Mistakes and projects

 

Last year I made a terrific batch of marmalade from Seville oranges. For some unkown reason, I went and bought a pile of blood oranges this year. 

I've made the batch. It is a bit a case of bad news good news, the bad news is it doesn't taste or look so great, the good news is there is plenty of it. Oh well, I guess it is good vitamin c.

I got out for a great sail in the Skerry late last week and took some great footage. As I was uploading, a bit tired and distracted, a notice flashed past on the computer monitor something like "can't load profile" but I uploaded, deleted media from camera, viewed it all and was having a great time till I went to edit. No video editor available, so I rebooted, and all media files had vanished off to that big hard drive in the sky. Oh well. So no photos from last sail.

Last time I took the Core Sound out, I felt that the Torqeedo prop was too close to the surface of the water, and definitely too close to the rudder. After a huge amount of faffing around I have built a ply outboard extending/lowering bracket, basically a box with a bit that drops over the transom. I managed to make version 1 of this just a little too small to actually tighten the outboard clamps. Version two I tried to be clever and got in a huge mess with angles all over the place. Version 3 is hopefully large enough and strong enough. I plan to test tomorrow.

My other project is making a sort of spray dodger for the Skerry. Poor Oz doesn't like getting splashed and blown around. 

I am making a prototype with an old  blue tarp. I am sure there are plenty of mistakes in this project also, but I am not far enough advanced to have discovered them. If the prototype works, I will make a better one from canvas.