สล็อตเว็บตรง

สล็อตเว็บตรง

สล็อตเว็บตรง

สล็อตเว็บตรง

The Joys and Sorrows Of a Life At Sea

By Ferry To Qijin

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I would like to brag in a macho way that we knew it all the time, but the truth is that Mr. Zhang talked us into taking our shaft out. His propeller is perfect, our shaft must be bent. We didn’t know what else to do, so we decided to take the shaft out and have him check it.

We were getting ready for a flood. The boat is in the water, you know. We covered the engine with a piece of canvas, I pulled from behind, Jana pushed from within the boat, but the shaft wouldn’t budge. Perhaps if we used a bit more force, but we didn’t want to try our luck and harm the cutless bearing. We’ve decided to have the prop checked first. We can take the shaft out in the Philippines on the hardstand if we find out that the vibrations were indeed caused by the propeller. In fact, Jana reported that she’s not afraid to take the shaft out anymore, that a lot of water comes when she takes the packing gland down, but that it’s manageable. Am I lucky man or what?

Engine room ready for an operation

Engine room ready for an operation

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| 17/01/2013 | Category: By the way, Logbook, Taiwan | 3 comments

Good by qTranslate, Long live Multisite

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Writing a multilingual blog can be a pain. If you are online all the time, the options is not as bad. We used to like the qTranslate plugin. But the development seems to be lagging and from time to time it breaks the WordPress editor. Plugins like qTranslate have the advantage that you only need to worry about one site, one set of settings, language versions of you articles are connected by default. I was reluctant to move away from that. It was nice. But plugins like that cut deep into the guts of WordPress and cause problems.

Then WP 3.5 came, I forgot to check if qTranslate has been updated, did the update, which of course broke qTranslate. There’s a workaround, which you can find on the qTranslate forum. The fix was easy enough, now that we are sitting at a reasonably fast internet connection. But happens when we are sitting on some shitty connection? Even simple editing was troublesome with qTranslate. From time to time, the editor would not save your changes. The fix for that, I’ve learnt, is to switch to source editor. We simply need something simpler and more reliable. No offence meant.

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| 15/01/2013 | Category: By the way | 2 comments

Never put off until tomorrow what you should’ve done yesterday

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We’ve installed a new propeller not long ago and immediately we’ve noticed slight vibrations, which occurred periodically in about 2-3 seconds. First we thought that it’s not a big deal. The vibrations were very minor and we try to sail most of the time anyway.

About a week ago, we sailed little further out. The weather was wonderful, fresh breeze, waves about one meter high, perfect day. Just about when we decided to turn around and head back, the wind died. We were just at the outer end of the south-west Kaohsiung cargo ship anchorage. For a while we tried to sail, but the current can be quite strong in these parts and it started to push us towards the anchored steel monsters.

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| 14/01/2013 | Category: Logbook | Leave a comment

Getting a new mainsail from Hong Kong

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The approaching deadline for two translations, which we accepted recently, and the weather, which is going bonkers, made us bite the bullet and once again board a plane to Hong Kong. The main goal of the trip was to bring our new mainsail, which was waiting for us at the UK Halsey loft, extend our Taiwanese visa and pick up my diploma, which was stored for a couple of months at some binder deep in the bureaucratic jungle of Hong Kong.

Jana and luggage

Jana and luggage


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| 13/01/2013 | Category: Logbook | Leave a comment

The weather really gone crazy

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Still sitting in Kaohsiung and waiting. Since we are playing sailors you might thing that following winds, favorable currents, a good weather window is why we are still rotting here (that’s a bit of exaggeration, but it is a fact that during the North-East Monsoon Kaohsiung is showered by dust from inland and sooth from the factories nearby, so rotting we are not, it’s more like being buried by the earth at sea). So weather etc is not the main reason for our delayed departure. We had plenty of chances to cast off. The North-East Monsoon is at full strength now, but periodically it eases up and opens a two to three day windows, which would let us slip in the shadow of Luzon without too much fuss. With a little bit of imagination you could say that we could do it without getting our feet wet.

weather 2013-01

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| 11/01/2013 | Category: Logbook | 2 comments

Christmassy

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We have started the day of Christmas Eve with a cold frigid shower on the deck. Taking a shower the day before was just unbearable. You might not believe it, but the temperature dropped to non-tropical 14° C. Yes, that’s right. And it started to blow hard too. Regular tropical blizzard. We even had to put on our socks and long sleeves. Yuk. Taking a shower in that weather defied our collective common sense. We Bohemians have a saying: cleanliness is half the health, dirtiness is the whole health. Preventive medicine, you know.

