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Boat Heaven - Boat Heaven

Boat Heaven - December 2006

One pot chicken stroganoff

December 31st 2006 07:35
chook
1st kill your chook

One pot chicken stroganoff:

This is an easy dish I make on board and as I am on the Atkins diet at the moment it is high protein low carb. (Being on my own now I also only cook for one so adjust quantities to suit.)


I chicken breast or 2 thigh fillets sliced into strips.
¼ onion sliced
½ carrot cut into Julienne strips
½ bunch of buck choy
Salt, pepper, garlic crushed, butter for frying, fresh or sour cream, dill (fresh or dried) white wine if you like.

In a wok, pan or pot melt the butter and fry the carrot strips to soften. Add the onion, garlic and chicken, then add salt and liberal amounts of pepper. The dish should have a strong pepper taste. A touch of water to create steam and throw in the bock choy and wine if you are using it. Sir well and as it cooks add cream or sour cream to form a sauce. Finish with sprigs of fresh dill or shake in dried dill.

I eat it from my wok but more couth people may want to plate it up.
There is usually enough to have left over to be heated with a couple of fried eggs for breakfast.
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The compass for navigation

December 30th 2006 07:20
Lake map
Lake Macquarie navigate with or without a compass

The compass

There is debate about who had the compass first. The Chinese or the Vikings, it doesn’t matter as it was a bit of a poor instrument anyhow. A loadstone floating in a pail of oil with a few notches around the pail marking out different angles and positions to places of interest. Eventually the compass came of age to resemble something like what we have today. It was used just as much on land as at sea. So sailors can’t claim it as their own.


Not only can a compass show direction of travel or direction to be travelled, but it shows the direction from the ship of different objects. If we have a chart with those objects marked on them we can quite positively mark our own accurate position on the chart. It became an earnest job to provide accurately marked charts so navigators could find their way around. In fact with a good chart and elementary tools like a compass anyone with a basic understanding could become a navigator.

The old compasses were not marked in degrees as are the modern compass. The modern boats compass is marked in 360 deg with every 5 deg being visible. Most yachts and power boats can’t navigate to within 1 deg so why bother with it on the compass. Bigger ships with computer steering can however steer to within a ¼ deg. The old compass was first broken into North, South, East, West then North East, North by North East and East by North East and North by North East and so on. The smallest angle usually used was hence 11.25 deg which became a point. So when a ships helmsman is asked to come up 2 points he is being asked to steer into the wind another 22.5 degrees not 2 degrees as many people think.

Navigation is a fascinating subject that combines pure mathematics with shrewd guess work and estimation. This is why it was often looked at as a black art.
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Maps or charts? (part 3)

December 28th 2006 19:11
map of europe
Map of Europe

Maps or charts?

Mercator was the man who decided to lay the round earth out on a flat piece of paper that was easy to read and store on a ship. This is still seen on modern charts and called “Mercator’s Projection” It gives a slight distortion to position but it is so slight it does not matter as the final tool in a navigator’s box of black art tricks is the eyeball. Once he is close enough he can visually con the boat.

To decide if you have a map or a chart look at it. If most of the information is about land based objects and only a little about the sea it is a map. A chart has good accurate (or as close as possible) information on the water. It is possible to become pendadtic here but no real need to. Down the sides you have degrees of latitude and across the top and bottom degrees of longitude. Read all the information given on a chart before you go to use it. All the notes and special warnings, the date the chart was printed, has it been manually updated. On old charts lots of drawings were used of real or imaginary objects found in the sea. Some areas were marked, “beware, here be monsters”. This was a way of saying “we have no bloody idea what is here, stay away.” Today it is simply marked as Inadequately Surveyed.

Once you have determined on a chart where you are, you can decide where you are going and how you are going to get there. Using the degrees of latitude and longitude you would say you were at Latitude 31deg 47 min. south and 151 deg 26 min. east. There are sixty minutes in each degree and each minute is divided into sixty seconds. Degrees of latitude are measures of distance, each being sixty nautical miles. Degrees of longitude measure the time from Greenwich so never use this as a measure of distance.

