Prepping for season 2014

The long wet and windy winter is drawing to a close, and over the last couple of months we’ve been doing what we can to prepare our Macwester Malin for the new sailing season. As usual, we haven’t managed to achieve all that we hoped to, however on top of the annual routine of de-winterising the engine, changing the oil, checking the engine anode (new one required next season), replacing the impeller, fitting a new impeller gasket (see above for part number), freeing-off the cockpit drains, anti-fouling and other processes, we’ve also ticked a couple of ‘bigger’ (yes, more expensive) boxes on our list.

At the end of last season we put all three of our 32ft Malin’s Quantum sails in for repairs and cleaning including replacing the UV strip on the head sail (total cost approaching £500) at the local sail loft over in Port Edgar. We’ve yet to pick them up, but the sail-maker said that our sails are high-quality sails that are still in good condition. So that’s great news.

The other ‘even bigger’ job that we decided to do over the closed season was to have stainless steel shoes fitted to the bilge keels and skeg. This was because we spotted that the keels had acquired some damage over last season (see above), and we were keen to not just repair that damage …but also prevent it from happening again this year.

The prevention aspect of the equation is why we decided to go for a stainless steel solution, rather than simply build-up new glass fibre over the damage, as I’ve occasionally spotted on some bilge keelers with encapsulated keels.

Several weeks ago my grinder and I got up close and personal with the keels. Then, when the temperature was warm enough, I repaired the holes that I’d made with epoxy, and sanded the keels and skeg down to a smooth finish.

The biggest part of the job was well beyond my limited abilities, so we had the keels manufactured and fitted professionally. That was always the plan, and the company that produced the shoes, also did all the technical stuff required to jack up our 5.5 tonne Macwester Malin to facilitate unrestricted access to the underside of the keels and skeg.

For the record, we used 5mm 316 stainless steel plate for the shoe base, with the walls slightly thinner to aid bending. We used A4 (316) stainless screws, silver CT1 as a sealant/adhesive, and we also added an additional layer of resin to the bottom of the bilge in order to be 100% sure that the screws in the skeg plate were sealed internally and externally.

It was financially painful, but undoubtedly a job worth doing properly.

This week, I’m replacing the bilge pump hose, and getting the strops attached to our Hippo buoy, which has already been re-installed. Once that’s done, we’re more or less ready for crane-in this coming weekend.

Almost there!

Spring Tide Storm Surge

With the BBC news channel headlines specifically warning of a storm surge on the Firth of Forth on Saturday afternoon, we were sure to check over our Macwester Malin ahead of the storm. The shot above shows the steps just across the road from our local pub mid-afternoon.

As our yacht’s hatches were well and truly battened down, we enjoyed a couple of drinks from our picturesque vantage point on top of the steps [shown in the first photograph] overlooking the river.

The strong winds didn’t show any signs of putting in an appearance as the tide continued to rise. We watched a local fishing boat Christina II make her way back up the river as the temperature began to fall.

A squadron of council vehicles with yellow flashing lights and many hi-viz-jacket-wearing workers were waiting in the wings with sand bags to the ready. The shot above shows the pier where we moor our yacht during the season, getting thinner as high tide approached.

As the light continued to fade, we made our way back along to the village’s east harbour where our Macwester spends it’s winter months.

The photograph above shows the end of the pier which had already been gently consumed by the tide. As it turned out, the storm surge didn’t happen, as the forecasted strong winds simply failed to turn up. This was a welcome stroke of luck, as I reckon that waves of around a metre could have caused havoc at our club. Our Malin’s twin keels are raised 30 cm above the hard-standing, and our 32ft Malin weighs in at 5.5 tonnes, so we would probably have been alright. However there are a number of smaller boats, including some on cradles, that might not have stood up to a sustained side-on pounding from uninhibited rolling waves combined with south-easterly gale force winds.

As the tide turned we realised that we could start to relax. Of course, I subsequently spent a restless night waiting for the missing storm to hit 12 hours later [the following morning] when the tide would be back up at a similar height. Fortunately it remained eerily quiet all night long, and once again we managed to avoid any problems as the tide came and went without incident.

