25/11/2009

It’s been a BLOG-less year ……...

A combination of guilt on our part and pressure from others has spurred me into updating this BLOG. As I have said before, writing about the tedious and day-to-day aspects of boating life is not for me. If you want that sort of thing, then there are plenty of other boating related websites around for you to visit.

So, what can I write about? Its got to be boating related tekkie stuff of course – here are some tekkie things from 2009 that might be of interest:

Blacking

BELLE had her hull blacked early November 2009. Like her first blacking around mid-October 2008, we were nervous about craning or dragging BELLE back onto dry land, so we opted again for a more genteel and less stressful approach by utilising the covered dry dock at Shobnall Boat Services in Burton-on-Trent for a weekend. BELLE was slowly and gently lowered onto support blocks at the bottom of the dock as the water was pumped out. No need to stash all of our ornaments away and tie things down, etc. in readiness for dangling from a crane like a 20 tonne conker or a good rumbling/shaking whilst being dragged up a quayside by winch at what appears to be an ‘unhealthy’ angle of inclination.

It took less than an hour to drain all of the water out of the dock and before we knew it, the lads were steam cleaning the hull clean. Thereafter we were left to get on with things. This sort of job is not for the work shy – it was certainly a weekend of hard graft. Having scraped / wire brushed off all of the loose stuff at and below the waterline, we managed to subsequently apply four separate coats of International Intertuf bitumous black paint to the entire hull and we touched up the red and white banding around the stern. There was no serious rusting or pitting of the hull to be found anywhere. We maximised our use of the covered dock and re-painted all of the white roof panels.

This time around BELLE had been in the water for a year. She had been in the water nearly two years when we blacked for the first time around mid-October 2008. The decision to black this time was mainly driven by the expectation that the anodes would need replacing, but, much to our surprise, we found that they were still serviceable. In all probability we shall be in the dry dock doing it all again around October/November 2010. Some might view this as a bit OTT. However, BELLE is our home and we want to keep her in pretty good nick right from the start.

Satellite TV

Whilst the Freeview digital terrestrial TV signals are usually well received on-board BELLE, there are times when the reception is poor, particularly when we are cruising. Sometimes switching to analogue works, but clearly the program choice is very limited. We wanted something better so decided to install a satellite TV system. Having scoured the market, we opted for a CAMOS SAT-DOME. This is a pretty nifty bit of kit (albeit expensive) that will seek the chosen satellite and will, subject to any obstructions of the line-of-sight to the satellite by nearby buildings or tall trees, etc., remain locked onto that satellite, even if you are on the move. There was a write up about BELLE’s SAT-DOME installation in the RoadPro 2009 catalogue – you will find a scanned copy of that write up here. You can see the dome discreetly located on our cabin roof in the picture below.

Our only problem (self-inflicted I might add) is that we are dead set against shelling out a wad each month to Rupert Murdoch for a Sky subscription. Actually, we are only really interested in securing British Eurosport. Unfortunately, the only provider of British Eurosport via satellite at present is Sky. An alternative might be to ‘stream’ British Eurosport from our computer to the TV, it having been received using Eurosport Player on t’Internet via either our T-Mobile or Orange 3G connections. The 3G data allowances might hinder this approach, but this is something that we are looking into very seriously. We are prepared to pay about £4.00 / month for a Eurosport Player subscription, but we are not prepared to pay about ten times more for a Sky subscription that, whilst it would include British Eurosport, also includes a whole lot of guff that we don’t actually want or need.

Francis Searchlight