How can time be placed on to a chart? Remember stone age man holding his hand out at arms length to measure the number of hand spans or fingers the sun was over the horizon? Well each degree measures the span on the sun around the earth. !80 deg. East or west of Greenwich. So if we are 151 deg 26 min. east of Greenwich the local time where we are is 152 deg 26 min divided by 15 (the number of degrees the sun moves in an hour. So the answer is very close to 10.5 hrs east of Greenwich. If in reverse we know the actual time in Greenwich, and we can determine the very actual time at our position on the earth, (by measuring the suns angle from the horizon) we can determine our longitude.

Degrees of latitude are measured parallel from the equator. 90 deg south and 90 deg north. As each degree represents 60 miles we can determine how many miles north or south of the equator we are. So at 31 deg 47 min south we are 1907 miles south of the equator (31 x 60 47 = 1907)
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coatal navigation #2

December 27th 2006 18:00
Map
A detailed but old style map

Coastal Navigation #2
Storms were the bane of all sailors and today not much has changed. Being at the will of the sea and the wind does not improve one’s temperament. It is difficult but not impossible to keep track of where you are when you can’t see land or feel the bottom. Once a storm has blown out and the vessel has survived the crew or navigator must decide where they are and which direction to travel next.
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Coastal Navigation

December 26th 2006 18:52
Compass
A compass

Coastal navigation:
Staying in site of land, keeping an imaginary umbilical cord between your home and your vessel on the sea, is one of the earliest of the “black” arts. Building up information over the years, a skipper and then in turn his kin could fish and more importantly travel along coastal highways.
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Prowling The Pittwater

December 25th 2006 19:06
Hawkesbury map
The Hawkesbury

Prowling the Pittwater

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Swarbrick 42' revisited

December 23rd 2006 18:18
Swarbrick 42’ revisited:

Last week I had an opportunity to sail a Swarbrick 42’ yacht, “Rum Jungle”, from Port Stephens to CYCA at Rushcutters Bay. To fit the trip in so close the Christmas and to be ahead o southerly weather as that was the direction we were travelling I decide to make it an overnight trip. Consequently we topped up the fuel for the Volvo motor, checked out the water, all the safety features, (she sails offshore a fair bit so everything bar the liferaft was there). At 1600 hrs we called the VMR in Port Stephens to advise of our departure and a solitary dolphin was escorting us out the heads.
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My favourite female sailor #3

December 22nd 2006 18:14

Natasza’s aim is to be the first Polish woman to sail solo around the world. She was training herself and was picking the brains of every solo skipper she could find. Eventually she travelled several times across the Pacific through the Panama canal and worked in the Caribean as a skipper on a 20 metre racing yacht. She sailed her Sydney Hobart and raced in several trans Pacific races and joined in two handed mini trans Atlantic races and solo 7.5 metre races to build up experience for a solo trans Atlantic race. At this juncture I must appologise if I have the sequence of events wrong or some of the subject matter. Whenever Natasza spoke to me it was quickly in heavily accented English of which I understood about 70% in her emails to me she writes phonetic English which sometimes stumps me. So if I make mistakes it is probably erring on the side of caution. She is in my mind a bigger heroine than I make her out to be.

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My favourite female sailor (cont)

December 21st 2006 17:38

Getting a ride back from Hobart on Innkeeper was a dream come true. She was the only girl and I think six guys. As they were crossing Bass Straight a huge storm blew up and most people were below and sick. She had the helm and if it were not for her harness would have been washed overboard several times. During the storm the mast came crashing down. The skipper came racing up to check what was wrong and was caught by a huge wave and she grabbed him by his shirtfront and hauled him fully back on board. Not just beautiful but strong. With the mast gone and most of the crew seasick the decision was made to abandon the yacht. A rescue helicopter was called and everyone was winched on board.