Christmassy photo gone wrong

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| 25/12/2012 | Category: Logbook | Leave a comment

Portlights on Hallberg-Rassy 31 Monsun

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The most dreaded item on our TODO list is finally crossed off. The portslights on our Hallberg-Rassy 31 Monsun probably had the original gaskets and all the windows had leaks, some leaked a lot. We were really afraid to remove them, because there was a lot of aluminum corrosion, salt sediments, etc. What if we can’t put them back again?

To get us some time, we finally made storm covers from 1/2″ acrylic sheets, trimmed with thick gasket. The storm cover is held over the broken windows by two or three supports that are placed across the window opening. It works quite well and is easy to deploy. When we removed the first window, we had the storm cover ready in case of a rain.

Storm covers with temporary plywood supports

Storm covers with temporary plywood supports

Detail of backing plate mounting

Detail of backing plate mounting

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| 12/12/2012 | Category: Logbook | 8 comments

AIS receiver on the cheap

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Sailor RT2048

Our faithful Sailor RT2048

When we were leaving Singapore to embark on our very first passage, one Russian Australian sailor gave us his old VHF. At first we didn’t like the radio that was on Jannawhen we bought it. It was Sailor RT2048 with old style telephone receiver. It looked unfashionable and awkward. How wrong were we! We wanted to switch to the new one, but found out, that it does not transmit. So we put back the Sailor VHF and soon found out how great the old receiver is. One actually clearly hears what the others are saying. And you can also pull the receiver out into the cockpit so that the helmsman can easily reach for it and talk to harbor traffic control.

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| 04/12/2012 | Category: Logbook | 6 comments

Janna’s upgrades continue

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Everyday, the forecast says, that it will rain the next day. The next day the forecast is the same. For few days we fell for the bait and postponed our boat maintenance to the next day. At least we had chance to advance our translations. So the forecasts were helping us in a way.

000 019

Chainplates have to be strong, but the crew also appreciate when the water does not leak around them

When we finally understood the recurrent method of Taiwanese meteorologists’ predictions, we got back to work on Janna. Last week we replaced lower shroud chainplates and decided that it’s time to replace also the two cap shroud chainplates. That gave us a chance to reminiscence over our first attempt to cross South-China Sea from Hong Kong to Kaohsiung, when one of our cap shroud chainplates broke. We had to return of course and quickly have a new one made. But the machinist that we found only had SS 304. When we finally reached Taiwan, we had new chainplates from SS 316 made and now after two years, we decided that it’s about time to use them. I still remember quite vividly how we had to disassemble Janna’s cabinetry in order to be able to remove and replace the broken chainplate back then in Hong Kong. For some reason we remembered that it’s a complicated work and we were procrastinating accordingly. The main excuse we used these days was an unfavorable forecast.

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| 02/12/2012 | Category: Logbook, Taiwan | Leave a comment

Offline multilingual posts with WordPress and qTranslate

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Sometimes you feel like posting, including sharing a photo, but the signal is weak or non-existent. Those who write in one language only have an easy life. There’s quite a few offline blog editors for most of the common blogging platforms.

The trouble is when you want to write multilingual offline posts. No editor is ready for that. And since we are getting ready to cast off soon and will be without regular internet connection for days at a time, I started to look for a solution that would enable us to write full blog posts offline and upload them immediately when we get signal, without the need to login to WordPress admin environment and finalize the post for publishing as we did so far.

We want to write and we want to spend as little time formatting, uploading pictures etc.
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| 26/11/2012 | Category: By the way | Leave a comment
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