Recent content by NPMR

Put it down to being addled! Of course it was Shingles Bank. That's what really is thread 'drift'! Apologies. PS it was some 40 years ago and I may not be in my first flush of youth.

Many moons ago, we left Cherbourg in a Cutlass 27. Decca Dinghy position device, advised position "suspect" about 6 miles out as the fog came down. Thereafter we groped our way back to UK aiming for Yarmouth. First sight of land was the beach huts, close up, west of Hurst Castle. We'd sailed...

The boat, Jeanneau, has 13 seasons in water. All seacocks except holding tank are silver on yellow metal skin fittings and connectors to pipework. All are clean as can be, virtually no verdigris or staining anywhere. The engine seacock having become blocked by seaweed in Salcombe, was cleared...

We had the engine seacock condemned by an engineer clearing a blockage of seaweed this summer. We replaced the whole thing as soon as we found it, with the plan to replace the others during winter refit - now in progress. Having just scraped all these skin fittings back to bare metal, they look...

New winter yard to us has more boats with the anchor and chain not out on the ground. We always laid it out. We don't have a wooden boat, but I rationalised that all that chain makes a cold spot next to the water tank (undesirable) and allowed the rope to be a little more open to any air...

Jeanneau 33i? Big wheel. Sails beautifully. Good in a blow. Not too pricey.

Crossing from R Helford back to Falmouth yesterday (Sat 8th Sept), I was interested to hear a Securite call, around midday, from Falmouth Harbour calling for vessels to mind their wash around the cruise liner "Island Princess", anchored in the bay. Why only the liner, (92,822 tonnes, 964ft...

The issue, to me, seems to be the positioning of lobster pots in awkward places. Out in open waters is less troublesome. In Falmouth I have complained to the Harbour Master* about pots in the narrow fairway and in between the moorings where it is not unreasonable to expect great numbers of...

Engineer advised having no external strainer and a 'straight' seacock arrangement (I.e. no bends) so it can all be dealt with from inside the boat. OK on a shaft drive but harder with saildrive.

We were in Salcombe in late June and it was its usual busy but bustling space. We were offered a resident's mooring as The Bag was pretty full with a rally. It turned out to be a pleasant place to be but the amount of weed floating past (and lots that accumulated nearby) was immense. When we...

We had a similar situation arriving at Douarnanez a few years ago. An organised competition was taking place across the river entrance. There were possibly a hundred or maybe more kites hurtling around. Very exciting but impossible to gauge where to go to help or avoid them. We were under...

The depth sounder in our Raymarine set up seems to be faulty. (Airmar Smart Tri Multisensor 20-633-01). Everything else is working very well Running through an ST70 instrument I can see the instrument is responding but depth readings have been variable and now seem to have stopped completely...

Thank you for suggestions (So far?) And Doug748 for reminder of a publication I had seen earlier in life and completely forgotten. It feels like we might have hit on something interesting to replace the EU trip we can't bring ourselves to be bothered with this year- it used to be so easy!

My plan this year is to try as many new anchorages as I can. Sailing from our base in Falmouth, I possibly know many of the traditional ones already - Helford, Cornish s. coast, Plymouth and environs and some small ones in between. But I have heard of some likely ones outside Brixham and...

The cast aluminium casing holding the morse throttle lever on our then fairly new Jeanneau had stainless bolts holding it together. The Powder coating flaked off wherever a stainless bolt had come into contact with the aluminium. It took me three days to get the thing apart as a result of the...