The weather forecast last night warned of strong winds, but by midnight is was merely a fresh winter bluster. Last night I’d started reading Treasure Island, one of those classic greats that my somewhat lacklustre education deprived me of as a child. I was glued to it’s pages, or rather, the ‘next’ button on my Kindle, but by midnight, just as young Hawkins was recruiting crew in Bristol, my eyes demanded a rest.

I couldn’t sleep. The fresh breeze was knocking Kudu about a little, but no worse than I’d experienced before, and it was probably down to eating far too much Le Roulé. After a while I abandoned my determined slumber and flicked on the radio. Radio 4, of course, just in time for Sailing By, and then the shipping forecast. The presenter painted a poor picture, with gales everywhere but Trafalgar, and many threats of “violent storm eleven”. I looked at the barometer on Kudu: 1013mb. Still nothing exceptional to report. Back to my sleep efforts.

During the next hour the wind gradually increased until Kudu, and the pontoons she clings on to, were dancing around like a child desperate for a wee. The motion on board had become choppy and uncomfortable, and sleep was looking increasingly unlikely. As the night continued, the wind progressively became more powerful, climbing the Beaufort scale in fits of gusts, during which we were pinned to an awkward heel as each mooring warp took it’s turn in tugging Kudu back to her proper place.

I was desperately in need of some sleep by this point, but managed only to lay semi-consciously still for a while before having to tense the odd muscle to stay put in my bunk. Some hours went by, then at four or five in the morning and almighty squall came thundering through the dock. The howl was intense, the roar, the heeling, then the violent tugging at the warps. It was such a blast that I put a hand on the forward window, vaguely expecting it to blow in. I’m convinced it was not a stingy number beyond  60 knots, and when the squall had passed, it only had the decency to take but a few knots with it. I gave up with any effort to sleep, and thankful of the stove’s gimbals, made a brew.

By 0900 the barometer was down to 998mb, but the worst of it seemed over. Shortly afterwards it began to climb again.

All around the country this deep low was attacking an otherwise mundane January morning. Maybe the first day back at work had raised mother natures anti-capitalist side.

At 0500, while I was further South, pressing my hand against Kudu’s perspex window, the weather front had reached the Forth Road Bridge in Scotland. As the mean wind speed climbed to a staggering 80mph, the gusts ventured to ninety. At the very top of the chart, beyond 90mph, the wind instrument on the bridge let go.

The South of England didn’t escape the hiemal bluster either, in fact the South suffered a more tragic assault. A man in Kent was killed by a wind felled tree that crushed his car, and another was airlifted after an accident on board a troubled chemical tanker in the channel, but he didn’t make it to hospital.

So, amongst all the disruption, to the liveaboards that got no sleep, to the home owners that lost some roof tiles or a couple of fence panels, and to the commuters that got delayed, don’t fret, it wasn’t that bad for us. When the weather is like this, there is true bravery in the UK. From helicopter search and rescue crew, to the lifeboats, ambulance service, and mountain rescue, to name but a few, they’re all out there, and without them, well, things could be worse for a lot more of us.

To the man in the car, and the sailor. R.I.P.

RNLI

Mountain Rescue

I entered, and due to the support I got off everybody, I ended up winning. Well, not long after, my custom Mr vee arrived in the post, and then all my plans went pear shaped and I started a business, thus pausing my sailing career for a while. As such, the windvane remains shamefully unfitted to my boat, but I can assure you it is of excellent build quality, and one day, I will get around to putting it where it belongs and heading out to sea again.

However, you might be able to beat me too it as they’re running another competition from Jan 1st. Worth entering. I really thought I’d have no chance, and look what happened.

MrVane.com Competition

Here’s the latest spec – you will not, I’m absolutely certain, find a spec like this on another Corribee. Everything here is new, nothing was purchased second hand, unless it came with the boat  – which is the hull, sails, and roller reefing.

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Genoa and main in great condition

Plastimo 406 Roller furling

All lines lead aft to cockpit (spinlock jamming cleats)

Suzuki 5hp four stroke (2008)

2 recent Harken deck winches for halyards, reefing lines etc

2 new Harken sheet winches, plus custom stainless steel mounts, and self tailing adaptors.

