Buffy: The lady was for turning

We are nearing the end.

Not without a succession of mini-dramas that crop up as we go and need their own special resolution. But we're getting there. Which is as well, as the Redecorating Committee (not their official name, but it'll do) popped their head around the door of the boat-shed the other evening and politely enquired how much longer I thought we'd be. Seems they've finally settled on the design and want to get a shift on with ripping the ceiling out and turning my temporary workshop into a ladies changing room.

Hels magnanimously offered that we'd be finished within ten days. John (said representative with head around door) visibly winced, as did I. I'm nearing the end of my emotional tether just as their impatience is evidently now escalating. I want us out by the end of this coming weekend. John smiled and visibly relaxed.

We've spend the last few days with Buffy on her back, painting her bottom. Sorry, I mean with the boat upside down whilst we painted her hull.

In an idea world, I'd have spent much longer smoothing out the hull in preparation, and then applied a couple more coats, but in the end we simply sanded out any loose paint and keyed up the remainder, then slapped three, maybe four coats of gloss on her.

It's not a perfect job, but she does look a lot better. On Wednesday evening I sanded over the hull with very fine grade wet and dry and then buffed up with a car polisher our friend and fellow Ent sailor Charles had kindly leant us. I'd left Dad to his own devices for once (he probably spent the evening in his workshop varnishing our restored centreboard) but Hels had sent her husband Matt down to the Club to represent her and keep me company as I worked. He did prove handy with a screwdriver when screwing the slot gasket back on however, and was very useful to have around when it came time to turn the boat right way up once more, so his company did have more value than the mere moral building qualities (and distraction) of his conversation and company.

The still raw varnish of the topsides had been marked where the boat had rested upside down on four tyres. That had been expected however, and a bit of wire wool smoothed those scars out. A bigger disappointment were in the form of three thumbnail sized bubbles, two on the port side-decks and one on starboard, where the laminate had lifted beneath the varnish. They were each in the area of some epoxy fillings we'd made before starting the varnishing, where the original varnish and laminate had cracked during the season and damp had got in.

I had sanded back the visible damage before filling with epoxy, but had been very conservative, hoping to preserve as much of the top layer of laminate as I could. Clearly, in this case, discretion was not the better part of valour, and it's come back and bitten me.

It was depressing to have to take the sander back to four painstakingly laid coats of varnish to get down to the laminate to sand away the lifted areas. But it had to be done, and better we found it now whilst we still had the shelter to effect the repairs than in a few weeks once she was back out in the wilds of the boat-park.

The laminate cut back and smoothed down with finest-grade sandpaper, I wire-wooled up the surrounding varnished areas, and then re-varnished each side deck with a thinned coat of varnish. Thursday and Friday evenings will afford us the chance to put another couple of coats on, rest her for Saturday whilst I head down to Portishead with Dad to do some work on Calstar and then refit Buffy on Sunday and move her back out to the boat-park.


The outskirts of "Storm Doris" is battering the windows outside, though occasional sun is still breaking through. It seems to me that since they started naming the more significant weather systems in recent years, the whole media has started getting terribly hysterical about them.

There are two Bristol Channel pointing webcams I'm rather fond of visiting whenever I'm feeling a little too landlocked.

Sugar Loaf Webcam is hosted by Portishead Yacht & Sailing Club and looks out over Kilkenny Bay just west of Portishead Point, a stone's throw from the marina where we keep Calstar.

The Porthcawl Lifeboat Station Webcam looks out over the breakwater at Porthcawl on the eastern side of Swansea Bay about 35 miles down-channel from Portishead, towards Nash Point.

High water at Porthcawl is at 1632 on Thursday afternoon. The westerly wind clocked 46 mph when I checked a moment ago. I might have to take a brief coffee break away from my work later on today to go watch the waves breaking against the pier.

Low tide

A photo taken of a late summer view from Sharpness to Lydney in 2012, as we were waiting for the tide to return to take us back across.

