A sail in Little Yellow

Today’s sail came after church, lunch at home and a nap.  The summer cumlus puffball clouds were prevelant today and the winds were about 5 Kts at the surface above the level of the glacial moraine lake.  What this means is that there were some good winds and some doldrums and mostly mediocre winds.  My Tumblr blog is at the following link

While writing this blog I read my daughter’s Panama Experience at Tumblr.  She documents things well and it is a photo-documentary with descriptions.  There is a new episode that I just read regarding her trip to Nicaragua.  It is worth reading at http://panamooreexperience.tumblr.com/

I have read a few of these

This will be a short blog about some good short stories that are free. Check them out.

http://mic.com/articles/90453/14-brilliant-pieces-of-literature-you-can-read-in-the-time-it-takes-to-eat-lunch

Sailing Little Yellow

I went down to our nearby lake where we keep out “little yellow sailboat”. My wind gauge was saying 3.1 MPH so I knew it was not going to be a high speed day. I took the gas can and filled her engine with the 50:1 she sips and then bent on the sails. I started the lil’ beast and flipped the motor around to back out of the slip and was just clear of the dock when she died ( and me with an on shore breeze). I pulled and pulled but no would she start. At the end of the sail I experimented and found by riching mixture it would start and run great – lesson learned, richen when you shut off engine :).

The sail was enjoyable but slow, with only a few puffs of wind to drive us into about a 10° port side down ( a starboard tack) angle. I sailed around for about an hour but the clouds were darkening and the occasional thunder rumble could be heard si I headed under sail for the dock. The wind was just right for the approach to the dock but I knew it was going to be dicey with no motor. At about 5’ out from the dock and making slowly for the slip, I raised the keel – big mistake – and the boat more or less turned 45° to the slip and dock under sail influence alone. Bang into the dock with the bow. I grabbed onto one of the posts and forced the boat around into the slip. Whew – sweating time was over. Time to go home for the day.

Party Polarization vs Party Co-operation: Gridlock and the decline of the USA

Most of my life has been in a climate of political co-operation.  Things were good here in the USA and life was great.  My troubles, if you can call them that, began in about 1990. At this time there was no great political divides like there is today. However, there was trouble brewing in the American Heartland as the manufacturing base began its disintegration.  In our little sector of NE Indiana came the collapse of International Harvester, General Electric, Tokheim, Dana, Weatherhead and a whole myriad of small support companies. I became a victim in this collapse that left our small, medium and large cities full of rotting buildings and rampant unemployment and transient job conditions and a flight of highly trained and educated people to the South.

However, My main reason for this post was to present the chart. I scraped it off of some site I was looking at and found it interesting so I have just wrapped some words around it.

A busy week ( and a half)

We both have been busy, not necessarily with paying jobs, but with donating time to the church for the annual garage sale and for me keeping the computer system and network healthy and growing.  Our pastor has announced his retirement at the end of August.

SAM has been helping her sister with her job of cleaning rental housing out at the lakes nearby.  Our poor sailboat has just been collecting water with all the rain of the past week. I need to get down there to pump out the boat but it is expected to rain again today as you can see from the cropped radar I took a few minutes ago.

I have not had much time to play with the blogs and html so I am devoting this part of the morning to a format of floating and padding. This little exersize is using the float:right to get the picture to wrap around the text which on the left. Not a big deal really but just a little fun to keep using html.

I am dreaming of sailboats, sunlight, structural integrity of hatches et.al.

One of the biggest deals of our new sailboat is the replacement of the lens of the hatch for many Lewmar hatches.  I called a guy in California to see what he had to say.  A pleasant gentleman, and honest no doubt, said that I would be priced out of the market if I tried to ship them to him to be replaced.  He recommended that I try a much closer place to the boat so that shipping is not an issue.  I did a quick Google search and nothing really impressive popped out of the screen that said  USE ME I AM GOOD so I did send a form inquiry off just to test the waters.

Tomorrow is another day and when I find the right person/company I will edit this thread and add information as it becomes available. Oh Oh, the prices thrown around are significant.

ACR PLB-200 Battery Changeout

A few years ago, too few at the price of new batteries, I bought a Personal Locator Beacon from ACR:  The expiration date of the batteries was 09-2012.  Since we had sold our Inspiration I was not too worried about it and since ACR was charging almost what a new device would cost to replace the batteries I considered it a throwaway device. I opened the device and looked at the batteries and thought I could replace them myself BUT how could I make sure everything was within specification for transmit power, frequency and all the other things like switch activations, etc.

Fast forward to today and I came across the following company that replaces the batteries, does all the system checks and certifications for a “reasonable” price.  I provide the information here as a matter of interest to everyone who has an ACR PLB-200/201 and others who are mariners wanting such a device.  Actually, you could take this PLB along with you if you are going into the deep dark woods, desert, or anywhere you could be in a life threatening situation and want to be found anywhere on earth that has a clear view to the open sky. Current day PLB’s are pretty cheap so if you are an adventurer get one.

The price to replace my batteries is around $135 plus shipping down to him.  The return shipping is paid by them.  Turn around is nominally a week or two.

John Szipszky
Stateside Commercial Marine,Inc.
2854 Stirling Road, Suite K
Hollywood, FL 33020
Ph: 954-926-3665
Fax: 954-926-3664
Monday - Friday 9 AM to 4 PM EST

An afternoon of sailing

After a morning of house type work and a short afternoon nap it looked like the wind was up enough for a sail around Pleasant Lake.  The day was bight and clear except for some cumulus typical for our summer season.  The ripples on the lake were not that encouraging however.  Still, we cast off and motored out in the lake to bend the sails and set up the rigging.  As with any new boat, it takes some time for things to become automatic and we tried a new technique – that was a failure – of hoisting the main sail and then trying to feed the boltrope into the boom later.  That definitely does not work so from now on it will be setting up the boom first  [Things would be a lot easier if she had a topping lift to hold up the boom whilst trying to bend the sails].  Perhaps this winters modifications will add the topping lift.  Another lesson learned is that we need a block on the aft end of the boom to reverse directions so as to pull tight the foot of the main sail.  Trying to do this by had just is too hard whilst you are doing two or three other things to get underway. The sail was leisurely and SAM did a good job of tending the tiller while I fiddled with sails and rigging.  We made several trips around the lake, tacking and jibing a lot, sometimes with good speed and sometimes just barely moving.  It was a good day to experiment and one time a lesson was learned to un-sheet the main immediately and not to wait for an excessive heel to take place :).  That little maneuver was pretty dicey and almost capsized us.  Still we had fun and the motor worked well when we needed it.  We will have the skills to really put her through the paces pretty soon.

Later in the evening, we went to Dairy Queen for a hot fudge/butterscotch sundae.  Man that was good.  It has been some time since I felt comfortable eating ice cream – thank the heavens for Lactose pills to counteract the intolerance to dairy products.  Even now, several hours later, there are no symptoms.

As I write, the time is growing late for me and it is approaching 2330 hrs so I had better wrap this up and get ready for bed.  All-in-all, it was a great day filled with new adventures and lessons learned.  I look forward to tomorrow and all the new things that make life worth while.  The morrow will be Sunday so we will start out with church and the day will end with a gathering of the Alleshouse clan to meet at Scoops for a reunion with Irene’s son Anthony E. Short and family.  We expect most of the Steuben County Family to be there so it should be a fun event.

Well, I will close this missive and say good evening to you all.