All woodwork (teak) has been recently treated with Deks Olje

200ah AGM battery + custom battery tray.

40w Solar cells

Recent complete re-wire, plus quality splash proof switch panel (BEP marine, not these cheap nasty things).

Shore power system – quality Marinco stainless inlet.

Electric bilge pump + manual bilge pump (both brand new and fitted)

New Lewmar forehatch

New custom designed rudder (vast improvement over the original)

New outboard bracket.

New Barton main sheet track & car

Hot/cold running water system, including calorifier, water pump, and stainless sink/mixer taps from penguin engineering.

Hull fully insulated with 12mm plastazote

Interior has been totally rebuilt using marine ply and hardwood.

Origo 3000 double burner meths stove (I love these things; best stoves going.)

Custom cabin table, which doubles up as an emergency washboard.

Custom stereo system – I built it, it’s impressive.

Mast compression post replaced with custom stainless version.

She needs some finishing off, but only minor bits of touching up and tidying. I’ve been sailing on her as is.

Looking for £3,500 for a no fuss quick sale.

As I have ranted many times, I love the Origo stoves. My first was the single burner Origo 1500, and I have since upgraded to the Origo 3000 twin burner, oh wow,  a brew with my breakfast, that’s amazing model. They are simply the best option for a gasless boat, but they do have limitations. There’s only so much you can cook in a pan, and since I’m very nearly in my 4th year of living on the boat, this was getting tiresome. I love curry, that is never tiresome, but curry needs naan bread, and I couldn’t heat it so I did without; you can’t fry a naan, afterall.

That was until I came up with this little idea.

Take a standard casserole dish. I’m pretty convinced a nice heavy caste iron dish would be much better for this job, but mine us a really cheap super-thin-walled-made-in-some-dubious-country version, and it works.

Next, get a tinfoil pie tray of roughly the same size as the casserole dish. My dish is about 8 inches, ooh err, and your standard pie seems to be about that too.

Stick the pie tray upside down in to the dish, and poke some holes in it with a sharp knife. The heat should, to my mind, transfer without the holes, but I seem to get better results when they’re there. This is to raise the contents of the “oven” away from the direct heat at the bottom of the pan which otherwise quickly starts burning.

Finally, break the bread up and stack it on the pie tray. Be careful to not let the bread touch the sides of the dish, or it will burn.

Stick it on the stove on a medium heat for about 20 mins with the casserole dish lid on, and it’s cooked perfectly. Just right for dipping in the curry simmering on the other burner. Yum!

This little invention doubles as a steamer too. If you poor a little water in to the bottom of the dish, you can cook ready meals intended for steaming in a microwave. Actually, you can probably steam anything.

So there you go, us single burner folk don’t have to suffer a life without naan.

Enjoy!

I got home from work yesterday about 7pm. Kudu had been disconnected from her power station umbilical, which meant I had no heat, and no means of running my laptop, which was required to finish of a few jobs left over from the day. I took the shore power cable and plugged it in to an outlet point in the yard, then walked back and plugged it in to the inlet on the boat. Nice and easy; the power was back.

I popped below to check everything was on, but there was something not quite right. The battery charger was making a strange noise, almost like an old computer accessing its hard disk. I listened for a moment more to try and diagnose the problem when, the strange noise turned to a sharp fizz, and bellows of smoke came pouring out of the charger. Worry would be an understatement.

I dived out of the cockpit and quickly disconnected the power supply, but smoke was still coming. I went to grab the extinguisher, but it wasn’t there. It was still in the compound Kudu had come from. I dived off the boat, barely landing on my feet, and sprinted for the compound to get the extinguisher. Sprinting even quicker, I returned, and though poised and ready to totally make a mess of my entire home, the smoke seemed to be calming. If you have never used a dry power extinguisher, trust me that they make a mess you would not believe, it’s truly disastrous, so now there was no imminent treat of flame, I decided to opt for plan B – cut all the wires, and throw the thing overboard.