Photo essay of a weekend

Leaving the office Friday evening, a bright moon hung large and low in the sky. The incy-wincy lens on my camera phone was unable to even touch the visual effect of it as it hung low and luminous over Chalford Valley.

Expecting the temperature to drop away overnight, I'd agreed with Dad we'd take the night off from our labours over Buffy. The next stage was to lay the first coat of varnish, and we both agreed that the best chance we'd have of getting it to dry in the draughty boat-shed would be to lay it first thing Saturday morning in the hopes that the temperature would climb a little through the day so the varnish would have a chance to go off in time for a second coat Sunday morning.

Complete aside, I've failed to set up the mobile view of this site with an Instagram feed previously written of. If you're curious, but reading this on a mobile and/or wondering what on earth an "Instagram feed" is, then mine is here:  www.instagram.com/tatali0n

It's essentially an online photo album / sharing site, that's fed by (and can also be viewed via) a dedicated "Instagram" camera app installed on my mobile. Basically social media but in photos, so fewer of those annoying Facebook "copy please don't share" statuses to worry about.

Saturday morning therefore, I met up with Dad at his workshop before heading down the club with him. He's got a lovely workshop - it was originally built as a studio for the band, but at some point through the tumult of the years, we moved out and he moved in along with all his tools and machines. I've often tried persuading him to enlarge the door to something wide enough for me to fit a dinghy through, but he's always resisted.

I can't blame him.

It is the perfect place to rebuild Buffy's centreboard however. The board is a vertical laminate of hard and soft wood, and at some point over the last season we managed to damage the end, compromising the varnish and epoxy sheath sealing the wood, and consequently, unnoticed and therefore untended, wet had been wicking up through the softwood laminate and turning the wood to spongy mush.

Dad has used a router to cut back a fair depth of the laminate concerned. It hasn't cleared all the rot, but there is enough good wood left in it to maintain the structure of the board. He's then going to refill the lost wood with epoxy.

We caught up with Hels at the Club and between us spend the rest of the morning cleaning and prepping Buffy's decks, and then laid a first coat of varnish; International Original varnish, cut 75:25 with Thinners No 1.

Saturday night's gig was a dinner dance at the Walton Park Hotel in Clevedon for Portishead Cruising Club. The hotel itself boasted a gorgeous location, high on a bluff overlooking the Bristol Channel. The band setup in a large bay window, our backs to the sea view. A fresh, cold easterly was blowing across the water, and we watched one of the big car carriers out of Royal Portbury making its way down channel in the grey fading light of the encroaching evening whilst we set up and sound-checked. By the time we were done, the light had gone and the only evidence of the wide expanse of sea behind us in the darkness was the blinking flicker of the lights on the navigation buoys; Avon, Welsh Hook and Clevedon.

It was an unusual mix of business and pleasure playing for the PCC crowd. It was great to catch up with some friends and familiar faces I'd not seen for a while, and although not multitudinous in number they were lively, and danced through the night as we played.

It was early hours of the morning before I finally got home, ate and chilled out enough to be ready for bed.

Sunday morning found me back at the sailing club with Buffy by about 0900. I left Dad at home in his workshop working on the centreboard rebuild and found myself alone in the boat-shed with the dinghy glimmering under her first coat in the morning light as I sipped my coffee. I couldn't bring myself to touch the varnish to check if it had gone off, and sat there for about twenty minutes before Hels finally arrived, admonished me for being silly, stuck the palm of her hand uncompromisingly on the deck and smiled.

The varnish had cured fine.

A small piece of the laminate by the mast-step had lifted under the combined stress of both drying epoxy and varnish, so I sanded that out whilst Hels wire-wooled down the decks in preparation for the next coat. We laid it on quickly enough, increasing the varnish : thinners mix to a more viscous 90:10. The job was done by noon and we went our separate ways, leaving Buffy to settle and dry once more in whatever warmth lingered in the boat-shed.

On the way back from the Club I called in at Dad's to see how we were getting on with the centreboard restoration. It's looking very promising, although we are on the verge of running out of epoxy.