Party season 2013

Party season is in full swing and we’re burning our candle at both ends. You know you’ve had a good night out when you wake up the morning after, with a hazy recollection that you agreed to buy a Russian-built hydrofoil (thankfully, in this instance, subject to a few caveats).

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

As usual during the closed season, we’ve been out and about by car and on foot. Typically visiting harbours and ports up and down the Firth of Forth, often travelling back to cruising venues in a forlorn attempt to rejuvenate our memories of the summer. The shot above is the lighthouse at the entrance to Anstruther on a crisp winter’s day.

At low tide on Boxing Day, we walked out along side the Dragon’s Teeth to Crammond Island. It’s something we’ve wanted to do for years, but any time we’ve had the opportunity the tide or weather hasn’t been aligned to our plans. The image above is from Crammond Island looking over towards Crammond and the mainland. Given that the island is East of the Forth Bridge, technically the trek there and back is along the bottom of the North Sea.

Reflecting on our truncated 2013 sailing season, there’s no doubt that the highlight was spending an hour with a pod of dolphins travelling East from Elie (read more here). Next year, we’re contemplating taking our Macwester Malin through to the River Clyde on the west coast of Scotland for a few weeks, but that’s far from a done deal. We have a lot of work to cram in before crane in, and my attention is turning towards how we’re going to get everything completed by early April.

Whatever your plans for 2014, I hope that you have an enjoyable and peaceful Hogmanay and a great start to the new year.

River Forth in widescreen

We took a break from boat maintenance this afternoon to walk over the west side of the Forth Road Bridge. By my reckoning it’s been one year and five days since our last crossing by foot (on the east side of the bridge), and today was the first time that we have walked across in daylight. The image above shows the view from the south bank of the river, looking east towards Longannet power station, with Port Edgar on the left and Rosyth on the right.

The weather was crisp and clear, with very little wind and it was surprisingly warm in the afternoon sunshine. Walking from one side to the other and back again takes just over an hour. Unfortunately the photographs shown here fail to properly capture the breath-taking widescreen views or the scale of what stretches out in front of you. It was truly awesome. If you ever have a spare 90 minutes and have the opportunity, then I highly recommend it.

One of our chums from the sailing club was somewhere up above us in a microlight taking snaps, so it will be very interesting to see those …assuming that we don’t read about him in tomorrow’s papers.

As regular readers of this blog might imagine, over the last month I’ve been taking photographs and video of remedial and maintenance work that I’ve been carrying out on our Macwester Malin since the end of the season. I’ll create a summary post of this work over the coming weeks, but for the moment I just wanted to share some alternative views of our closest cruising grounds.

Crane-out 2013

We managed to squeeze in a couple of day sails in the run-up to crane-out, but time and tide waits for no man and inevitably the big day arrived all too soon. We were one of the last yachts to be craned-out this year, as our position in the yard had changed. We duly brought our 32ft Macwester Malin over to the club pier just after lunch at the clubhouse on Sunday.

Thankfully there were no problems lifting the boat out on to the hard. Before she  was lowered on to her wooden blocks for the winter, I asked for our yacht to be held aloft by the crane while I inspected the bottom of the keels. As I suspected there was a little bit of damage visible, and so that issue was added to my ‘to-do’ list.

As usual I helped with other boats after our Malin was safely on the ground. Later, as the day was drawing to a close, I got a lift over to our mooring and rowed our dinghy back round to the club to take it out of the water too. That last journey signalled the end of our season.

Crane-out is always a subdued event, but at least it went smoothly. I guess that all we can do now is look forward to the spring.

Dodging the gathering clouds

Our weekend’s sailing was slow to start as there was a lively weather front clearing through on Saturday. However I didn’t manage to avoid getting soaked, as I was drafted in as a last-minute crew member for the local dragon race. The forecast was better for Sunday and we arrived at our Macwester Malin before she was afloat, so that we could slip our mooring at the earliest possible opportunity. We had no plan other than to avoid the rain clouds, enjoy some carefree sailing, followed by a night at Capernaum Pier.

