John B

You're the guy many people are looking for Matt. Does this tie in with the vesper ais thingummy as well?

Salient was Trevor Coubray's boat as Biggy says. What a salt of the earth bugger he was, both when he ran the moorings barge ( he put my mooring down in Hobson bay)and when he then ran the haulout for all those years at Okahu. I hauled 20 years ,every year there.From Ken and Dave , to Trevor,Graeme and Sandy , to big John. She looks pretty good apart from the obvious growth from lack of use , I hope you have a great run from her. You could probably join the CYA, I think she's old enough.

Mark , a very important question for you... Did you see the elephants in elephant cove?

Well, I should have said 2/3rds the way, I've been there twice and its so nice I wouldn't even contemplate doing the trip without stopping there.

A cruising fleet doing it in legs? A stop halfway would be nice.

I give up. the trolls win.

I listened to Hosking and his studio mate scoffing at the protest or issue yesterday morning on the radio. He is in a position of power himself , with his profile, and he's mocking people on national radio who don't think 'progress' at any cost is the way to go. Then he went onto an" interview" with a Ports PR guy who is at some other place, at some other time no doubt, answering pre arranged questions with a smoothly false patter leaving me thinking POA are baby kissers ,tree huggers and the answer to all the problems in the free world, instead of the ruthless bunch they actually are.

Is Open CPN not available at all on Android , or just the new version ? I finally bought a tablet , navionics is OK, I thought I'd have that as well.

This is where you find your local body councillor http://www.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/EN/AboutCouncil/representativesbodies/Pages/Wardcouncillors.aspx tell em what you think. I only used the word megalomaniacs twice, and the phrase 'underhand and opaque' once. To my regret , I left Machiavelli out. Someone else might like to use that in an email. Because these guys are carried away with power , are ruthless, and they need to be reined in.

hmm.

I've always found that family who pesters you to go sailing is about top of the list. To that end I'd suggest that you take it easy and choose your weather for the first season, not frighten them , and then you'll get that ok.

There's a nasty forming up up there out to the west of Fiji. They have it dropping through Vanuatu and new cal and tracking on to slide down our east coast by 2 or 300 miles or so next weekend. I see a 952 in there. of course this far out it may .. may not ,or may track left a bit and land on us etc but worth watching out for . It looks like it could be pretty rough for Vanuatu though., .

Gotta love a Mull!. Some weekend, man , come to work for a rest. neat seeing the One ton boats start and then I spent 2 days watching the classics either do nothing or finally on sunday get some wind for a race, terrific spectacle. A bit of a wander around the volvo boats on sunday too, its all going off.

Fer sure I'd be interested Fusion , I tried sending you a PM but couldn't get through ... do you still have my email by chance, I've been through a couple of computers and no longer seem to have yours. I have a few snaps of your boat from the sail up to mahurangi I've been meaning to send you.

and there was this one , dunno what happened to it , haven't seen it since...

Not so old a photo perhaps , But I did see this wiggly one down at okahu that time... and it is old ish. .

This be it. But I think we might be all getting a bit cynical here.( regarding the Birdsall) If you think about it , trawling adds on trademe would be a good way to find a suitable boat to steal, and talking insurance fraud here is pretty damning , considering we don't know the people concerned . In all probability the owners are fine upstanding people who are victims of a crime. I remember when Tamatea was burned by vandals in a yard in west Auckland all the insurance fraud theories came out . I know for a fact that guy was utterly devastated by those vandals and what the

That's not good for recovery potential. I was wondering why anyone would steal such a distinctive boat on the basis that they must have wanted the boat for lifestyle. If they're on the run they've just stolen it for transport and they'll probably discard it when they're where they want to be.

What a cool Waitangi day, best sail of the season . Don't know what wind strength it was but it certainly was a lot at times. So good. We sailed down to Onetangi about midday( shocked by the number of boats but , hey we've spent the whole season away from crowds so not too bad for change,) later on 'rescued' a buddies boat dragging out the bay( mission ) arrived back at our boat and had 2 kingfish splash beside us . I went below , fought the rod out, unwound the lure , dropped it over the side and the second it touched the water the fish took it and ran. Great sail , a mission and a ki

You can run navionics on zeus can't you Matt? ( I think I read that somewhere)

I imagine two or three of everything nav so I could easily end up with 2 plotters and Open cpn on a device too. Not going back to raymarine , they upset me with their fake promotion for the pacific gold charts they had in boating NZ last year. They wouldn't honour what they promoted , that'll cost em . .

Cheers Matt. I was wondering if it was just the 0183 V 2000 language thing , but there's more to it eh.

I don't have one. I do like my old plotter though , a C 80 raymarine because its reliable and doesn't have a touch screen . So I asked L and B if I could build the system like they told me I could and the answer was no , the new radars don't work with the old plotter( about 2008 or 9 model) I assumed it was because the new ones were broadband but I saw a comment on another forum the other day saying that raymarine doesn't have broadband? so which is true? do I have some options with the old plotter without buying second hand? is broadband performing as well as the old fryers anyw

sort of relevant , 2 boats we met in South Minerva a few years ago were single handed guys in 'cheap' boats they'd bought in the US and sailed down here and back and forth to the islands for a few seasons. They were really modest boats and they'd each only paid about 25 K US for them ( or so). They had spent quite a bit of coin on upgrades/ maintenance though. Still , it really opened my eyes , One was Downeast 32 , a little mini clipper ship of a design but he's been in all sorts of bad weather in it and done all the miles, I wouldn't have believed it. The other one was an old Halberg

What BB said in her first post was So I would stand by my Lotus 9.2 suggestion. That besides the fact that plenty have made safe offshore passages , we ( my mates and I )often talk about people who actually go and do it in modest cost yachts rather than piss around talking about it or spending gazillions for all the toys. One of those (not young )couples quietly go off to the islands in their 9.2 two handed, they always take the main down at night so the jib can be furled easily if the wind pipes up, they do it. I didn't suggest a D28 for offshore, but that is exactly what a D 35