Here we go another blog post when there hasn’t been all that much to report on either maintenance or sailing.  In the last blog, which was only about three weeks ago, I took La Mouette out for a run up Coal and Candle Creek to give the engine a much needed run.  Sad to say, I haven’t done much since then.

I spent last weekend on the boat at the marina, with the good intentions of doing some electrical work, such as fix the starboard navigation light after I accidently cleaned up some of the extraneous, redundant wiring which happened to be the wiring for the nav light.  It should be a fairly straight forward job, but it was just too hot on the Saturday.  The temperature was in the high 30’s during the day and the thermometer in the boat was about 37 degrees Celsius.  That’s pretty hot.  About 100 on the Fahrenheit scale.  And inside the boat that’s pretty steamy.  We have long since learned that on hot sunny days, you can’t really open up the forward hatch as it lets the sun in and heats up the boat even more.  But then if you just leave the hatch ajar and prop it open with something, just enough to let the breeze blow through, it doesn’t really do much.  Especially if there isn’t much of a breeze. 

Basically, not much got done on Saturday.  It did cool down on Saturday night and I did manage to get some sleep but when Sunday dawned it was cooler than Saturday, however, still really too hot to do much.  Inside the boat was still a sweat box.  Even the little fan didn’t do much.  So basically, all that happened was the batteries got charged.

We have water restrictions in Sydney at the moment.  So that means you can’t use a hose to wash the boat.  It was covered in brown crap, a mixture of dust and ash from the bushfires and as much as I would like to have washed it off, the water restrictions meant that it had to stay.  I gave a couple of the really bad areas a bit of a clean with the bucket and brush, but that was about it. 

Next weekend we are going up to Anna Bay to stay with some friends and the weekend after that is a pipe band job down at Sussex Inlet.  Maybe the weekend after.  Nothing in my diary at the moment but that doesn’t mean anything!

I feel like that these blogs should be coming out on a more regular basis.  At least once a fortnight, not once a month as they are now.  My friend in Missouri, Debbie does at least one or two a week – although to be fair on myself, her blog is personal about all sorts of things that are going on in her life, whilst mine is just about the boat and what we do with it.  Ideally, I would live to be able to report on our boating life at least once a week but that is still in the future.  We sometimes see this with some of the sailing channels that we follow on YouTube.  They are often scratching for content in order to keep up their weekly vlog and it often ends up with stuff in bars, or just as boring, painting the boat.  Not that bars are boring but it is if you are sitting on the lounge watching someone else in a bar in an exotic location sampling the local beer.  I also realise that in order to keeps people’s interest, you have to be publishing or loading your vlogs on a regular basis.  That seems to be the go on YouTube, if you aren’t putting them up weekly, your viewers soon drop off, no matter how interesting your videos are.

What to do?  Do I just keep plugging away as I am, or do I increase the range of my content to include other stuff that is going on in my life.  Such as bagpipes etc  To be honest, I am reluctant to do that.  Really reluctant.  I would much rather keep this as a blog on La Mouette and sailing.  That’s what is says on the header – “Sailing the World on the Wings of a Seagull”.  It’s about sailing and boat maintenance and messing about with boats.  Not bagpipes, or Landrovers etc  There should be another, separate blog for that.  However, I could just fluff the posts out a bit more.  Add a bit of philosophy about sailing and fettling.  Include some more details about the local waterways, history, geography etc.  That sort of thing.  It will make the posts a bit more interesting and then I can increase the number of posts, hopefully to one a fortnight. 

I also write each blog as a complete unit.  Not as a road trip, by which I mean that I don’t stretch out the writing over a couple of weeks and add things as they happen.  Each blog is written in a couple of days, proofed and then published.  This particular blog was drafted out last week and was only three quarters complete.  As I type this, it’s the Monday after a weekend of particularly fierce storms in the Sydney area and a quick trip to the marina to check on La Mouette has uncovered all sorts of things.  Granted that in a strong storm, water is going to find its way in, a quite common occurrence actually, but it seems to have gotten in from a few places.  Window maybe?  There is a pool of water in the middle area where the head is.  Where did that come from?  There is a small track of water running down the port cockpit drain tube.  Looks like there is a leak there that needs attending to.  Some of the engine wiring looks particularly nasty.  More investigation and fixing.  So the next few posts might have more fettling than philosophy.  But more on that next time.