Antibes calamity pics, and E120s

jfm

jfm

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A few odds and ends:

Those 3 E120 plotters that I have for sale are now listed together with some other electronics here on the for sale form. Half price, and one is half price -£200

Three pics below from Antibes, taken yesterday. This 50' ketch was aground on the beach at La Garoupe as I arrived for lunch, crew having just got off. Weather was worse than the first pic suggests - second pic is more like it. As I had lunch it sadly got pounded onto a rock (that you can't see in the pic, but it sticks up half a metre out of the sand) and eventually smashed. A chunk of hull washed onto the beach and sadly I saw it was a double diagonal wood hull. Such a shame. There were strong (45 knot) winds for a few hours from the East and I've no idea how the yacht got onto that lee shore. It is strange that it had 3 sails rigged, which is way too much for that weather. It had its anchor down

yachtgaroupeaground.jpg

yachtgaroupeholed.jpg



The last pic is much more light hearted. When you see these pics on the 'net you wonder if they're for real. Well, this one was. A yacht broker parked new Volvo SC60 on Mole Sud quay in Antibes, which has a tiny incline, and left handbrake off, and this happened. Sunday morning, day before yesterday. Sunseeker 'Hattan 70 bathing platform mechanism might have been damaged by the weight of the car, by the looks of things, but no other problem and no-one hurt. Volvo was towed (dragged) back onto the quay an hour later. I'm not making any sexist comment but I observed that the driver of the volvo was female
Volvoantibessmash.jpg
 
That sea looks pretty rough. We should have been in SoF last week except for life's rich tapestry. We've been there round about the first/second week in April every year for donkeys and there often seems to be a few days when a nasty wind blows up from the sea.

Hooning in on the 10k, I see :)
 
GrowingLad said:
Shame about the yacht.

As for the volvo, I can never understand how people manage to forget to put the handbrake on.

I even leave the car in gear just in case.
Click to expand...

It's a female thing. Both my existing and previous SWMBO's always refused to put their car in gear when parking it. Perhaps it was the way I asked them
 
Wow ...

That must have been a very, very local storm. We had no winds whatsoever - well not 45 knot easterlies anyway ! ( I was about 10 miles crow flying distance away for others). What a shame .

Nothing to be said about the Volvo ... except that car, driver and result seem to be well-matched! (Memo to self to use handbrake in future).
 
Deleted User said:
It's a female thing. Both my existing and previous SWMBO's always refused to put their car in gear when parking it. Perhaps it was the way I asked them
Click to expand...

Funnily enough we had to go through months of training in our household...

...every time the wife started up after I'd driven the car we jumped forward...

...me in a calm voice, "Either check it's in neutral or put your foot on the clutch".

It has taken years of guidance but we are slowly getting there.
 
GrowingLad said:
Funnily enough we had to go through months of training in our household...

...every time the wife started up after I'd driven the car we jumped forward...

...me in a calm voice, "Either check it's in neutral or put your foot on the clutch".

It has taken years of guidance but we are slowly getting there.
Click to expand...

Spot on. I don't know why but for some reason, the females in my life have the inability to compute that it is advisable to press the clutch pedal down before turning the ignition key (in fact some new cars cannot now be started without doing that). I gave up with my current SWMBO and bought her an auto. It's less complex so she can cope with it
 
Deleted User said:
Spot on. I don't know why but for some reason, the females in my life have the inability to compute that it is advisable to press the clutch pedal down before turning the ignition key (in fact some new cars cannot now be started without doing that). I gave up with my current SWMBO and bought her an auto. It's less complex so she can cope with it
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...and does it not help to explain that it avoids the starter motor having to turn over the engine and part of the gearbox, rather than just the engine?

She probably puts it in the same mental file as I use for my father's advice to always reverse into a parking space so that you are doing the complicated manouver whilst the engine is hot - I guess it had more resonance when you juggled the manual choke for the first 5 minutes after starting a car.
 
Deleted User said:
I don't know why but for some reason, the females in my life...
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Neither do I, but the guys who designed the Smart surely knew something about that.
You can't turn the engine on unless the gear is in neutral, and you can't remove the key unless the gear is in reverse....
 
MapisM said:
Neither do I, but the guys who designed the Smart surely knew something about that.
You can't turn the engine on unless the gear is in neutral, and you can't remove the key unless the gear is in reverse....
Click to expand...

No prizes for guessing which gender market that car was aimed at then:)
 
Deleted User said:
It's a female thing. Both my existing and previous SWMBO's always refused to put their car in gear when parking it. Perhaps it was the way I asked them
Click to expand...

My SWMBO got the idea of leaving it in gear rather quickly after her 3 month old car rolled down the drive into the garage wall....

Luckily it only rolled about four feet against the handbrake so just a bit of paint damage. Perhaps you should 'engineer' a similar event :D
 
Deleted User said:
No prizes for guessing which gender market that car was aimed at then:)
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It's not just a female thing, you know.

Driving through Harpenden High Street, when a metro came straight out of a side turning right in front of us. There was nothing we could do other than collide.

Then we discovered that there was no driver in the metro. It was all a bit bizarre.

What had happened was, that not an hour beforehand, this chap had got his ticket to become a BSM driving instructor, and parked this metro on a hill, and didn't put the handbrake on.

The insurance Co. never paid up fully either as they reckoned we had to take a percentage of the blame, can you believe it?
 
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Questor said:
It's not just a female thing, you know.

Driving through Harpenden High Street, when a metro came straight out of a side turning right in front of us. There was nothing we could do other than collide.

Then we discovered that there was no driver in the metro. It was all a bit bizarre.

What had happened was, that not an hour beforehand, this chap had got his ticket to become a BSM driving instructor, and parked this metro on a hill, and didn't put the handbrake on.

The insurance Co. never paid up fully either as they reckoned we had to take a percentage of the blame, can you believe it?
Click to expand...

I was at the Run to the Sun (VW Beetle/Camper event) a few years back, when a camper van handbrake failed and it started to roll down the hill picking up speed, before running over a tent and bouncing up in the air as it hit something solid in the tent. I had the unenviable task of looking in the tent to see if it was a body or a backpack, fortunately it was the latter. The camper van carried on until it was stopped by a (previously) pristine fully restored Split Screen.
 
kcrane said:
She probably puts it in the same mental file as I use for my father's advice to always reverse into a parking space so that you are doing the complicated manouver whilst the engine is hot - I guess it had more resonance when you juggled the manual choke for the first 5 minutes after starting a car.
Click to expand...

Do that in an American shopping centre parking lot and the security guards give you some attention. Its known as the 'getaway position' :)
 
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