Forethought 2007 log
This is now the story of year 12 of owning a
GK24.
Royal Southampton Frostbite Series 2008
After a one year gap we went back to taking part in the series. The
regular crew all came back apart from Eerfan who has now bought himself
a shiny but needs- work Contessa 32. His space has been filled by Nigel
Nicholson who has crewed on Forethought over many years.
So I have been taking Forethought up to Ocean Village on Saturday and
then staying overnight , bringing the boat back on Sunday to Hamble.
Royal Southampton MDL Frostbite series Race 1: 13 Jan
The first week (13 Jan 2008) had
Force 6, we broached several times under white sails and Steve fell
overboard. The main hatch was kicked off during the race but was fixed
afterwards.
The single handed return delivery trip was extremely unpleasant as the
wind was SE on the nose and the chop slowed Forethought to about 2 knots.
Royal Southampton MDL Frostbite series Race 2: 27 Jan
The second week was extremely quiet. Racing was postponed until another day.
On Saturday 2nd February, I put Forethought up on the piles, and scrubbed the bottom.
As well as the scrub, I managed to fix a cold-start problem. Actually
the stop cable was jamming so that the stop lever was held in the stop
position until the starter motor vibrated it loose.
As it turned out the atmospheric pressure increased during the day with
neap tides and the tide went out further than expected but did not come
in again .
Using a block attached to a strong point on Forethought and attached
high up a pile, we pulled up and away from the shore at high water and
escaped. The strong winds forecast for the Sunday began to show
at 2030 when we finally headed back down the river.
Royal Southampton MDL Frostbite series Race 3: 10 Feb
On the Saturday I fitted a new solar vent, (solar cell plus battery
plus fan in the fore hatch) the old one had worn out so would run
if you poked it and for a few minutes until it seized up.
The Sunday dawned cold and clear. The walk down to the tender was
lethal. It was low tide , the pontoon was sloping down hill on the mud
and leaning over at about 10 degrees. Fortunately the steep ramp down
to the pontoon had strips of wood across it every foot. The pontoon was
passable provided I did not stand on the white planks just visible in
the twilight. Carrying an engine and a bag I kept my weight low to
minimise the effect of falling. But I got to a tender. Forethought was
barely off the bottom of the river when I got there. Fortunately she
had done her usual trick of the keel sliding off the mud into the
deeper channel.
I had to wash the ice off the decks.
A thermometer in my bag was reading -2 degrees C. I know it dawned cold
and clear. I was there.
0730 : Can see the sun.
The race started badly. We went the wrong side of the committee boat on
the tide with no wind. When the wind filled in it came from the
southeast rather than the northwest which is where it began. By the
first mark we were in the middle of the fleet despite taking about ten
minutes to re-cross the start line.
This is the Class One start. The Hunter 707 is in class 2, and they
remained within 20 metres of the committee boat for about 20 minutes
before their start. They started well.
Apart from the start, the race went well. In fact the Race Officer
phoned me afterwards because the start was 'dodgy'. I assured him we
enjoyed the racing despite the out-of-specification start (more than 5
knots wind needed ). Was there for the first two starts but not for us.
We didnt mind as we caught up so soon ...
Man Overboard ! (but not Forethought this time)
I spent some time putting the boat away , as the rate of ebb of the
tide increased. When I came up to the buoy there was less than half a
knot of tide, but by the time I left it was over two knots. I was glad
I had taken the outboard on the trip with me as the tide was so strong
I would have had difficulty performing the rescue I was about to
perform.
As I was passing a boat I noticed a tender behind a boat and something
dark in the water . It did not look right. So I turned round the tender
and had to open up the throttle to stem the tide. At one time the kill
cord fell off my engine and the man in the water asked for help in the
silence. So I came along side him and his boat and we gradually worked
him back into his tender from lying in the water one hand on the
tender, feet in the tender and the other hand on the stern ladder. That
was all that was holding him and his tender to the boat.