Back home, I spent the rest of the afternoon ferrying scrap wood and cut up carpet to the local tip from out the side of our house where I'd left it neglected and mouldering for a few too many weeks. I was done by a shade after 1600, and exhausted but not unhappy, enjoyed the brief sensation of satisfaction you get from thinking all your jobs are done.

Three sets of paws and tails lay in wait for me at the top of the stairs to remind me that there was, in fact, still one duty I'd thus far left untended.

Nice thing about winter weekends is daylight. Makes it much easier to play ball in the park with the dogs.

Buffy: The lovely dust

Having now established that my labours to include my Instagram feed in the sidebar of this site will be of no benefit to anyone reading this on a mobile, I thought I'd share my favourite Instagram photo from the few I took yesterday.

The end of an evening's hard graft.

Hels and I spread a thin, protective layer of epoxy over the decks last Sunday. It seemed like a good idea at the time. The temperature then crashed to about -2C overnight, and the epoxy failed to properly cure, leaving a waxy residue over the entirety of the deck. By about Tuesday evening it became obvious it really wasn't going to get any better, so by Wednesday I caved into the inevitable and Dad and I started sanding it back.

I say sanding; it was more properly a case of rubbing at the waxy decks with sandpaper until the stuff stopped rubbing off. Imagine trying to sand a candle. It was a bit like that.

By about 2200 Thursday evening we were about done, and the decks were once more producing a lovely layer of fine, dry dust anywhere the sandpaper touched instead of horrid little rolled sausages of waxy, failed glue. Dad set about hoovering up the dust, and I sat back and took a photograph of him doing so.

I call that a proper distribution of duties. To each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities. Or something like that.

We were in any case essentially back to where we'd started last Sunday. Which you'd think would be a depressing thing, but actually, after all the raw muscle-power involved in returning the decks to a state fit to receive a first coat of varnish, was strangely satisfying.

Weather: The prevailing

Really just for personal interest: the following are a couple of graphics I've lifted from one of my favourite weather forecast sites, windfinder.com, showing statistics gathered for the prevailing conditions over the course of the year for my two main sailing areas, Frampton-on-Severn and Portishead.

Frampton-on-Severn

Portishead / Redcliff Bay

Interestingly, given the marked difference, the two sites are only separated by a shade over 20nm (as the seagull flies) but Portishead is coastal whereas Frampton is obviously inland.

The prevailing direction comes as no great surprise, except perhaps I expected a southwesterly mien to be more dominant, especially in Portishead. And I think I perhaps expected a higher average wind speed in Frampton, but in actually fact what the graph shows probably tallies better with my actual experience.

Also worth noting, for the sake of detail, that the Frampton stats are taken from a weather station in Hardwicke, an outlying village / suburb of Gloucester, which is about another ten statute miles further inland than Frampton itself.

Calstar: August recall off Oxwich Bay

photo: tina of "Syn-y-Mor"

All this grumbling about the woes of deep winter, being condemned to the half-light of a workshop and submerged in a morass of sawdust, epoxy resin and varnish, I realise I'm in immediate peril of over-indulging in self-pity. Had I any sense of shame, I'd probably be embarrassed.

One of my favourite trips last year was the run from Swansea to Tenby and back aboard Calstar with Nikki.

photo: tina of "Syn-y-Mor"

Whilst moored up outside Tenby harbour we struck up conversation with lovely couple called Kevin and Tina aboard a gorgeous 37' Westerly Typhoon out of Milford Haven called "Swn-y-Mor" a mooring over from us. Later that day I joined them for a beer aboard their boat whilst Nik, exhausted from a day of touring the fleshpots and tourist traps of Tenby and the stresses of the sail over from Swansea the day before, had a rejuvenating nap aboard ours. We drank Tenby ale, nattered and swapped stories as the day faded; Tina in particular was at pains to provide some valuable and appreciated insight and advice on introducing Nikki to sailing and cruising as it had become apparent much earlier that day that Nik was very new to this, as Tina had been once also.

