Messing About In Sailboats

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

c/o Carlo Borlenghi. Grazze Carlo! Read more →

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... Read more →

Sailing Photo of The Day - Close Race

Close Race, originally uploaded by paul.mirenda. Anyone racing this Wednesday night? Wish I was Read more →

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... Read more →

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," Read more →