Seadog of the month

 

The highlight of an otherwise rather dud end to the month has been Ozzie's achievement of the Practical Boat Owner "Seadog of the month" award. Richly deserved, well done Ozzie. Paul Davison, a UK SCAMP builder, kindly sent me the page.

The weather has been mighty unsettled and we have been lucky to get one good sailing day a week, and life has organised itself so that something has come along to stop me sailing on that good day.  

I did get out from Black Rock for a bumpy sail with Gavan as crew and Peter in Pitthirrit for company. Black Rock ramp is exposed to Westerlies and was horribly weedy - I managed to put a dent in the bow of Anjevi, coat the trailer in sticky weed that took hours to wash off, and make a hash of retrieving the boat. I won't be hurrying back to Black Rock. But Peter made a nice video of the sail.

I got out for a solo sail a few days later, to test a new arrangement for the third reef.   The reefing worked fine, but somewhere along the line the boom must have hit the pole I had just replaced that I used to fly my WBA burgee from the rudder. Both pole and burgee vanished somewhere into Altona Bay, another sacrifice to Neptune. Hey ho.  I have been using the down time to do some work on the SCAMP.  I took the rudder out and tried some re-faring after long consultations on fluid dynamics with my brother Mike. Fingers crossed I have fixed the vibration. And I patched up the ding in the bow from the encounter with the concrete pylon at Black Rock jetty, and added a new hatch rear starboard side cockpit seat so I can keep anchor rode there. 

I am laid low at the moment with some truly nasty bug, not Covid if I am doing the test right, but it feels like it. Hopefully I can bounce back, the weather will improve, and I can get some sailing in over October.

Equinoctial gales

The equinoctial gales have been on full blast last couple of weeks. Every day has been blue arrows on the weather app, and we've had gusts up to 120 km per hour here, good for the fence repairers' businesses. The nature strips are full of sawn up blown down fences and tree boughs broken off. Must be tough if you live in trees. We found two baby ring tail possums over the last week, one alive which we took to the vets. The nice receptionist said ours was the fourth for the day. The other ring tail, poor little thing, was dead. Definitely not a good season to be a tree dweller.

We seized the opportunity to get out on the one ok day in between maelsroms. Chris in "Ysolde", Peter in "Pitthirrit", Ian in "Westy" and me in "Anjevi" with Oz. It was a splendid sail over to Point Cook for lunch, complete was a dolphin visit, and a good sail back. The wind eased off but the sun came out as compensation.  Peter made a lovely video of the day. The SCAMP looks good, and indeed it is fun to sail.

I seem to have lost my video making mojo. I tried my spar buoy camera arrangement out, and made everyone sail round it, but when I got home I discovered  I had turned it off just as I was putting it in the water. I have a couple of seconds of me saying "alright" and the buoy going over the side, and that's all. My other video camera, for long shots, had a flat battery. And I left the gopro running and used up its battery taking a very long video of clouds and not much else. I will have to try harder. 

 Ian in "Westy" is an experienced catamaran sailor but hasn't done a lot of dinghy cruising. He relies on outboard engine to get into and out of the safe harbour in his Cal 14. His latest petrol outboard (his third in recent times) refused to start. I persuaded him to sail out under jib alone and promised to give him a tow back in.  Tow back in went OK, but on the basis that no good deed should go unpunished, in the excitement of organising the towline my handy dandy wind indicator jumped overboard and sank. And then I stood on my WBA pennant staff and broke it ... but it was getting on time to replace it as I have been progressively breaking bits off it and it's been getting shorter and shorter. Despite minor casualties, it was a thoroughly enjoyable sail. It looks like the weather might be improving a bit for next week too.