Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Get seasick much?

In all my years of sailing I have never felt the queasiness of the sea (touch wood, touch wood, touch wood).  But many of my fellow crew have.  How do you avoid seasickness?

Click for - How to avoid seasickness on Messing-About-In-Boats

Or is it only in your head?  gCaptain has just posted a new post on seasickness and 50 ways of preventing/curing it.  But mainly they say it is all in your head. If so, get cured and go sailing.

Monday, October 17, 2011

Anchoring system for tidal areas

There has been a lot of chatter on the John Welsford Yahoo group about a anchoring system fro tidal areas,  Here is a system short description of a system we used when I was younger.


We used to camp next to a tidal river and we used a system similar to this to change the  position of our boat (reel in to board at high tide or move the boat further out at low tide.  It worked pretty well and you could almost get in without your feet getting wet.


Click to see full size




The System - drop your anchor in deeper water with enough anchor chain and a small length of rope.  At the end of the rope secure a good quality marine pulley.  Then you create a loop of rope with two hook clips on (boat length apart on that loop - to clip you boat on to)

Then there is another anchor on the beach with a line that is connected with a pulley to the loop. This way you can reel your boat in and out from the boat or from the beach.  You use the free side of the loop (the side where no hook clips are) to cleat it off at the correct position you want your boat. 

It sounds complicated, but once you set it up once it is a piece of cake.


USE AT OWN RISK

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Friday, October 14, 2011

What's on the pond?

In the winter I was building a scale model ship and enjoyed it so much that I decided to start doing small model boats out of Balsa wood just for the fun of it. No works of art, just something to get my mind off work.



Meet Frederik, he is now the local fisherman on my Goldfish pond and hopefully he will soon catch the "big one" for supper. 




More detail - Boat - 4 inches / 10 cm    Frederik 2 inches / 5 cm

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Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Aloha Joe

FINALLY my postcard came that Joe sent me on his last trip to Hawaii.  Living in South Africa, one gets used to waiting some time for your mail, but luckily it is always reliable even thou it is sooooo slow.



Thanks Joe, your postcard is on its way, might be there by Xmas.

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