Progress....

After attending the Bluewater Boat Seminar last weekend, we were left with a feeling that our in-boom furling was a disastrous situation and the sooner we ditched it, the better. All our previous experiences with it had left us with poor sail shape and much swearing when attempting to furl the sails (in fairness, we'd not actually spent much time tweaking the setup). I spent the week researching lazy jacks (lines that allow us to drop the sails without them going everywhere) to see if we could just setup a standard system instead, but then an email to the in-boom supplier gave a glimmer of hope.

Ten minutes with an allen key later, below are the results. A much better sail shape and once the battens are reinstalled, we should be golden. A big thank you to Chris @ Jeckells Sails for his assistance and saving us from a potential nightmare....

Anyway, after a long evening tweaking sails and furling lines, it was nice to have another bbq and a quiet evening.

Friday morning dawned and we needed to move our boat to the next berth over so they could dredge our slip (the joys of a half-tide berth). Anyway, both engines started fine but once engaged in reverse, our old friend - the starboard engine - began to puff out white smoke. Ugh. I'll admit it did sound like it was bit off and slightly down on power, so after re-berthing we ran a few tests and this was the smoke level at 1700rpm. Not brilliant. I've got hold of the mechanic and he feels it could be a slightly blocked injector but that'll be yet another visit out. All the while, the port engine happily ticked along without a care in the world.

After that round of fun, I spent the remainder of the day up the masts, fitting the two new deck lights. That was another interesting project - the wire looked a bit corroded so after testing, snipping, re-connecting, and re-running wiring, in utter exasperation I checked the main switch and it transpired I'd connected the aft deck light, but not the forward light. Ugh. A quick crimp later, we were up & running.

Another job for this weekend was making our lives a bit easier. The genoa furler line had turned out not to be long enough, so we changed it's colour and colour matched it with the clutch labels, just to improve our chances of not releasing the wrong line.....

Saturday morning dawned after a night of dredging and it transpired they'd taken 1/2ft off the top in one evening. Once finished, it'll mean we can get out on lower tides and not have to constantly pull our keel through the mud.

Anyway, that's it for this week. Next weekend we're off to Cowes for the 2014 Round the Island Race. We're taking Calypso over as the trip will be a good full day test, then it's a mate's boat for the race itself, before having another test day on the Sunday on the return trip.

46 weeks to go.... (46?!?!??!? You say? But that's 6 weeks less than in the last blog update?!?! Well, yes. In short, we decided there's no point rushing our departure next year to make the Biscay crossing, so we're off a bit earlier to get a few decent hops in (Channel Islands, south coast UK and northern France) before making the trip down to the Canaries via Portugal).