Messing About In Sailboats

Sailing Photos of The Day - Regate Pirelli Coppa Carlo Negri 2009

c/o Carlo Borlenghi. Grazze Carlo!

Twits worth following

Unless you have been living in a cave you will have noticed that this Twitter thing is exploding. There are already well over a 150 twitterers, twits, tweeters or whatever Twitter user is called, who tweet about sailing and boating. I am following 154 sailing-related twitter feeds. They are of varying quality. Some are purely blog feeds, i.e. they automtiaclly tweet when they have new blog post and not much else. I am little guilty of this myself. Most rarely seem to tweet much at all.

There are a bunch that really stood out to me as they seem to be taking the time to use Twitter in a smart and engaging way. Here are a few I especially like. They are in no particular order and I have probably missed a bunch so don't take it personally if you are not on the list:

Scuttlebutt
Sailing Anarchy
Wetass
Mark Hendy
boatingwithrob
sailwithrob
PumaOceanRacing
GreenBoating
marekofholland
sailmonster
Yachtingmonthly
Blursailing
Timmynocky
sailproud
Bigoceans
Petermello
Firstboat

You can find them by using Find People through Twitter or by uisng Twitter Search. This post will of course be tweeted automatically by this blog. It has a life of its own.

Sailing Photo of The Day - Close Race

Close Race, originally uploaded by paul.mirenda.

Anyone racing this Wednesday night? Wish I was

Help wanted

For most of my sailing life I have depended on the kindness of strangers or paying vast sums of money to sail on or rent other people’s boats. The main advantage of this is never having to fix a thing.

The first thing everyone said to me when I bought Messing About was all the stuff I was going to learn how to do myself. After many hundreds of dollars in basic maintenance and repairs to get her in the water last summer, I understood how true those words were.

I have two problems. Number one is time. I really can’t take time off in the middle of the week to go work on the boat and weekends in the Spring are consumed with my son’s rugby matches.

Number two is my biggest obstacle. I have two left hands. It’s not that I don’t want to work on the boat it’s that I am rightly concerned about buggering it up. I can do the basic manual labor like cleaning and servicing various parts. When it comes to anything mechanical or electric, it’s another story. I am mechanically incompetent.  My greatest accomplishments with the outboard were changing the spark plugs and lubricating something or other.  Beyond that if it doesn’t start I am screwed. God help me if I ever buy a boat with a diesel.

Answers to the mystery photo

Blur.se posted this photo. I received some interesting suggestions on what it might be. Not sure I am convinced about any of them.

"Looks like someone glued on a camera mount to their bow."

"fish finder transducer."

"it's Joe Rouse's secret weapon for catching fish."

"something electromagnetic, stuck on with epoxy putty. Since it's above the water line, it wouldn't have anything to to with fish-finding or other underwater soundings. My initial thought was something having to do with keeping the anchor from swinging around..."

"i think is a earthing cable for lightening strikes as the tall aluminium mast are great electical conductors,"

Sailing Photo of The Day - Anyone want to caption this?

IMG_9842sm, originally uploaded by antiguan.

Sailporn - BMWOracle's Trimaran on one hull

Slideshow on YBW. I need a cold shower.

Can anyone translate this Morse Code?

Yachting Monthly tweeted it today: .... .- .--. .--. -.-- / -... .. .-. - .... -.. .- -.-- / ... .- -- ..- . .-.. / -- --- .-. ... .

The H2O Show

Check out this week's podacst of the H2O Show. Well worth listening too. Robin Knox-Johsnton tells how he feel about the 40th anniversary and some interesting insights about the voyage and the race.

Launched

Launch day at Raritan Yacht Club was very uneventful. No one fell in. I only got barked at once. As ever it was superbly organized and we had 30 boats in the water in about 4 hours.

My job was painting the patches on bottoms where the keel blocks or stands had been. I got covered in paint as ever but managed not to avoid buggering anything up.

Messing About went in fairly uneventfully with one exception the $%#@^&**^%ing outboard wouldn't start so I had the ignominy of being towed to my mooring. One of my club mates very kindly came with me to the boat later on to take a look. He is a mechanic and it took him five minutes to figure it out.

All in all a very boaty week. RKJ Day took up most of my blogging week; last night dinner at New York Yacht Club for my friend Phil's 60th Birthday. What an amazing place! Today launching the boat. Hey, who knows I might even get some sailing in in the next few weeks.