Not quite ready to Leave Church Point

On Saturday I went for a cruise around Pittwater to get the batteries charged up a bit. Theyve been getting a lot of use lately with Jasons Power Tools, and the Xantrex had the House batteries drawn down to minus 125Ah. The two house batteries are rated as 80 Amps and experts tell me you get better life out of your batteries if you dont draw them down to more than 60% of their capacity - ie in this case minus 96. But it was nice to be doing something on the boat other than maintenance and cleaning up the dust and mess we are making - even motoring was better than being stuck on the mooring! As I motored along I noticed some absolutely picture perfect homes on the edge of the water around Scotland Island and the adjacent bays of Pittwater, and I also saw two yachts like mine - Eastcoast 31's. I went round to Refuge Bay which has dozens of beautifully sheltered moorings you can use, and after morning tea I went out into Broken Bay to watch the start of the 36th Gosford to Lord Howe Island Yacht Race. Apparently the winner of the very first LHI race was an Eastcoast 31 , but that was - well 36 years ago! Yacht design and materials have made yachts these days so much lighter, faster and stronger that I am sure Sapphire would be left way behind, as the winner typically takes not much more than two days to get there. When I leave for LHI in a week or so I am giving myself a week!

It was frustrating not to be able to do some sailing on Saturday because the wind was strong but we were in the midst of resealing the mast boot and the deck fittings at the base of the mast had all been removed. I had spent several hours scraping off all the old silicone from the base of the mast and surrounds, and also from the hatch which has also been resealed. Jason ususally finds menial tasks like that to keep me busy while he gets on and does the important stuff - today I got to scrape rust out of the heavy steel fitting that the mast sits in, and tomorrow I am going to paint it. Today I also cut out some new sound proofing material for the engine box and after it was all in place I started the motor and was pleased that the noise was definitely less. The list of things to do is quite short now and probably will be finished tomorrow, Tuesday when we will fit the Firdell Blipper, which is a passive radar reflector that goes up near the top of the mast - its purpose is to make Sapphire more visible to the radar of ships in the vicinity. It looks like a giant Capsule about 2 feet tall. Also tomorrow I am getting a visit from Marc Robinson the Radio guru. Ive asked him to come back and explain it all to me one more time because I realised the other day I can hardly remember how to make the HF radio work or how to use the Pactor Modem to do email.

After that its just a matter of waiting for some reasonable weather for the sail to Newcastle. You can see on the chart a nasty little low coming across and they are forecasting winds to 30 knots from the South and South east on Wednesday but easing to 15 to 25 knots on Thursday as the High approaches so that should be a good day to go North.