Entering December

It is feeling like December now and we don’t seem to be as far ahead as I anticipated. Still a lot of winterizing to finish up on the boats out of the water. I don’t hear the travel lift moving this morning so a couple of my promises won’t come to fruition today. This will seem like ingeminated content but I don’t actually do any scheduling – I just make suggestions to the “boat promising guy”. First I have to get the obligatory boat hauling photos out of the way. The guys who do this are an important part of the yard’s success and they deserve some recognition for a job well done.   This piece of rigging is being replace for two reasons – one obvious from the photo and one not so much. You can see where it is flattened out and separating which makes for a very weak piece of cable. What you don’t see but can definitely feel if you handle the cable is the “meat hooks” which are small broken strands which puncture your  skin. We had someone contact us for a deck fitting. I remember these PAR Jabsco fittings from back in the day but they have been out of production for years. Just to prove that if you throw enough time and money at something you can make it happen we are making one out of aluminum plate and off the shelf fittings for the customer. And here it is sitting in the hot box with Awlgrip primer on it. A few more hours and it will be a complete fitting. Suggested Content: Laura Dekker in Capetown Notoriously media-shy solo sailor Laura Dekker has not only survived a 50 knot storm to arrive in Cape Town at the end of her Indian Ocean passage, she has done it with a coolness which belies her sixteen years, and with little fuss outside the sailing world. If she achieves her next leg as planned – from Cape Town back to Gibraltar in the next few months – she will then not be able to avoid a mainstream media storm as the youngest circumnavigator ever. As long as she completes this leg before September next year, she will take the unofficial record from Australia’s Jessica Watson. The way she’s handling her successive oceans, it doesn’t seem a big ask.  Read the story at Sail-World.com Content you can use Navigational charts direct from Google Earth – and it’s free If you have ever had a problem with inaccurate charting where you sail, you’ll want to know about something that seems so simple in concept that it should have been done years ago, and wasn’t – a program that can create navigation charts directly from Google Earth, avoiding any inaccuracy. Retired Canadian HP programmer Paul Higgins tells the story of how he came to create the program, AND explains how to do it, free! Read the story at Sail-World.com