Sun, sea and sand?

Nope, more like rain, river and sanding

Today being my day of rest, following a very busy week, I was in no rush to be up and doing this morning. Added to which it was blowing old boots and chucking it down with rain

So after a leisurely breakfast, well damn near lunch to be honest so let's call it brunch, I took advantage of a gap in the rain to dash up to the car and grab the sander and sandpaper

Then, after sealing up the cabin tight as I could, it was time to get busy sanding down the locker lids I'd fettled and repaired last Tuesday.

A couple of hours and a lot of dust later and the rough sanding was done. Then I switched to hand sanding with the fine paper to finish the job...



After brushing and wiping down the lids to remove any dust, I had a major dusting session to clean up the cockpit. It would have been better to have taken the lids ashore and sanded them in the customer workshop but the weather ruled that impractical

With that chore complete, well sufficiently for now, I laid out a plastic sheet to protect the painted surfaces and set to with the International Woodskin

The first coat went on very nicely indeed
..



Now they need to dry for at least twenty four hours and it's recommended that three coats are applied to bare wood

That could pose a bit of a challenge as I've only got another couple of days on board before I've really got to be home and the lids really need to be back in place before I leave.

It might be a case of two coats now and a third or even another couple a bit later on

That done, I washed the dust off myself in the marina showers before settling down for the evening

A sticky situation....

Is both what we were in and what was needed today. I'll come to the needed one in a bit but first the tide!

Who pulled the plug out?

This morning was a very low low water indeed. Predicted to be 0.2m below Chart Datum and one of the lowest tides for many years. So low, in fact, that when I awoke, little did I realise we were well and truly in the mud

That's not a problem for Erbas, with her twin keels and even a fin would simply have buried itself in the soft mud. No, the problem was that I used and pumped the heads on the main intake and thus pumped a load of mud into the pipework and toilet bowl

That was doubly annoying given that we have the facility to close the intake in the bottom and open one just below the waterline specifically for use in a drying mud berth, which is what we now found ourselves in temporarily.

Switching intakes, I vigorously and thoroughly flushed the system with clean water, later doing the same via the main intake when the tide had risen again.

I'll have to check the engine intake filter when I start the engine next but I don't expect a problem


Over the winter, the dummy cockpit locker lid that's mounted above the quarter berth (so that the port and starboard lids are symmetrical) had started to come apart at the joints

The first mission was getting it off which meant a head first trip down the quarter berth. I wasn't wild about the prospect as I tend to suffer a bit from claustrophobia but it had to be done.

As I'm on board alone I thought it wise to phone a friend to arrange that they'd ring the marina to come down and pull me out if I got stuck and didn't ring back within the hour!

It turned out to be quite easy to get in and remove the screws securing the lid and with a bit of a wiggle not that hard to get out again.

With the lid off and cleaned up, the problem was clear to see...

Off to Wickes in Maldon I went for some suitable glue and an hour later the second sticky situation led to it being back how it should be and all cramped up to set

I then set about sanding the other half of this lid, all of the exterior woodwork needs sanding down and varnishing this spring. Actually, I'm not using varnish but a concoction that is sort of half way between a varnish and a wood oil baked International Woodskin

It remains unseasonably cold and I even resorted to putting the fan heater on in the cockpit tent in order to lift the temperature a few degrees to aid the glue setting

The water came back!

I'd had enough by four-o-clock and after sorting out my kit for tomorrow and moving my personal gear on board (very easy with the tide well in and the ramp fairly flat) I sat down with the travel guitar for a good practice session.

Then it was on with a tin of macaroni cheese with a couple of slices of bread for dinner. I'd scoffed two rounds of corned beef and pickled onion sandwiches earlier so that was all I fancied for tea

A further half hour or so on the guitar followed and then it was time to do the washing up. I'll not be up much longer as I've got an early start for Suffolk in the morning. Sadly it's by car rather than by boat

GNU Terry Pratchett

If you have to be dead, it seems a lot better to spend your time flying between the towers than lying underground. (Paraphrased from Going Postal)

(He's in the overhead forever, here and everywhere)

Early Spring Weekend 2015

Yay! It's official. It's the start of our sailing season

Except it wasn't, in the end

After picking up Jane from work, we drove down first thing Saturday morning with the car full of all the kit that we removed into dry storage at home over the winter. Lifejackets, foulies, boots and all manner of other odds and ends that disappear into various lockers never to be seen again until the late autumn when they'll get taken home for dry storage!

