Petrella: odd jobs season

Gigs Friday and Saturday this last weekend, and a rubbish forecast for Monday meant it wasn't worth skipping work to extend the weekend for sailing. So Dad and I took a daytrip down and back to Plymouth on Sunday just to check on Petrella and catch up on a few jobs. 

I think I'm going to have to regretfully accept that the sailing season is all but done and odd jobs season is now upon us.

After a late night Saturday, crawling out of bed at 0800 Sunday morning to drive down to the boat felt like an unreasonably brutal start to the day, but as we pulled up into the marina carpark and got out the car, I could smell the salt on the autumnal air, and immediately remembered how much I've missed it.

My own jobs didn't extend much further than checking the lines, running the engine up to temperature, exercising the sea cocks and topping up the the diesel and coolant in the Webasto heater in preparation for the coming winter. I also fitted a bracket to the con for a tablet.

It's just a refurbished 10" Samsung tablet on a mount, running the Marine Navigator app with the raster charts from visitmyharbour.co.uk

It's a waterproof tablet (only IP68 - so I won't take it swimming!) in a waterproof case, should run all day off a battery pack in the cup holder beneath, and is independent of the boat's electrics and GPS so gives a nice bit of redundancy if anything goes wrong with the latter.

It's not as clever as the boat's Raymarine, but I like the familiarity, ease and simplicity of the route planning and tracking with the Android app, and the screen (and corresponding projected course over ground that tells me what we're going to hit within the next 10 minutes) is a bit bigger and clearer for my aging eyes 🤓

Only downside is the touchscreen probably won't enjoy having rain on it. But then, neither do I.

Dad spent the afternoon replacing a catch on the cupboard door underneath the galley sink. It's long been faulty, so the door has been prone to swinging open whilst we're underway. The static / receiving half of the catch was broken, possibly as a consequence of having been previously forced, so needed replacing. Unfortunately, finding replacement parts for the furnishings of a 36 year old boat isn't as straight forward as one might hope.

Happily, Dad's got a workshop, so he made a pattern from the catch on one of the other doors, and 

machined up a new one. After the requisite bit of fiddling and cursing to fit it, it works a treat.

The clocks having gone back, the sun was setting by the time we closed the boat back up and headed home, but it was a pretty sunset over the Barbican. The drive home was complicated by an accident just ahead of us on the motorway which added a delay of an hour or so but we got home safe in the end. 

The band is really busy between now and New Year, so unless I take a sneaky Monday off work, any more trips down to the boat will likely be another Sunday down and back, squeezed in between racing the dinghies on the lake. I really feel like we haven't used Petrella enough this last year, or the year previous. This year's diary has the band playing 62 gigs, which would go a long way to explaining why it feels like that.

I love playing with the band, but there have been other "internal" stresses with many of the gigs this year, nothing to do with the music or performance, that have made things much less than pleasant, and often made me (and at least one other member) question why we put up with it. 

But it's a very hard thing to walk away from, even when you know it's making you unhappy.

We have 33 bookings in the diary for next year, ending with NYE 2026/27 at The Railway Tavern in Bristol. The band's diary for 2026 is now essentially closed, and we'll see how we still feel towards the end of next year.

Perhaps having half the workload will remove or reduce some of the stresses that have been causing the friction. At the very least, it should give me a lot more time to go sailing.

As I write this, I can see a button to screen-right that offers to "Automatically insert Google Search links" for me. I've clicked it just out of curiosity, and deleted some of the more random or unnecessary hyperlinks Google has then obligingly made for me. I've left some of the others in place though; in case you were wondering why, so am I.