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My favourite female sailor

December 20th 2006 17:31
My favourite female sailor.

A few years ago I advertised on the web pages of an online magazine for crew to do twilight races with me on the Lane Cove River. I had a reply from a girl in Poland. If I could sponsor her she would come out and sail with me. By sponsoring she also meant pay the airfare, accommodation and so on. She was in her early twenties and a had a lot of sailing experience. I was not wealthy enough after several divorces to pay for her airfare but I did sponsor her with accommodation and work. She arranged to borrow her parents visa card and put her air fare on that and arrived in Sydney.
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The Cavalier 39.9 test sailed

December 19th 2006 19:10
The Cavalier 39.9 test sailed:

A weekend on Pittwater with three students was an ideal way to test sail the Cavalier 39.9. First off the students who were not that new to boating and had been introduced to the Benateaus and Bavaria’s and such like were impressed! “Wow this is nice” was the general comment. I have been warned about describing boats as “nice”. But superlatives should be used where they are deserved.
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The Bonny Pirate Anne

December 15th 2006 19:08
The Bonny Pirate Anne:
Another girl often disguised, as a boy was Anne Bonny. She was born the illegitimate daughter of an Irish lawyer who got it off with his wife’s maid while the wife was ill and staying with her mother in law. After Many dramas and court cases the lawyer settles with the maid at his home. The wife moves in with the mother in law and she (the wife) is accidentally duffed by the husband who thought in the dark that he was potting the maid who had been moved temporarily out of that bed without him knowing. The maid has a daughter when she is wrongfully in prison for stealing from the household.

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"Oh, she was a pirate queen"

December 14th 2006 19:06
“Oh she was a pirate queen”
The words of a song about Mary read: A tragic pirate queen. She was born in England after her mother who had an infant son when married to a sailor who did not return from the sea. Being with child and still married to a sailor who was away from home mother decides to “move in with country relatives” and there in the country after her little one-year-old son dies she has Mary. She runs out of money after three years and must return to her mother in law and to hide her former pregnancy she dresses Mary as a boy and so deceives her mother in law. At age thirteen and still disguised as a boy she is sent to work as page for a lady. From there she joins a man of war leaving in Flanders to join a foot regiment. Not getting the commission she hoped for by being a brave soldier she then joined a cavalry regiment and here the first stirring’s of love emerge.

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Sunrise at sea

December 13th 2006 17:58
Port Stephens sunrise
Sunrise over the sea

There is something about a sunrise at sea. It somehow seems more dramatic, certainly more beautiful and allways worthwhile getting outof your bunk for.

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A bit of star gazing

December 12th 2006 20:21
Here is an opportunity now that warm weather is with us to do a bit of star gazing. I have used info from Southern Sky Watch to be a bit more accurate in predictions. If you are into astrology as I was few years ago you will have and idea of where the moon and planets are at all times but this is on paper. Stick your head out the window and have a real look. Or better still when you leave the boat ramp for that early morning fishing session take a look at the eastern sky (or western on a late return) You can see how easy it can be on a clear morning or night to now take celestial observations to find your postion.

The moon is in its last quarter at the moment and is waning (getting smaller) toward the end of the month it will be dark (best time for prawning) on about the 21st of December just after sunset you will see a thin cresent moon and Venus. this is quite special and looks so lovely. You can see why it has been used on flags of nations.
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Are you lonely on a beach?

December 11th 2006 18:43
White haven beach
QTB pic.

What is it about a lonely beach and a single soul tramping along it? Probably the most popular admitted to pastime by single females (research by myself over 6 singles sites) is walking along a beach. Particularly a moonlit beach and more so with their lover. It has a certain charm and it has romance and the sound of waves breaking on the sand in a regular rhythm has a calming effect. It doesn’t make the said female any more pliant I can assure you but they do love a walk along the beach.

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No boating today!