We tacked back and forth off Rosyth, Blackness Castle, Limekilns, and Charlestown in a gentle easterly. The very first shot above shows us on our 32ft centre-cockpit ketch with Charlestown in the background. Just above this block of text, is an on-board shot heading towards Limekilns, and below is a shot of us onboard our Malin with Grangemouth in the background. Thanks to John for photographs 1 & 3 from his yacht.

I’m not sure that I can explain just how good it felt to be sailing again, as this feeling was augmented with relief. 2013 has been a fantastic sailing season, yet we were hundreds of miles away for ten weeks missing most of it. Then when we eventually managed to get home and go for a mini cruise, the elements conspired against us and we spent most of the time stuck in the fog. We were beginning to feel that we weren’t going to get our sails up again before crane-out, so set against the backdrop of our predominantly yacht-less season, we had a totally fantastic day.

We arrived on the pontoon at Capernaum Pier just as a race was finishing. We met up with friends, and eventually made our way to the local pub to catch up on news, and hear about the race.

We woke up to a bright morning, so we quickly scoffed breakfast and got ready to go back out on to the river again. Just as we were setting off, we heard some stirring bagpipes and we both felt compelled to explore. If you like that sort of thing, it was great …and we happen to like that sort of thing.

Eventually our thoughts drifted back to sailing. The piper stopped playing and came down from the pier to see us cast off. It’s quite a tight spot to turn a 32 footer (see shot above the piper), so I used our bow thruster to swing our bow round about 120 degrees. As I was doing this, I couldn’t help but hear the owner of the Westerly Centaur moored just ahead of us say “I want one of those“, and then the piper shouted back over to her “Oh you need to get a bow thruster, they’re all the rage!”

By the time we left Capernaum Pier behind us, the weather was closing in. There was a filthy, black rain cloud consuming all in its path to the west over Grangemouth, and a similar black cloud to the east over the Forth Bridge. Where the sun broke though we were bathed in colourful light, and we reckoned that we must have been at the end of somebody’s rainbow.

Although we escaped the worst of the rain while we were out on the water, we were a bit damp around the edges. However we did make it back on to our mooring before a heavy downpour inevitably caught up with us.

Before too long, the rain cleared and we were left with a beautiful evening. The shot above is an attempt to capture the view we enjoyed over dinner in our cockpit. In case you’re wondering, the dark area occupying the top third of the photograph is the roof of our cockpit tent.

As the sun and tide dropped, we got our stuff together, locked up the boat and jumped into our dinghy. We weren’t quite ready to leave yet, so we went for a row out into the River Forth. It was a stunning end to a great couple of days.

Anstruther LWS cruise

After ten long yacht-less weeks in London, we were uber-keen to get back out on the water as soon as we could. We set a course for the marina at Anstruther, but given that the duration of the trip would be right on the edge of what was possible in one tide, we popped in for an overnight at Aberdour first. It was great to be back in our favourite east coast destination and we caught up with friendly faces that we hadn’t seen all summer.

That evening our rigging became the ‘perch of choice’ for the swarm of swallows that were resident in the harbour. We enjoyed watching their silent acrobatics as the tide fell and the day gave way to night. The next morning brought heavy fog, and it didn’t take an Apple Store Genius to deduce that the trip to Anstruther would need to wait for at least one more day.

Therefore a day later than expected we set sail for Anstruther. In a last-minute change to our plans, we slipped quietly out of Aberdour at 7.15 am on a falling tide rather than a rising afternoon tide. This would mean we would reach Anstruther at near LWS, but we set off anyway, as we were keen to make the journey while the fog had wandered off to bother somebody else.