So how did this happen, you may be wondering. Well, it comes down to a lesson I learned at a very young age; water and electricity don’t mix well. My shore power cable isn’t long enough to reach the outlet, so I piggy backed two cables together. This is a setup I’ve used for over a year without a problem, but I’d had the join in a vertical position, where as now it was horizontal, and unbeknownst to me, a substantial amount of water had collected in the plug. As best as I can guess, since I’m no expert in these matters, the water allowed current to flow to the earth. I’m guessing further, so please correct me if I’m wrong, that because both the breaker on the boat, and the break at the outlet were the MCB type, and not RCD, which would instantly detect the short, it allowed the current to flow for long enough to send the charger up in smoke, create some other short in the burning electronics, and then finally trip the MCB breaker, which took about 20 seconds.  Scary.

Anyway, so there I was with no power, feeling saddened by the loss of my trusty and expensive charger, and indeed a little bit sorry for myself, when the heavens opened up the precipitation valve to full, and an almighty downpour ensued. It was at this point that I discovered the one deck fitting that I’d forgotten to sikkaflex during the refit, and so my bed quickly became substantially more cold and wet that I would have liked.

I woke up a bit grumpy this morning.

I’ve now fudged the power situation by cutting the saturated plugs, and splicing the cables directly together with lashings of electrical tape. Returning from work this evening I found the epoxy repair had hardened, so sanded, and painted with primocon, and tomorrow, subject to no more mishaps, she should be getting lifted in.

We’ll get there in the end, I’m sure.

Also, I haven’t taken a single day off work this year. Of course, I have had the odd day off over a weekend, but not one day in the working week since we started building our company, Croud, back in February. This is beginning to take its toll. Not in any drastic way, but nevertheless, I feel like I need an escape.

I tried a mini motorbike adventure a few weekends ago, but it went terribly wrong. Having ridden to the lake district on a Saturday afternoon, I couldn’t find room in any of the peaceful campsites, so ended up on a busy “family” site in Consiton. I’ve stayed there out of season and it’s lovely, so I shan’t put them in bad light by mentioning their name here. I do usually wild camp, since I have a distaste of camp sites, but trying to get a motorbike to a suitable place is somewhat difficult.

So anyway, there I was, having had a good meal and two pints of my favourite ale, Consiton Bluebird, ready to go to bed at about 2130. By 2200 I was definitely asleep. Perfect! Just what I needed; an escape, some peace, not thinking about work (much).

Then the terribly wrong bit happened. Two Geordie couples returned from the pub at ten to midnight. I shall adapt any quotes for the benefit of easily offended readers.

“poor us a drink love”
“get your own ducking drink you runt”
“who are you calling a runt, you ducking runt”
…and so on.

That was couple #1. Couple #2 were having different issues, however, since soap operas aren’t my gig, we’ll just settle for a fact; it took them until 0230 to shut up sufficiently for me to attempt to sleep again. At that point, Yorkshire lass enters the scene, and thus ensues another party in another group of tents. That was the final straw.

I’d struck camp by 0245, and was on the road again. It was a (to me) new bike, and as soon as I set off I realised that this was the first time I’d ridden it at night. I could tell, since if I’d have ridden it at night before, I’d have fixed the headlight which was doing a stirling job of illuminating the front wheel! Couldn’t turn back though, too proud, must continue in to the darkness. I could sort of see if I squinted anyway.

I navigated the B roads out of Consiton, through Ambleside, and on to Windermere. I spent the rest of the night sleeping rough, without my tent, next to the bike in a carpark by the lake.

Not quite the relaxing weekend I needed.

Enter Kudu (finally)

So, with a bank holiday coming up, I’m determined to get my peaceful weekend. I bloody well need it. Kudu isn’t really quite ready, but she’s ready enough, so I’ve booked her lift in to the water. I’ll go to work on Thursday, and when I come home she’ll be floating, and I can go for an overnight trip up the river. I cannot wait.

However, as you may have learned from this blog over the years, things rarely go as I plan.

