Back in a garage....

Moved house so now I have another garage for Xiao Feng. She will fit but not on her trailer unless I diagonal park her.... But that is a problem for autumn, right!

Unwrapping

Unwrapped Xiao Feng on Sunday, lovely day almost felt like summer.... The kids even had their first dip in the lake (an extremely short one but still...)

Not sure how much sailing there will be this summer since we are moving house end of June, but I am sure I will be able to squeeze in a few nice days.

Another year

Another year have past and it is time to put Xiao Feng to sleep for the winter. We have had a great summer, but I have not had the possibility to take her out as much as I would have liked... Well both her and me have many more summers in us 😄 (tried to publish this last week but for some reason it did not work...)

Marking the waterline

I have been thinking of bottom painting Xiao Feng for next season and when I pulled her out of the water yesterday I got an idea of how to mark the waterline easily. She has been in the water for just over a month so the unloaded waterline is already clearly marked on her hull, I just added a few marks along that line before cleaning her. When it is time for painting I just need to put the masking tape an inch or so above the marks (maybe a little more in the bow).

Marks

Cleaning of bottom started

Sailing (?) with crew

Took Grandma (aka my Mother) out for a sail today, so finally I had a crew that could handle the camera. Unfortunately the wind died after almost two hours of sailing, so I had to man the oars to get us home. The Walkabout is an excellent row boat so I could comfortably keep Xiao Feng at 2.5-3 knots the whole hour it took us to get back, with a little extra effort she climed up to 3.5 knots. For longer distances I think 2-2.5 knots would let you keep going for hours on end.

All in all a very nice day on the water.

Sailing out

Our destination

Wind is dying out

Grumpy at the oars

Back on the trailer

Reporting the week

We have had a week of fabulous weather so I have had time to do a lot of sailing. Unfortunately works prevented me from spending the whole week on the water. So I did shorter evening sails on the weekdays and slightly longer during the weekend. Have been practising balancing Xiao Feng so that she can steer herselves and unless there are not too much waves and the wind stays reasonably constant it works quite nice.

I also figured out how to get the GPS plots out of the box and into Google maps, below you can see the track of the two days when I brought the GPS.

Trip Saturday a week ago, featured in my last blog post

This Saturdays trip, the yellow star mark the location of my house

I have also changed the mooring arrangement so that I do not need to walk across the fore deck when climbing onboard. I have added a very long mooring line to the bouy so that I can pull her in along side the quay and then just pull her out to the bouy.

The new aft mooring line that let's me pull the stern in and out.

And finally some pictures from our trips, it is difficult to get good pictures from 'new' angles when you need to sail the boat as well. I am pondering some sort of camera attachment to the mizzen so that I can shoot some video....

At the mooring

I am planning to sail most days next week (if the weather allows), so today after my Saturday sail I left her at the mooring. She is a bit tippy when standing on the bow getting on and of but I guess I will get used to that as well.

Sailed to a island about 4 nm away, dropped the hook in a small bay and had lunch. Excellent weather today sunny and a nice 4-6 knots of wind. Brought my GPS today and we averaged 3 knots with a top speed of 5.5 knots, nice!