As there was a light easterly wind, we decided to keep our Macwester Malin’s sails under wraps. About an hour into our journey, just as we started to cross Kirkcaldy Bay, our Garmin chartplotter lost all of it’s satellite signals. I veered substantially off-course to check if there was any change in position, but the screen was unresponsive. During the following five minutes we discussed turning back, as visibility wasn’t great. We could make out the coast to port side over towards Kirkcaldy, but had absolutely no visual of our destination. While the GPS was down, I used the diffused glow of the sun as a reference to steer, and have to confess that I was pleasantly surprised to find out that we were only five degrees off-course after the signal kicked back in.

We decided to press on. After crossing Kirkcaldy Bay, we needed to dump some time as we couldn’t enter Anstruther at low water, especially on one of the lowest tides of the year. We took a leisurely detour around the bay at Elie, before getting back on course to Anstruther.

Just as we were passing the lighthouse on the way out of Elie, ‘the crew’ nearly jumped out of her skin. She was speechless (not a trait I would normally associate with her), and could only point at the large disturbance in the water just off our stern. It looked a bit like we had strayed into a firing range. Moments later we realised that the large splash had been caused by a dolphin breaching alongside us, and that there was a pod of six or seven dolphins including a baby (see baby below).

The dolphins were going our way at around 2.5 knots and they accompanied us on our lazy journey for over an hour, meandering along passed St Monans to Pittenweem. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to video any of the dolphins breaching right alongside our Macwester on the three occasions that happened, but I did film them breaching further ahead of us half-a-dozen times, as can be seen in the video still below. It was a truly magical experience.

The dolphins eventually tired of playing with us, and all to soon they headed south. With the easterly wind picking up, it got a bit lumpy as we approached Anstruther, and we waited around for twenty minutes or so until we saw a fishing boat head into the outer harbour. We promptly followed it, and sat alongside the lighthouse for a further thirty minutes before heading into our berth on the pontoons.

High water came and went, and by 10pm it was approaching low water again. Our twin-keel Macwester Malin started to sink into the silt on the port side, leaning away from the finger pontoon. I courageously ventured out into Anstruther’s foggy Friday night chipmosphere, and did what I could with additional mooring warps. However, there was little could be done until we floated again the following day, and we spent an uncomfortable night listing to one side.

The fog we thought we had left behind, put in an appearance in the morning. Nonetheless we spent our days walking to Cellardyke and Pittenweem, and we also visited Crail by car courtesy of a visiting family member. We were grateful for the short periods of sunshine, but we also found the mellow tones of the fog horns to be strangely soothing. As we left the weekend behind, the fog stayed with us until it showed signs of clearing a little on the Tuesday. While we had the opportunity, we decided to head down to Port Edgar in time for East Coast Sailing Week which started two days later.

As luck would have it, there was a westerly wind blowing against us on the way back down …and as that wind was in-cahoots with the tide, the journey to Port Edgar took us five and a half hours. The marina was already very busy and we struggled to find a suitable vacant berth for the night.

The next morning I looked ahead at the deteriorating weather situation, and discovering that the marina was to get substantially busier, we chose to set sail the following night for Capernaum Pier at Limekilns (see above). In the end the bad weather didn’t arrive on schedule, but it did arrive …and (as I understand it) East Coast Sailing Week was cut short, as winds edged from F7 towards F8 on the last day. By then our 32ft Macwester Malin was safely back on her mooring.

London calling

While the weather has been much better than expected in the UK this summer, unfortunately we’ve been hundred’s of miles away from our Macwester Malin since early June, and that’s left a gaping hole in our sailing season.

We’re no longer eager to be dazzled by the bright lights of big cities, so we spent most of our time trying to avoid the tourist hotspots. Predictably, we sucked-up every opportunity for a ‘boat fix’, whether that was religiously watching repeats of ‘Coast’ at 8pm on the ‘Yesterday’ television channel, a trailer-sailer parked in a drive way in Horsley, (yes, I’m referring to you ‘Moon Critter‘), or a disparate collection of boats huddled together on the edge of the Thames spotted from a great height on Google Earth.

Surrey Quays (pictured above) was a disappointment. Less of a marina and more of a floating shanty town. I am sorry if that sounds a bit harsh; absolutely no offence to the live aboard occupants there – I can see the attraction of living aboard in a big city such as London …however we were looking for boats that actually sail, and we didn’t travel half-way across the city to view what could be argued is affordable housing.

