The Sailing Bug

Well it was the first proper sail of the season after the long winter of work and all the moddifications and improvements today. The sun was out and the winds where light - perfect conditions for the first sail of the year. We also had the new engine fitted as well which worked very well and certainly made a difference as well as the new lightweight number 1 headsail. Apart from a slightly slow start it went pretty much to plan despite only having three crew members on board and we managed to get the spinaker hoisted and dropped without any problems. We even managed to negotiate the rocks a bit better than Mustard Mitt II did A nice sunset accompanied by the ringing of church bells whilst packing up and a beer on the balconly of the GYC finished off a pretty good sail. So far all is looking good for our sail off to Jersey for the KB race from Jersey next week - more to come on this soon!

Whats the definition of a happy happy happy hour? Well I guess it could be turning up to the yaght club for a quick beer and getting 4 free beers! How did we manage to acomplish this I hear you asking. Well simply volunteer for moving a bunch of wine bottles from the bar to the furthest part of Castle Cornet possibile - thats how! after 20 minutes of labour shifting about 50 crates of wine. A slightly opportunistic bit of barrtering and a bit of manual labour we had a very cheap evening thanks to the GYC and also thanks to Dave for donating his beers to us! If my spelling or grammer seems a bit off then please read the above

Thursday evening saw the crew of Mystere competing in the third race of the GYC Boatworks+ Spring Series. After the first two races of the series Mystere was sitting in first place overall (not including discards) with only one point between us and second place boat Busker.

Given our rather inconstant performance last year we all knew that we were capable of sailing a good race, we just needed to do it. And we need to do it constantly.
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Continuing with my tradition of off topic posting here, I thought I would post some notes on my new computer case and assorted goodies that I posted about recently. I have finished of transplanting everything across now and it is almost completed! (more…)

Since my last post I have received all my new computer bits and I have started playing with my new case. I have installed some of the Acoustipack sound proofing material and have put a few pictures and descriptions in the gallery. I am sure I will be adding more sound proofing and pictures in the next week or so. It is currently a work in progress though.

Also I have tried installing the Artic cooling VGA cooler but ran into a few issues! The heat sink on my current VGA card appeared to be connected by 2 push pins only. After removing the fan and push pins I was unable to actually remove the heat sink. Either it has been attached with industrial strength superglue or it has just bonded itself quite well after a year or so of use!! Despite a reasonable degree of force that saw the card bend to an almost banana shape it would not budge which is a shame as the Artic cooler is a great bit of kit and really quiet when connected to a 12v supply. Comments on how to removing it without snapping it would be gratefully received!!!

Today we went out for a Boxing Day sail to the neighbouring Island of Herm for a spot of lunch and a pint. Despite the near freezing conditions and wind chill that left all of us with no feeling in our hands after a few minutes we managed to sail across in a fairly respectable time. Our fist challenge after dropping the anchor was get the outboard motor fitted to the dingy and get it started. This may not sound to difficult but I think it was last started about 5 months ago! Despite our best efforts it refused to start – I even remembered to switch the fuel line on correctly this time!!
After having to row in it was time to queue for drinks and then when we realised that we had to buy food vouchers at the bar, queue again for those before queuing for food. We had just about enough time to eat the partially raw burgers and “poached” sausages before heading back to the boat. With Daves’s engineering expertise we eventually managed to get the motor on the dingy running and keep it running before getting back to the boat.

It was a fairly relaxed sail back with the spinnaker up and almost 8 knots showing followed by the quickest packing up of the boat I have ever seen. Hopefully it will not be quite as cold tomorrow for the Sunsport Marine Iceberg race although the weather forecast shows a wind chill of -1 so that should be fun!

After much consideration and research I have finally decided to get round to the case upgrade for my computer. My current case was designed for over clocking and has been with me for about 4 years or so now. The key reason for upgrading was noise reduction and I have been looking at ways to reduce the noise levels of my computer. To try and minimise noise as much as possible I have ordered the following:

Antec P180 case
Acousti AcoustiPack Deluxe (v2) Acoustic Material Kit
Gigabyte G-Power Silent Blue Light Cooler
Artic cooling VGA silencer
Zalman ZM-NB47J Northbridge Cooler
Silverstone SST-FP52 Silver Aluminium Fan Controller
Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound
Vantec Vibration Dampening Kits for all Case Fans
Vantec Vibration Dampening Kit for Power Supply
120mm Zalman quiet case fan

Phrixus has offered to help build this new case which will be a big help seeing as the bare case weighs 14kgs and the sound proofing kit alone is 3kgs!! Hopefully I will be able to get some pictures and a nice write up done in the next few weeks once all of this stuff arrives and a little review of all the items I have ordered. One thing is for sure is that it should be a heck of a lot quieter than my current case.

Today was the last of the GYC frostbite series and the penultimate race of the year. It certainly lived up to it’s name with temperatures hovering at near freezing this morning on the drive down. Despite an earlier start than usual at the boat with the intention of trying out some start line tactics that Phrixus had be busy researching, we made it as far as the end of the pontoon before we heard the radio announcement cancelling the race! Unfortunately there was almost no wind at all so we could not go out for a practice before the Iceberg race on the 27th December. All being well we should be able to get a good result next week before looking at taking the boat out the water in the New Year for some long overdue maintenance in time for the start of the next season.

Yesterday was a pretty good day for me as I passed the Managing and maintaining a Windows Server 2003 Environment exam I had been studying for a few months and straight away I got to put my new skills to the test. A phone call from Phrixus with a strange networking problem he was having when Dave was connecting his PC to the main DLink router. Basically whenever Dave’s PC was plugged in, internet connectivity went completely from other client PCs on the network and the router needed to be rebooted. After swapping out cards and cables and running a pretty exhaustive series of tests it was discovered that there was a process called mDNSResolver.exe running in task manager. A quick end process tree on that process and a reboot of the router and everything worked fine until the process was started again at the next reboot. The exe file and a couple of DLL files where tracked down to a Bonjour installation. It seemed as though Bonjour had been installed and not quite removed properly as it was still in the services list.
A quick bit of tidying up later and Dave’s computer was running perfectly although none of us could seem to offer an explanation as to why the network went so badly wrong when a pc running Bonjour on it.

A highly accurate (amusing) look at what’s what in the nautical world. It seems like a very apt entry for this website. It was cut from one of ‘those’ emails that goes around! If you are the author and I think it should not be here, I can only apologise and will of course take it off immediately… however at the same time, I would like to say that you must be a sailor to understand these things… good job!

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