Once he was in his tender I towed his tender alongside for a couple of
minutes talking with him, in the direction of Mercury Marina about half
a mile up the river. Progress was slow. In the end he decided to start
his engine and headed off by himself.
As far as I can tell he fell in when he went back to get his life
jacket having forgotten it. He overbalanced while grabbing his boat.
Judging by the fact it was his right hand on the stern ladder
which is on the starboard side of his boat he might have tried a
down tide approach and been hauled out of his tender by the tide.
When I got ashore at the Royal Southern I reported the incident to the
Harbour Master. He said he would check with Mercury Marina to see if he
got back ok.
We did one race where on a gybe Steve fell overboard but we
managed to drag him back in. The slog back into a Force 6 Southeasterly
down Southampton water took 2 hours - the boat would stop in some of
the gusts
Round the Island 2008 here
Installing instruments
I was made redundant late in 2008 and spent some of the money on boat
upgrades, going from a collection of boat jumble to a coherent set of
marine electronics.
In order to install them I have decided to
make a large wooden box to replace the plank with junk screwed to it
used to hold all the instruments on dashboard mountings where the sea
got at the back of them.
The instruments and electronics which were fitted :
- Space
Age Doppler Log : circa 1977 . This never worked properly anyway and
had suffered from either a lightning near-strike or a battery
disconnect with engine running requiring replacement of some old
chips in it with newer versions. It worked less well anyway after
repair.
- VDO Logic analog 20 knot display circa 1996 with dot
matrix auxiliary display. Cost £5 at a boat jumble in boxed new
condition. Used a pulse output from the Doppler log to indicate correct
speed under engine and always wrongly while heeled sailing
- Garmin
Fishfinder 80 : circa 2000 display destroyed by condensation
owing to water splashes on the back. Also the connector between the
echosounder transducer and the fishfinder had rotted away owing to
seawater exposure , and this had been replaced with soldered joints. Of
course the Airmar transducer and the Garmin cable had a different
number of wires and a different colour code either side of the joint.
- Garmin
GPSMap 160 : circa 1996 one of those chartplotters using proprietary
cartridges which were bought back from dealers and destroyed by Garmin
when they upgraded (see film Robots for what that feels like ) . It
only cost me £16 and 2 days of digging around to find the solder
whisker inside to make it work. The display also had some condensation
damage.
- Seafarer mini seacourse autopilot: works perfectly well still.
- Seafarer VHF : a 1980's model with EPROMS and channel programming switches inside. Works well still but its not GMDSS.
Replacement
- Paddle wheel transducer : Using a Navico/Airmar speed/temperature transducer , I cut the plug off and wired it to the display
- I kept the VDO Logic log display as we use the timer and all the crew know how to operate it properly.
- Garmin
GPSMap 450S.: Chartplotter with complete British coastline and cross
Channel charts on it . Dual frequency fishfinder integrated in the same
unit and featuring a sunlight viewable LCD. It can also display
AIS from a receiver (and do navigate-to on an AIS target!!). As many of
the waypoints which I transferred from my old GPSMap 160 are actually
buoys known in detail, I need to go through and delete these
'duplicated' waypoints from the database in the GPSMap 450s.. The
screen is pretty small but if it was any bigger the unit would not fit
on the swing-out instrument panel I have built.
- Simrad TP22.
Either fewer people buy these or they are more reliable than the
obvious competition. I went for a model that has data input for steer
to waypoint operation.
- Simrad IS20 wind instrument: even a piece of wire costs £25 to go with this aaargh.
- Icom 505AIS VHF . A GMDSS VHF combined with an AIS receiver function that uses the main VHF scanning receiver for AIS.
- Sterling digital alternator regulator
So after all this the boat will have a Simnet databus on it.
Page © Mike James 11th Jan 2009
- Comments to:
- mike@hamble.demon.co.uk