Our two trips to St Katharine’s Marina were much more fun. Amazingly on our first visit we spotted ‘Tide Head’, the Outbound 46 that berthed alongside us at Port Edgar in early August last year (currently up for sale at £300,000).

Trying not to dwell on the deep-fried delights we could have been ingesting at the ‘Fishcotheque’ over in Waterloo, we enjoyed less-calorific dim sum for lunch at ‘Ping Pong’ before going for one more circuit of the marina. Making our way around the docks we also spotted a Macwester Malin ketch hidden amongst a sea of larger yachts and motorboats (see below).

July and early August brought a heatwave to the UK, with temperatures up to 34 degrees in London. Inevitably we craved to be out on the water, but with no water-based craft to hand we just had to make the best of a bad situation. I shan’t go into detail about our trip to the boating ‘lake‘ at Dulwich Park …suffice to say that by the time I navigated around the pedalos and got into my stride, I had to stop and row back in the other direction. It was an epic fail of diminutive dimensions.

In the end we were away for ten long weeks, and as the weather was the best it’s been in recent years …it was really hard not to feel like we’ve missed out. Next up we’ll be back on the water as soon as possible, although now that we’re back the short-term forecast is looking pretty bleak. Who would have thought that?

Great Odin’s beard …it’s summer!

With good weather flirting with the forecasts and a busy time ashore over the coming weeks, we grabbed the opportunity to set sail on Thursday evening’s late tide. After a short overnight stop at Port Edgar, we were sailing again before 7am on Friday morning. It was a grey, moody, but soft start to the day and we had the river to ourselves.

Once clear of the bridges, with Hound Point to our starboard, we threw up some sails on our Macwester Malin ketch. This proved a bit pointless, as there simply wasn’t enough wind around. However we could see the promise of sunshine in the distance and our hopes of good weather for the weekend started building.

After a while we reluctantly brought our Macwester’s sails back down and motored on towards Braefoot Terminal (top left in photo above), The Haystack (top middle in photo above), and Inchcolm (top right in photo above). As we got closer, we conjured up far-fetched names for the green tanker that was alongside the terminal in the distance.

The sky brightened as the journey unfolded and by the time we reached Braefoot Terminal, we were beginning to think that the weather might even surpass the forecast. As for guessing the name of the tanker …we didn’t come close. [Handy user tip: If you click on the image above, you can just about make out Odin’s mythical goatee beard at the bow].

Approaching 8am just one or two nautical miles later, we reached Aberdour. By then the sun was beaming down on our home for the next couple of days. It was such a great feeling to be back.

We took things pretty easy for the rest of Friday, mainly catching up with friendly local club members that we hadn’t seen since last season. On Saturday we had visitors from the West coast onboard. Their young son brought a pirate flag with him especially for the occasion. He was keen to learn all about our 32ft centre-cockpit ketch and almost got the names of the sails from stern to bow nailed. It went something like this: …’Mizzen’ (correct), ‘Main’ (correct), ‘Chihuahua’ (umm …nearly, but not quite).

Although we offered our friends a bed for the night, they had to get back, so we enjoyed another peaceful night alone with only the crows, ducks and our pet heron for company. The next morning we woke up bright and early to another fine day, and after breakfast we were invited for a mid-morning cup of tea at an ABC member’s house on the beach. He had a fabulous home, and we learned that he typically walked his dinghy through the front garden, on to the beach and from there it was a short transfer out to his yacht in the bay. Late morning we walked  (in shorts and short-sleeves) a couple of miles East along the coast to a small harbour at Starleyburn. The harbour is privately owned and was locked up. From a distance, I spotted a couple of old boats on the hard, but there wasn’t an awful lot to see. It was an enjoyable walk nonetheless, and we had a relaxing late lunch with long chilled drinks on returning home to our Malin.