On arrival on board, Jane quickly made up the v-berth and got her head down while I went walkabout. First stop was a visit to Ironsides to confirm the plan to do something musical (exactly what is yet to be decided!) at the Fambridge River Festival in May. Suitably fortified with a cup of coffee I then headed round to Brandy Hole moorings

Brandy Hole Yacht Club is on the South bank of the river a couple of miles upstream of Fambridge. Getting there means a loop round Battlebridge because despite village names such as "Fambridge" and "Hullbridge" there isn't a bridge until Battlebridge!

There isn't a yacht club these days either, although it still goes by the name it's now operated as a bar and restaurant I believe. The moorings are an independent commercial operation and it was to the yard ashore that I was headed to measure up a job of fitting new rubbing strakes onto a Countess 28

That done I pootled off to Burnham Yacht Harbour for no better reason than to make a nuisance of myself getting in the way of friends working on their boat by standing around chatting! They weren't there though so I headed up to the Co-Op to grab a sandwich.

I'd just about finished that when my mate Tony rang to say they were at Fambridge! (Are you keeping up with this at the back?). They winged their way down to Burnham Yacht Harbour and we wandered around the yard looking at boats for sale. Not for me and Jane, can't see us selling Erbas any time soon, but for Tony and Shelagh who are looking to join in this yachting lark.

Lisa and Marc had appeared by this time working on Artemis so I spent a while chatting and generally getting in the way while Tony and Shelagh went for a look at gear in the chandlery.

Then it was back to Fambridge where Tony and Shelagh booked into their B&B room at the pub for the night and I nipped back to see if Jane was up. She was still sound so I walked round to the pub where Tony and I turfed some young lad off the telly and changed over from the cartoon he was watching to find we'd just missed the kickoff at Twickenham (I could have sworn it was 5:30 but it was 5:00)

Eighty minutes later we'd watched England butcher more try scoring chances in a single match than Scotland have had in the entire championship and what's more allow Scotland to play some rugby and score points. They may rue the relatively narrow margin of victory next weekend.

Shelagh and then Jane joined us and after another drink we moved to a table in the old restaurant for dinner. Then we moved back to the comforts of the sofas in the snug for further drinks. Then we walked back to the marina and went to bed! It's an exciting life, this sailing lark!

Sunday morning dawned grey, quite windy and above all cold. There was certainly little sign of spring being in the air and every sign of rain to come later. I'd had trouble getting to sleep due to indigestion (I knew chocolate sponge pudding and custard was a bad idea but I couldn't resist at the time!) but coffee and toast improved my outlook upon the world.

We set about sorting kit properly into its lockers and generally having a bit of a tidy up before receiving boarders. The boarders duly arrived in good time and the kettle went on.

We had planned and fully intended to go out for a day sail but I'd already warned our guests that this was unlikely now to happen. Apart from anything else, access to our winter berth is somewhat tidal as although we stay afloat at all states of the tide, we'd struggle to get in or out of the berth for a good couple of hours either side of low water.

With low water at lunchtime, this would have meant being out of the berth for at least six hours which would have been fine on a nice spring day. On a day when the temperature was refusing to rise above 5° with added wind chill from the brisk Easterly breeze and every sign of rain on the way heading out for a sail was simply going to be a chore which nobody would enjoy.

So instead we sat in the saloon drinking coffee and talking for several hours! Tony and I could actually keep that scenario up for several days (and have) stopping only briefly to sleep and I can only hope that the ladies weren't too bored by the time it was time to wave our guests off on their way back North!

It was a shame but we had indeed been heavily persisted upon several times during the day and I just can't see the point in stowing the cockpit tent, removing the sail covers and manoeuvring out of the berth in order to spend several hours getting extremely cold, wet and doubtless miserable just to prove that whilst we can sail "Erbas" in those conditions, we'd much prefer not to!

On our own for the evening, we decided to stay aboard and see what we could rustle up from last years galley stores for dinner. And lo, in the back of the locker we found the holy grail of boating grub ...

 

 ... yep, the ubiquitous and some would say iniquitous Fray Bentos pie!

There are those who swear by them and those who swear they would never touch them but despite all the tales I've heard about there being no filling in them and what they're made of, I've never actually had a bad Fray Bentos pie. 