The following morning, leaving Nik asleep below, I cast off a little before dawn for the trip back to Swansea. The forecast promised a gusty F5 from astern, so I motored out across Carmarthen Bay to clear the firing range before it opened at 0800, crossed Helwick Bar as Nikki awoke and came up from below to be greeted by a pod of dolphins (previously written of up here so I won't revisit it, even though the delight of the memory remains vivid still) and then silenced the engine as we drew abeam of a picture perfect Worms Head and Rhossili and continued the rest of the way under headsail alone, sailing as conservatively as I could in the conditions for Nik's sake.

photo: tina of "Syn-y-Mor"

Passing Port Eynon, I spotted the expected glimmering white of Swn-y-Mor's sails coming up astern of us through the Helwick Passage. About an hour later off Oxwich Bay they crossed behind us with a cheery wave and the mutual clicking of shutters from mine and Tina's respective cameras, gybed and then powered on ahead under full, glorious sail.

Nik and I have two weeks booked off work this coming summer, book-ended by gigs on Friday 28th July and Saturday 12th August. The plan is to abandon the house and dogs on the kids and head off sailing with Dad; fourteen days, weather permitting, for a trip down-channel and back. Much as I'd quite like to explore Syn-y-Mor's home grounds of Milford Haven, Dad has had his heart set on reaching Padstow for some time now, so I suspect that will be our objective, although again, the weather will be our tyrant and dictator in this, as always.

photo: tina of "Syn-y-Mor"

Blue waters and two weeks of freedom though with Dad, Nik and Calstar. Can't wait.

Weather: Another workshop weekend

image: windguru

Force 6 gusting 8 from the northeast for Sunday. Desperately wanted to go sailing this weekend, but with that outlook it's probably for the best that I'm still stuck in a boatshed sanding and varnishing. An ill advised attempt to coat the decks with a thin layer of protective epoxy last Sunday has left us with a lot of sanding to get through before we can start with the varnish, and frustratingly set us back by about a week.

Think I've mentioned this before, but I'm really not a fan of this time of year.

Have noticed the snowdrops starting to push up however, and catkins on a tree this morning. Some comfort that spring is surely on its way.

LightWidget

[EDIT 10/02: Explanatory footnote added belatedly to the bottom of  this post]

Over the years I have, at various points and with varying degrees of enthusiasm, played with Instagram. The flirtations always ended up brief and transitory; typically I'd be drawn in by the camera app itself and the filters and effects that come with it, and then discouraged because it inevitably felt like too much of a closed environment to have much lasting interest for me.

I take photos, but don't pretend to be a photographer. If there is any art in me, I'm a writer and a musician. I rarely see much artistic merit in my photos in and of themselves, but that doesn't reduce their value to me. Instead, I take them to document a moment or, more often, to share that moment with friends.

Facebook and this "blog" (hate the term, but sometimes can't avoid it without risking pretension) always proved much more open and flexible environments to share through.

However, through happy accident (actually, a whim and a Google search) I've discovered I can link my Instagram feed to this site, using a third-party site called LightWidget to generate the necessary code to do so. There are other companies that do the same, but of my brief search of the free code generators, LightWidget seemed to have the lightest, least obtrusive touch so I've gone with them.

I don't know if the Instagram feed over to screen right will ultimately prove too intrusive or visually heavy for this site, I've always preferred a slightly lighter, more minimalist presentation, but we shall leave the feed up in the sidebar for now and see how it goes.

On the subject of Instagram, below is a short video clip I took sometime last year with the Instagram app. I'd completely forgotten about it until I stumbled back across it whilst sorting out the widget and it made me chuckle, so I thought I'd share.

Chilled

A video posted by Bill G (@tatali0n) on Mar 25, 2016 at 9:55am PDT

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ADDENDUM 10/02: A friend queried the whole "Instagram feed" thing with me yesterday evening which brought home a point that should've been obvious to me but I'd overlooked, and should've mentioned - the feed (which is a stream of thumb-nail photos) only populates on the conventional website view of this site and not on the mobile view.