December 10th 2006 18:24
No boating today as the tide was so low my tinnie was aground at the end of the wharf. It was blowing pretty hard so it was a bit to dangerous to row out to my yacht in the bay. I took comfort in the fact that I had a car and could do some cruising with it. I packed my hand spear, mask, snorkel and fins and headed out to Mannering Park.

I had anticipated the park to be quite sheltered with a sandy beach falling into deep water where I could spear some flathead. And I could have except for a new boat ramp that had been put in and now because of the well sheltered spot it was a haven for rev heads in speed boats. good luck to them but they were not going to get an opportunity to run over this spear fisherman.
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Sydney-Hobart, same old same old?

December 9th 2006 19:12
I have been starting to read the preliminary reports on the coming Sydney - Hobart yacht race. The reporters, after reporting on the event for who knows how many years seem to me, to be using a tried and true format on the race.
1) Report that the race is on. (This is fair enough)
2) Report that it is the toughest race on the planet. (Ho Hum)
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Plan to export whale meat.

December 7th 2006 17:20
Jumping whale
A magnificent beast, but!

Here is my plan to export whale meat to the rest of the world from Australia and possibly New Zealnd. Both countries are known for having the biggest numbers of whale strandings anywhere in the world. Why is a mystery but many people have some very good theorys but no true facts. One true fact is that no matter how hard we try we can't seem to convince the stranded whales to return to sea and stay there. Volunteers work their backsides off and have learnt a lot about how to keep the poor buggers alive but I think the best way to deal with them is to euthenase them when it becomes evident they are not goig to return.

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Test sail a Compass 25

December 5th 2006 17:19

I was lucky enough to get to sail a Compass 25 from Port Stephens to Lake Macquarie a few weeks ago and again for a day on Lake Macquarie. Here is my report on this yacht.

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selling a boat

December 4th 2006 18:10
The skipper
The Skipper

Selling one's boat is never easy. First you have to make up your mind to do so. It is harder than deciding on a divorce (and I have been through a few.) How do you part with the love of your life. I have to think back to the times she has given me grief. There were times when I did think what the hell am I doing with this boat? In rough weather she had no dodger and leaked a bit through deck fittings. My fault. Her rigging needed replacing and when that was done bits of wire that had not been finished off properly, would stab me in the finger. My fault. She is to small to live aboard confortably but I am 25 kilo overweight, my fault. So the faults are with me not the boat. Now I can make the decision. SELL.

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Fresh bait, best bait, live bait

December 3rd 2006 18:05
yabby
This is dynamite on fish

the nests
Here be monsters!

Fresh bait and better yet, live bait is still the most successful way to catch fish! Getting good fresh bait is sometimes as much of an art as actually fishing in itself. I tried very hard once to obtain some live bait to go trout fishing on Lake Jindabyne. I turned over old logs lying on the ground looking for grubs and turned over soil looking for worms. I caught grasshoppers and even dug grubs out of trees but what I didn’t ever succeed in doing was getting hold of ‘mud-eyes’.
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Moon Island Madness

December 2nd 2006 22:55



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Ahhhh! what I am missing out on this week.

December 1st 2006 16:58
Kings Cup Competitor
Kings Cup Competitor


After spending nearly six months arranging almost 20 crew for "Millennium" a sixty foot racing yacht I wll not be able to attend. But thoughtfully race organisers have contacted me to show me what I will be missing out on. Here is an edited version.
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Ahhhh! What I am missing out on.

December 1st 2006 16:32
Yachting Phuket
Kings Cup entrant

This week I am supposed to be in Phuket, Thailand for the Kings Cup Regatta. Due to commitments at TAFE and exams to be done I can't make it. For the last six months I have been putting together crew for the yacht "Millennium" and all those lucky people, almost 20 in all will be enjoying what I can't. No point grizzling. I have recieved emails from the organisers and here is what is happening this month to celebrate Thailand's King's Birthday 60th birthday on the throne.

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