The challenge here was cooking it sans oven. Actually, the first challenge was getting the lid off! How many yotties does it take to open a Fray Bentos pie? Two, one to hold the tin opener in place, the other to turn the tin round and round. That's sort of how we did it in the end!

After a quick rinse and wipe, the inverted lid then formed a base to keep the tin off the bottom of the pan and onto the hob it went in the double skillet. Forty minutes later, accompanied by new pots and peas, a damn fine repast was served. I ought to have taken a photo of the cooked pie which looked most appetising but I was far too hungry to mess about at that stage!

We then settled down with the bottle of rum (yo ho ho) to watch the final episode of "Wolf Hall" on iPlayer. Jane was none the wiser about the storyline or the plot(s) by the end of six hours than she had been at the beginning and I have to say that even with my fairly extensive knowledge of Tudor history even I struggled to follow the story. Beautifully cast, filmed and produced though.

A hunt around what was available turned up the first episode of the remake of "Poldark" so we streamed that and found it much better viewing. After that it was time for bed.

Monday dawned little better than Sunday had. We broke our fast with coffee alone, neither of us feeling motivated to make breakfast, and then whilst Jane headed off for a shower I set about putting our bags in the car and having a bit of a tidy up below decks.

Then we were off homewards via Go Outdoors to look at footwear and coats. Jane wants something better than her tatty trainers for her feet and I want a decent but rather less bulky shore rig coat in place of my "Farmer Giles" job that has done me sterling service over many years but which takes up the entire hanging locker all by itself! 

Neither need was satisfied but we did pick up some other odds and ends such as belt packs for our money and passports, new thermals for Jane and a couple of bits of climbing kit I wanted as part of my plans for getting up, and critically back down, the mast next month.

And then it was home. With a problem manifesting itself with the car in the form of a knocking noise every time we hit a bump or a pothole. As I must be back in Essex by next Tuesday at the latest that might prove expensive.

By the way, I've decided not to include in this blog the time I spend aboard "Erbas" whilst working on other boats. It's boring enough as it is!

The best laid plans..

.. of the skipper of Erbas can be easily scuppered by feeding him beer and dangling the possibility of an audience under his nose!

By happy happenstance, the first weekend of our planned Spring Cruise to Furrin' Parts is, I've discovered, the weekend of the Fambridge River Festival here at the Yacht Station

And there's a lack of music which is just too tempting for this old folkie to ignore!

So after consulting with the crew and the shore staff, we've decided to delay our departure until the Monday and join in the fun at our home port

It's also a bit of a business opportunity which I can't ignore as I can have a little stand to advertise my services (I'll have to figure out what I could do with that) and I'll maybe do a festival special offer on VHF tests or something of that kidney

Yuk!

I don't know what but on the spur of the moment I typed Erbas's call sign into Google ...

Oh, I probably ought to start out by explaining what the call sign is for those of a non-nautical or non-HAM radio persuasion. Nearly* every radio station in the world has a totally unique call sign composed of letters and numbers. Older call signs were usually four characters, at least for maritime stations anyway, but they ran out years ago and now they're five characters.

(This, by the way, is the origin of those classic American radio stations such as "this is W-O-K-Y, the official Elvis station" etc. I made that one up by the way but you know what I mean! US law requires, or perhaps required, all US radio broadcasters to broadcast their official call sign regularly)

* I'm not sure whether this still applies to the big broadcasters in the UK and Europe. Certainly they used to have a call sign assigned - the first precursor to the BBC was a station called 2MT followed by another called 2LO, but things have moved on a bit since then!

Anyway, to get back on track, our call sign is an older four character one "2JDA" or Two Juliet Delta Alpha in phonetics. All well and good but typing it into Google I discovered that "2JDA" is apparently the designation of a "novel periplasmic polygalacturonic acid binding protein" (whatever the hell one of those is!" from the Yersinia enterolitica bacterium.

That didn't sound good! (My historical antenna started twitching for one thing, some sort of Yersinia baceria was, if my memory serves, otherwise known as the Black Death - cue horror music, pause for effect ......)

This one isn't quite that bad but if you get it you'll definitely become very familiar with every knothole on the back of the privy door (that's one for the Pratchett fans - for the philistines it means you'll be spending a lot of time in the smallest room)

I'm never going to feel quite the same about our call sign ever again

Happily, these days we can always be bang up to date and use the modern digital equivalent. The truly unmemorable 9 digits of our MMSI number 235077379

What's an MMSI number I hear you ask? It's effectively our VHF radio telephone number

I am utterly utterly hopeless at remembering telephone numbers!

