Sunday morning; rigged, ready and waiting

Not just for Christmas

Around the end of November I briefly mentioned Stan and, in passing, his then kennel-mate Luna in a couple of posts to this site when we moved them out of kennels and delivered them to their new foster homes at the beginning of this month. I also posted a couple of pictures of Stan.

I learned last night that Stan has been adopted and is now with his lovely new family, and then learned this morning that the foster family we delivered Luna to have failed completely in that role and fallen utterly in love with her. So she'll be staying with them.

Such fantastic news for both of them. Stan is the handsome fellow at the top, Luna is the lovely girl below.

Garmin

Brilliant company, very impressed with their support department.

The GPS on my watch has been resetting itself about three minutes into
any race, which has been very frustrating. It stops the track recording
(but seems to leave GPS draining the battery in the background, but not
reporting that it's still running or giving any information) and, more
importantly, was leaving me lost and guessing as to exactly where I was
in the race time wise because it was resetting the timer.

In a pursuit, the time in can have a big impact on your tactics when
dealing with other boats. Early in the race, you avoid them and go for
speed. Towards the closing stages, you play them off, holding them back
and not letting them pass at any cost. Played right, a slower boat can
make it quite difficult for even a significantly faster boat to get
past, but it comes at a cost to the boat speed of both parties.

I logged a call with their support via their website this morning,
didn't really expect to hear anything back. Within the hour, a guy had
emailed me, asking for further information as to the symptoms,
suggesting a hard reset and providing instructions on how, and a
software update, providing a link to do it.

Always a pleasure when you approach a big, faceless corporation asking
for help and get a swift and effective response from a human being,
rather than an automated response from a robot directing you to more
worthless links on websites you've already spent hours trawling through.

I like dealing with people when I have a problem, not robotic automated
diagnostic systems.

As I said, very impressed.

Promises, promises

Final pursuit of the Frampton Winter Series is 11am this coming Sunday. Handy, because I have to be in Bristol for a gig by 5pm of that same day.

A winter's morning

Pictures from our office car-park as I rolled up to work this morning. I took the Pentax in with me today. Not sure why, just idle opportunism. Perhaps because I'd had it out at the Club yesterday, so it was present in my dawn-bleared mind as I readied to leave for work.

The jackdaws are present all the way through the year, but seem most bullishly active in either the early spring or the fading breath of autumn.

Our landlady, Mrs P, is not a fan. I think she not unfairly resents their bullying, mob-handed nature on behalf of the more delicate, less gregarious birds that grace the surrounds of the mill.

I can sympathise, having never been fond of either mobs or bullies. And I have an inordinate amount of respect for Mrs P and her invariably sound and well-founded opinions. But I think even so, this lot have a certain thuggish charm about them.

I likewise have friends that live by the sea that refer to gulls as "aerial rats" and, again, they have a point. But I can't help but watch a gull hovering on the uplift from the breeze against a quay wall, even as he eyes up my supper of harbour-side fish and chips, and not envy him the grace of his soaring.

Racing Face

Matt, my very good friend and husband of Hels, my indomitable crew, was on safety boat duty today, so I leant him my camera (and credit for the photos here therefore rests with him). The forecast was looking frisky, so I thought there might be some interesting pictures to grab.

In the event, the wind came in less than I'd expected, which was just as well, as I'd effectively promoted the safety boat cox to camera-man.

The race proved the hardest of the series so far, if you discount my crew feinting on me at the start of the second race last week, and my need to subsequently retire, sailing the swamped boat back single handed through a squall to deliver her safe to shore.

But that was a different kind of hard.

And she came back looking more than fine again this week, so I clearly didn't handle the situation that badly.

This week, the hard was all weather. Pressure enough to get the lasers planing, not enough to get us up on the plane except for once or twice, but great air for Solos, with their fully battened sails, and there were loads of them to climb through.

It took a good while to catch them up, and longer to weave our way through them. They had us every time on pure boat-speed downwind, but upwind we slowly abraded their weather advantage and snuck through.

For once, our only collision of the day wasn't my fault and had one of the lasers doing turns. Not enough of a delay to catch him, and Jon still beat us by a single place. And well deserved for him, I reckon.

About half way through I'd pretty much resigned myself to a middle of the fleet finish. The wall of Solos seemed insurmountable. But that's the lovely thing about a pursuit race. By design, the format brings everybody together at the end of the hour, so it looks insurmountable, but if you keep climbing, the end is always skin of the teeth, boat on boat climactic entertainment.

In the end, we finished a respectable 5th place out of 17 boats. 

The down side of that is that overall, added to the efforts of previous weeks, it lifts us out of the relaxed obscurity of unqualified for the series and into 1st place with one race left to go. Of course, I've got to hold it for that last race. Which, whilst I'm not normally so well positioned, traditionally I always fail to do.

I've never won a sailing series yet. I did once manage to throw away a 2nd place overall by successfully pinning out my only two challengers through the entire final race, only to loose concentration and miss the finish line on the last leg of the last lap. They took 2nd and 3rd respectively, then were kind enough to yell at me to turn around and come back and finish.

[EDIT: realistically, looking at the boats that have yet to qualify, but could do if they race the final on Sunday, combined with the forecast wind, which is promising to be Laser country, I'm in with a chance at a 3rd overall, if we sail well]

So I shall enjoy the moment of being on top for now. I shall race next week, and I shall try to hold my own, but I shall not take it too seriously, and whatever the result, I shall then head off to enjoy my last gig of the year at the Lion, next Sunday evening.

One last thought. Given that this is one of the many things I love most in the world (and yes, I picked the words of that phrase with both care and honesty), the camera apparently says that if I love it that much, I should smile more when I'm racing:

Good Morning, Sunday

All shiny, bright and new

Dad and I took a trip out to Swansea this morning to check on Calstar. Pete of Wraymarine has worked magic on her, Dad's very pleased. A very pleasant morning all round, if something of a chilly start. The decks were very icy till the sun spread over them.

Can't wait to sail her home. Won't be till the new year now; the crane shuts for the festive season, so she's going to spend Christmas on the hard. We'll have her lifted back in first thing in the new year though.

My wedding anniversary is in the first week of Jan (I think it's twenty years now, but will have to double check pretty sharpish) but after that, we'll look to sail her over to Portishead as soon as possible. That said, if things get in the way, I've no objection to exploring Swansea Bay and the Gower coast for a few weeks whilst we wait on the perfect timing.

Loopy Lu

Yesterday in the park with our current foster dog, Luna.

An old Cohen cover

Apparently posted this to the Tube in 2008. Can't believe it was that long ago. Stumbled back across it looking for recordings of a rehearsal to advertise a gig we're doing next February. It won't include this song, but it was posted about the same time.

[WARNING: whatever mechanic YouTube uses to share the video below here causes it to run into the next video on my YouTube channel and so on.... so if you do watch/listen through to and beyond full 6 mins+ of the song beware of the volume at the end and apologies for the clown loach ambush]

Always struck me as a Christmasy song, so I'm feeling quite festive now. Possibly because my weekend started some hours ago, as I've Thursday and Friday off to use up some excess leave.

Dreaming of Polperro

The bones

The flame is now stripped from the sides of the valley, all that remains is bone of bared trees; the squabbling of jackdaw, the kiss of a dying year's distant sun; Winter is come.