When I last made an attempt to put Kudu in the water, she started to leak. This was a great surprise as she had never leaked before. It wasn’t drastic, but it was from the bottom, and trickles never get better, so I had her lifted out again. I identified the problem area, but never got around to fixing it… until this evening.

A bit of sanding back antifoul and some prodding with a pointy metal bit, extracted this from the offending area:

This is a plug of, I think, polyester resin. It filled a drilled hole. It has no taper, and was in no way chemically bonded to the hull, since if it was, there’s no way I could have extracted it intact. How on earth this didn’t let go while I was slamming my way up the North Sea, I’ll never know.

Here’s the hole, just on the inside of the starboard keel. I have not drilled this, I simply picked at it quite gently with a watchmakers screwdriver.

Fortunately, I’m quite the expert at sorting out holes in plastic boats, so it’s no major concern. The problem is, I’m not sure I have time to do it before Thursday.

Watch this space. I hope I get a weekend away. I can’t wait to write about it if I do.

This is well worth watching.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9ki8aJnXIE

Well done Frank!

www.frankspear.co.uk

I never thought I’d be here again.

You see, this life of freedom that I adopted was a bit imaginary. I suppose, if I’d started on an even keel, then it would have been possible, but I didn’t. I went for a jolly big sail up the East coast, and was very inexperienced when I did it. As such, it took much longer, and cost much more than I imagined it would, and when I finished my trip in September 2009, I was quite deeply in the red. I’ve managed to hobble along for over a year, but no matter what I did there seemed to be an undercurrent of financial entropy.

I was living, for a prolonged period, on no more than £50 per week, usually just one meal per day, and lengthy gaps between any sort of work quickly diminished any savings I managed to cobble together while I had work. Add to that a project boat, and, well, it’s hard.

When push comes to shove, as my old man says, you can’t exist without money, and I certainly couldn’t go sailing without any. I was prepared in every way to set off on another adventure this year, but the cold hard facts of the matter were that I’d have to get a full time job for a while first. I knew this, but I kept delaying the inevitable, hoping that I’d find an alternative way to fund whatever trip I was about to embark upon.

Then something strange happened. I got a phone call from an old work colleague. He, along with two other guys, were busy planning  a very interesting start-up. Investment was all but secured, and they needed somebody to build the technology for them. Well, it’s worth a trip South to find out more, I thought.

I would have never moved back to London for a mere job, but this is more than that. We have an idea, an investor, and some of the most talented minds in the industry, and I’m here at the beginning helping to turn it all in to a working product. It’s not quite the adventure I had in mind, but it’s certainly going to be an adventure nonetheless.

As for Kudu, she’s still going in the water this year, but not until mid summer, and she’ll only get a few weekend trips. The adventures of Kudu are most certainly not over, just paused for a while.

Now, it may seem apt to thank everybody for your support over the years, but I’m not going to do that just yet. Of course, I do thank you, but wrapping up this post with such statements suggests it’s terminal, and this post most certainly isn’t the end of the matter.

As a well known hero of the eighties said…

I’ll be back.

I am still alive, but I have things to deal with at the moment that don’t allow for writing about it on the internet, hence no posts.

Progress on the boat has been slow, but not non-existent. The forehatch and weather were proving tedious, so I gave up trying to make it look good. The problem was/is, each batch of epoxy filler is taking between 24 hours, and 48 hours to go off to the point where I can sand it. I’d fill a bit, wait two days, then sand it and find it needs more filler. After several attempts, I gave up trying to make it any smoother, and painted resin over the lot of it to seal it up.

Once painted, whenever that will be, it won’t look great, but it’ll be strong and water tight. Show boats never go to sea anyway.

Since this picture was taken, I’ve sanded the template to shape and added some epoxy filler to blend it in with the existing deck structure. Once this has gone off, I’ll sand it again, then paint the whole lot in epoxy, sand, paint, and bolt the new hatch in. The bolts will run through the deck, so it will be a mechanical attachment too. Not that the epoxy will be weak, of course, but it doesn’t hurt to have a little more strength.

The rudder is still in progress to. The annoying bit is waiting for epoxy to cure. If it wasn’t for having to wait 24 hours each time, I’m sure it’d be done by now.