Oh and all of this was sparked by the arrival of our lovely new calling cards ...

These will be handed out to anyone who needs or wants to know our email or blog address

I reckon a hundred of them should last a couple of decades then!

To Europe with travel insurance!

 

Our first passports!

Yes, odd though it may seem we've simply never had the need or the desire to travel beyond the shores of these sceptred isles. But now the time has come ...

We plan to attend the big annual extravaganza that is Oostende voor Anker (that is Ostend at Anchor in English, although technically and to be pedantic the boats on show are moored, not anchored!) at the end of May and that means, yikes, travelling to foreign lands where they don't speak English as a first language and the beer is a funny colour and, to be sensible for a moment, a certain amount of paperwork is required

Life is made somewhat complicated for the British yachtsman travelling to Europe due to our rather half hearted approach to being a member of the European Union. Now leaving aside the politics of whether the UK is better off in or out of the EU, there can be no argument that when it comes to travel we tend to get a lot of the drawbacks with virtually none of the benefits

As we don't have a National ID Card, Brits need a passport to travel to Europe. OK, not a show stopper but it required a certain amount of research (long story but some of the info needed was not readily to hand), a deal of form filling, a not insubstantial wadge of cash, the assistance of our good friend Pat of "Laurin" to countersign the forms and a trip to Peterborough for an interview.

Actually, I have to say that I found the whole process relatively straightforward and Her Majety's Passport Office staff friendly, helpful and extremely efficient. Given the need to prevent identity theft and other illegal activities, that you have to go through a certain amount of hoop jumping to obtain such an important document is totally understandable.

With the delightfully traditional looking, and traditionally worded, books in hand I turned my thoughts to other matters pertaining to travelling to the continent.

Usefully, included within the envelope with the passports, was a handy guide to travelling abroad. This pointed me at the EHIC (or European Health Insurance Card) web site where in no time at all I had applied for this essential document which will provide for essential healthcare should we fall ill whilst the other side of the North Sea

 However, the EHIC doesn't by any means cover every possible expense that might be associated with falling ill and the EHIC website makes it clear that travellers should also arrange travel insurance.

It does not, for example, cover the cost of repatriation to the UK. Nor, in another example, does it cover the cost of an ambulance in Belgium. It only covers 70% of medical costs in France, 75% in Belgium and so on. It may be a "must have" but it also smacks of being something of a false security blanket!

We do however have travel insurance through our Halifax Reward Account but I decided to take a look at the small print and therein I found a wee problem. The insurance covers us for the hazardous (their words, not mine) activity of sailing but only within "territorial waters". By international convention, ratified by the UK, territorial waters extend 12 miles from the mean low water line.

Crossing the channel from Dover to Calais (or Dunkirk as in fact we might skip Calais) is entirely within territorial waters. Crossing the North Sea back from the Netherlands to Harwich involves a good 60 miles, or about 15 hours, in international waters where our travel insurance does not apply

Now some might say I am a worrier, I would argue though that I am a thinker. I like to plan for every eventuality and then I can relax and enjoy myself in the knowledge that come what may I've got it covered.

And I positively do not like the idea as skipper that if one of us was taken ill some eight or ten hours outbound from a Dutch port I'd be worrying about the costs of turning back to the nearest assistance (or, for that matter, the consequences of accepting assistance from Dutch or Belgian rescue services)

Worse, if it was me that was taken seriously ill, that would leave Jane having to deal with a potential nightmare. I'm well aware, and very grateful, that a whole host of friends would rush to our assistance (as indeed would I to help them in the same circumstances). "Erbas" would be back across the North Sea and on her mooring in the blink of an eye, lifts, help, etc. etc. would be proffered on all sides and so on.

But none of that avoids the likelihood of racking up a fairly hefty bill. And the bottom line is that a bill of as little, for a given value of "little", as £4k or £5k would almost certainly force the sale of "Erbas" to cover it.

So a quick scout around turned up several one off and annual travel insurance policies for the sailing man, and woman. For about £50 to £60 I can obtain full cover of every eventuality and virtually ever cost associated with a medical emergency even in the middle of the North Sea. 

It would not only cover any gap between what EHIC covers and the actual charges, it would fully cover the cost of repatriation, flying out replacement crew, and a whole raft of other potential costs too.

That's an awful lot of peace of mind for a just £60!