Like our long weekend, the weather didn’t last. On the journey back we tried to get our Macwester Malin’s sails up, but once again there was no wind. It wasn’t cold, but the cloud cover was dense and the sun was struggling to put in an appearance. The shot above shows Inchgarvie a small island near the Forth Bridge. Like many of the islands on the Forth (Inchkeith, Inchmickery etc), Inchgarvie was intentionally modelled to look like a battleship.

The weather improved as we neared the end of our journey. On the approach to our mooring, we met a friend from the club out on the water. We rafted up and slowly drifted down the river for a while as he told us of his week-long trip down to Lindisfarne and back. Sounds like a journey we’re going to have to make sometime.

Fife Regatta 2013

With a social event ashore on Friday night, it was after lunch on Saturday before we made it onboard our 32ft Macwester yacht and out on to the River Forth for our first proper sail of the season. It was great to finally reacquaint ourselves with our old friend ‘Dhu Craig’ (typically our first navigational marker) after a long winter apart.

We were both feeling a bit rusty, so even although the wind was behind us, we decided to throw in a couple of practice tacks back and forth across the river, as we meandered down towards the bridges and our final destination of Port Edgar marina at South Queensferry.

The river has become much busier on approach to Port Edgar since construction of the new Forth Replacement Crossing began last year. As usual, we dropped our Macwester Malin’s sails before we hit the construction zone, and we motored into the marina carefully avoiding the growing forest of buoys, barges, boats, and other obstacles.

Not long after we berthed, a friend from our club turned up in his Colvic Watson along with his friends in a Colvic Atlanta ketch. If you’re not familiar with either of those boats, the Colvic Atlanta (white over navy) is next to our Macwester Malin in the shot above, and the Colvic Watson is to the top right (on the far side of Maui 4, a Moody 44). It turns out that we had actually spotted this very Colvic Atlanta back in 2010 when we were looking for boats. At the time it was ashore near Blackness Castle in the owner’s back garden while it was being restored.

After dinner I eventually found some time to read the latest PBO, while ‘the crew’ was reading a novel on her Kindle Fire. I say ‘novel’, but I had absolutely no idea what she was actually reading, as the backside of a Kindle doesn’t give that info away to the rest of the world. After considering the circumstantial evidence and asking some subtle yet probing questions, I deduced that she must have been reading… “Stray shopping carts of  Eastern North America; A guide to field identification”.

Okay, okay. I’m joshing with you. I made that last bit up. Technically you can’t actually buy “Stray shopping carts of  Eastern North America; A guide to field identification” as a Kindle book at the moment …it’s only available as a hard back.

Anyhoo, before long some friends turned up and after a couple of drinks in our Macwester Malin’s spacious centre cockpit we headed over to the other side of the marina, where seven of us squeezed into a tiny 1968 Invicta’s cabin for a nightcap. Although uber-compact, it was fun nonetheless.

We had a great night’s sleep in our newly improved aft cabin, and after a healthy walk ashore in the morning followed by some lunch, we headed back out on to the water and set a course up river towards the Fife Regatta at Limekilns. I should perhaps point out that we were heading for the annual ‘Fife Regatta’ in Fife, rather than the more recent ‘Fife Regatta’ on the Clyde in a month or so. We weren’t racing (it’s not our bag), but we were keen to see what was going on. We motored into the wind until we cleared a tanker coming down river and then threw up our sails.

The race was in full swing by the time we got there. We dropped our sails and darted through the field in front of ‘Erin’, a 49ft Jeanneau with her spinnaker up. Once through the other side and clear of the race we got our genoa and main sail back up. By then the wind had dropped and so we kept our Malin’s mizzen under wraps as we didn’t think that it would give us much more momentum.

On the plus side, we were able to enjoy the tranquility as we weren’t rushing to make it into a distant harbour on a rapidly falling tide. Inevitably time eventually ran out, so we dropped our sails and headed back home. A friend from the club was onshore to welcome us in as we picked up our Hippo mooring buoy . After a short dinghy transfer, he was onboard and we exchanged details of our respective sailing weekend over chilled drinks. It was a pleasant way to finish off a relaxing weekend.