with more rain and higher more variable winds, culminating in rather a hot landing at Pw. Many thanks to Ian of Rebellion for his help on hand!
And forgot to mention the puffins we saw - flying and diving into the swell !

Fresh bread this morning!

Made some fresh bread this morning using this recipe which I have adapted from John Vigor's books (ackowledgements):

Mix 3 cups of self raising flour with 1/2 teaspoon salt and 2 teaspoons of sugar

Add a small bottle of beer - supermarket 'belgian' type lager sold in stubbies will do

Pour the mixture in to a greased bread tin

Cook in the oven until its done

On a comparative scale , delicious!