The tee shirts say a bad day on the water is better than a good day in the office.I reckon though that another day stuck in a harbour like Grimsby waiting to get back on the water is only just better than being in the office.
As I lay in this morning listening to the rain and wind. I thought what on earth can I find to put in my blog today.Steven Fry then came on the radio talking about "brevity" and he'd given me the answer.He suggested that the word limits imposed on tweeters are a modern version of the rules for the ancient Japanese form of short poetry called Haiku.It's easy to blather on saying nothing. It's much much harder to use very few words and say something that stops you in your tracks.
He used the examples of epitaphs and headlines to make his point and had the comedian Tim Vine to give funny versions. He cited the American comedian Stephen Wright who used to come out with such things as;-
" You can't have everything-where would you put it?"
So today's blog is going to be brief. This is not because I have nothing to say,honest, but because of the powerful way it is written.
The press turned up today to interview Paul and take photos of him in his boat. This is all good stuff for his charities the number of people reading his blog has trebled. However sitting around in Grimsby is not getting the miles under the keel. He is starting to worry about whether he has time to get around before the weather turns autumnal. We will try and convince him that he has plenty of time.
My day has been spent sorting out my battery, which I had concluded was on its last legs. On an overcast morning when using my auto helm the battery would drop to less than 8v and then the auto helm would cease to work in auto mode. When there was any sunshine around the solar panels would easily cope with its power consumption. I calculated the average hourly rate of my electrical equipment when at sea to be about 1.6Amps or maybe 16 Amp Hours.When moored I maybe use about another 7 Amp Hours with charging phones and laptops. So with an energy use of about 23 Ah and a energy production of an average of 30Ah there ought to be enough. Overall there is, but there is nothing in reserve at times and I put this down to the battery.I have replaced my old 110Ah with 2 75Ah wired in parallel.Phil's dad kindly took me to a caravan accessories dealer to save being ripped off with marine equipment.He has said i really benefit from the shallow draft of Hylje to explore some of the East coast rivers; especially the Deben. He has even kindly lent me his East Coast Pilot book. This chimes with my reading of AC Stocks book. That's all about 3 days away from here but first I have to get away from Grimsby.
Reading the pilot, I reckon its pretty close to a Haiku in the introduction when it talks about the good times on the East coast :-
"When the sun,tide and wind all go down together and the boat floats on her reflection"
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