Bit of a slow time at the moment

Not a lot has been happening recently. We had hoped to get down to Sarah G last weekend and try out the cruising chute properly on a short trip to Fowey but were defeated by rowdy neighbours keeping us awake till the early hours of the morning.

We will be down next on the weekend of the 31 July but have guests aboard so will not be going far. We do however hope to finally get the AIS transponder working. After a bit more reading it seems that having two aerials on the masthead really would be a bad idea unless we rigged up some complicated contraption to give them 2 meters separation which really would make us look like the roof a cold war embassy. Instead we are going to put a splitter in and run the VHF and AIS off the same aerial. Reports seem to say that this will work well enough.


And so it goes on. We are planning a long weekend in Falmouth at the middle of August with the objective of fitting the Aries. We will also leave here there for a week and start our holiday from Falmouth rather than Torpoint. Here is a picture of her dried out and also one of me looking not very heroic on the foredeck.

Got a Satellite Phone

The whole business of an Iridium satellite phone was looking highly vexatious. A new one is around £1300 plus air time which is way out of my price league. Second hand ones do not seem to appear in the yachting press. They do however appear quite regularly on Ebay and I was lucky enough to get one for £250 odd on there. It is of course an old 9500 series which is now out of production and does not support data connections.


However for my purposes, it is fine and will serve it's purpose perfectly. I have purchased an airtime deal from mailasail so will be testing it this weekend.

The phone it self is wonderfully retro compared to today's mobile phones. It is styled like mobiles from it's era which is the mid nineties and is also about five times bigger than most phones today. It even has the meaningless flip down cover for the key pad as inspired by the star trek films.

Met one of the Jester Challenge entrants

Gus Davidson who had entered Jester Challenge now works in the same office as me and I was lucky enough to have a bit of a chat with him today which was both an honour and also very enjoyable. I have nothing but admiration for anyone prepared to set out across an ocean and to do so in a boat so much smaller than we are planning is even more awe inspiring. He undertook the project to raise money for McMillan Cancer Care. His website is below

Gus Davidson

Meanwhile our plans continue to come together ever so slowly.