So you'll only see the feed if you're reading this on a computer rather than your phone - I've not yet worked out how to add it to the mobile view, or whether I even should, given the relative limits and restrictions of screen space, bandwidth, etc you naturally get when viewing on a phone.

Sorry for any confusion I might have caused!
================================

Stop Look Listen

The end of my drive into work Tuesday morning 0800; the office and car-park is just on the other side of the railway track. Sat in my car waiting for the London train to pass before the gatekeeper will let me cross, the morning mist still lingering about the valley floor caught my eye.

I've always liked the sign on the pedestrian gate and the mantra it carries. It's perhaps a bit cheesy to actually say it, but I've always thought it's good advice for life that applies to more than just crossing a railway line.

Frostbite

Ate my lunch at the lakeside yesterday, watching friends race out on the water. One race in a number that make up the new year's unofficial "frostbite" series. No race committee, just enthusiasts that can't wait for the official season to begin, so they set a timer on the shore to govern the start and duration of the race (that's the black box to frame right of the photo) and go out and race amongst themselves.

Had I a plastic boat, I'd have been out there with them.

The "frostbite" label can only be ironic this year, the winter temperatures being so warm. In previous years we've broken the ice to sail. And in one year I can think of in particular, the ice was too thick to break so I settled instead for walking the dogs around the lake.

Jazz & Lilly, February 2012

This year however, I'm condemned to spectate, in between bouts of sanding, gluing and varnishing. Still, it is a pretty spot to be stuck with such labours. And the hull of the little racing dinghy is coming along nicely now.

The centreboard is a different matter however. An unnoticed and therefore subsequently neglected crack has let moisture in, which has wicked up through the one of the softwood laminates and caused some extensive rot. In my defence, it'd been an age since I last capsized the boat, albeit this happy omission being more a function of the light weather we enjoyed late season last year than any ability, so the damage to the board had been invisible until we removed it for our winter maintenance.

photo: roger gribble

A replacement board would cost in the region of around £240, so we're going to try and rebuild what we have with epoxy first. I say "we", what I mean is Dad has the board over in his workshop now, and he's kind of clever with this sort of stuff.

It's not the first centreboard he's rebuilt for me.


By way of a footnote to the weekend, we finished with a gig last night. I'm pretty sure late nights followed by early mornings used to be much easier back in the day when I was still drinking at gigs. Then, I'd get home late and quite, well, not to put too fine a point on it, "tipsy", but have little trouble getting straight off to sleep. These days, forced to sobriety by the need to drive there and back myself, I get home late and then still take hours to wind down enough for bed, even with the threat of an unavoidable early morning to follow the next day.

photo: lisa organ

It was a pleasantly local affair however, a pub on the other side of town where my daughter and her boyfriend Dan work, so we had a lovely collection of friends and family join us, including my wife and dad. Packing up to leave around midnight, we left Dan and Tash in front of a big screen with a few of the pub's regulars watching the American Superbowl into the early hours of the morning. Apparently my daughter is a "Falcons" fan. Being somewhat football agnostic, be that British or American, I'm not actually sure what that means. But enthusiasm I can understand,

We had a great gig. I hope they had a great game.

Saturday night

Doesn't look much different, but that's just a matter of perspective. Another coat on her insides and the few rotted bits still left now replaced with epoxy.

More to the point, I gave Dad the day off and Hels turned up to chip in. Dad spent the day with Calstar.

Apparently he's set the domestic battery up with a charger of it's own. I thought the thing charged when the engine ran, but apparently that's not enough. Dad said something about sulpherdisation, at which point I smiled and nodded.

Above my paygrade. I do sails.

Though I think he just likes a project.

Should've kept him varnishing.

Would like to fit the boat up with proper shore power, rather than the camping RCD unit we currently use to link up to the marina's power. Just not really sure how to go about it.

No pun intended.

Buffy: Friday night

I'm thinking the man needs to find a more rewarding hobby.

Meanwhile, I'm very pleased he's so keen on supporting mine.