Owens L'ill Slice of the Web

I’m bored… bored bored bored…boooring.
No updates recently, except loadsa guff about fish. Well I’m still going to write about my finned friends but I need to start venting and smiling a bit more; so, having vowed I’d stop commenting all the wonks here and just use it as a diary I’m going to exercise my prerogative and say ‘Stuff that! Make more noise.’ watch this space…

Dario dario

Two Scarlet Badis (Dario dario) in my 10L nano-aquarium with some Red Crystal shrimp. This picture does not do them justice really, they are a real living jewel; truly beautiful and tiny (1 to 1.5cm adult size). They are related to the Perch family, and lots of interesting behaviours. I was having a small issue with minute water bugs; sub millimetre dots swimming and crawling over the rocks and plants in the Nano tank. I have always wanted to keep some fish in that tank, so this seemed like a good opportunity to go for it on the basis that the shrimp were ignoring them, but a predatory fish would not. They will eat very young shrimp too, but leave juveniles and adults alone, having some shrimp population control in that tank is no bad thing.

10L 'Jewel' of a tank

I’m already keeping Celestial Perl Danios, and Microrasboras in a 35L aquarium, the Danios are a bit bigger than the Badis, but the Micros are even smaller (possibly the smallest invertebrates in the world). I like these very small species, and the shrimp I keep them with, it’s like owning Fabergé miniatures or a precision mechanical watch, they are so tiny but so perfect. I have a pair of males, I’d hoped the smaller one was a female but it turned out to be a male that had not coloured up yet..

What I had not reckoned on was that they are fussy eaters in a way that would make most girls with ‘Anna‘ really, really jealous. I’m currently having to feed them individual live bloodworms with a pair of tweezers.. But they seem to have finally got the idea that the little critters in their tank can be eaten too. I noticed the number suddenly start to decline last week, and I eventually saw one of the Badis chasing and eating them; they seem to have cleaned them up now. Going forward I need to wean them onto frozen live foods, and if I can I’d like to get them accepting small flake and pellets. I actually tricked one of the them to eat a pellet last night, he spat it out really quick. This may be even harder than I imagined.

We sailed Coppelia for the first time in 20 years! A couple of lengths of the Gaasperplas and a big smile on my face…

I finally got the mast on Coppelia up yesterday, and the sails raised, really pleased!

Still a way to go before first trip on the water:

• Sail repairs: cleats on foresails, rip in spinnaker.
• Mainsail outhaul (clew) needs strengthening.
• Halyards need fittings splicing to the line.
• Toestraps to be purchased and fitted.
• Deck fittings need sealing in place, keel bolt needs sealing.
• Rear lockers need lockable catches fitting.
• Sort out the forestay bottom fitting, it’s a mess at the moment.

The list is growing shorter every day

shrimp, just hanging around

In the midst of bad news in the family, there is good news in my aquaria, I have baby shrimp in the nano-cube tank. And the female is carrying eggs again.

Baby shrimp, and an adult for comparison.

The baby shrimp are amazing, even after a week they are just 2 milimeter long red-and-white blobs, hard to see any detail at all, but they move and feed like adults already.

Keel after refitting in boat.

The keel is now back in the boat, and the new winch mechanism works well. Many thanks to Cassje for helping me to get the bolt in place, it was not easy.. The list of things to do is getting shorter:

• Seal keel bolt, replace and seal a load of fittings, get some matching locks and some lock-plates for the cockpit lockers.
• Paint cockpit floor with anti-slip, make and fit toe-straps, end-stops on mainsheet track.
• General hull cleaning and touch-up, seal up some cracks.
• Mast and rigging; do a dummy-run on the rigging and work out what needs to be replaced, find any sail repairs that are necesscary.
• Test sail on the Gaasperplas..
• I’d like to sort electrics and some running lights out too, plus interior fittings and cushions.

I got the keel of Coppelia painted yesterday, two coats of ‘POR-15‘, she needs a final topcoat today (a nice blue to match the rudder) and she’s ready to go back in. Another huge job, hopefully I’ll be doing that later this week

The keel weighs 110 kilo (240lbs) and is made of a single piece of cast iron, it was very rusty when I took it out and has needed quite a lot of cleaning, the paint I used is a specialist rust covering/proofing coating that should protect her for some time. To do the painting I needed to hang the keel by it’s mounting points from the roof of the EHDC clubhouse, this let me paint all of it, but makes me nervous as hell. Despite my best efforts I could not really smooth it off, although it is good enough for cruising. Maybe that is a job for the future; ideally it should be fibreglass clad.

I got a load of other minor things done, the new keel winch is in place, I have now baseplates on the sheet winches so that they can be fitted to the existing holes in the hull, rather then creating new ones. All that is left are the toe straps, painting the cockpit floor and then rigging her. Which will be fun, all the rigging was stored in the dry and looks good, but new halyards and lines will need to be brought. The sails are good, but maybe a bit baggy and I think ther eis a rip in the spinnaker. If she sails OK with the existing rig I might try to get a roller-furling setup for the front and a new mainsail.

Wonderful! A crystal red shrimp carrying eggs in my 10L tank; look for the little ‘berries’ under her belly. I’m really rather pleased to see this happen in such a small tank. Now I need to think of how to get rid of the juveniles, at 3-7 euros each it may be worth feeding them up and selling them.

Click on the image for a better view, she will carry the eggs for a month or more before they hatch as minute versions of the parents.

Hectic weekend, 10 Miles running on Friday night in the Midzomernachtcross (Midsummer Night Race, not strictly held on the shortest night, but rather the Friday closest to it). It was a really good run held in near perfect conditions. I posted a good time: 1 hour 43 minutes and 43 seconds. Within seconds of my personal best time at this distance
Then on Saturday I had a dragonboat racing afternoon in Amlere; with the EHDC, I’m shattered! We managed to avoid the wooden spoon in the 2km race, which is quite satisfying.

Coppelia being lifted

I lifted Coppelia  yesterday and removed the keel. A hundred kilos of cast iron, pretty awkward to handle but lifting the boat was actually quite easy once I’d worked out the correct way of securing her.

The keel will now be renovated, it’s the last really big job before I can sail her for the first time in many years.

More photos in my gallery; here.

I’m so proud… I finally managed to add a block of random images from my gallery to the right-hand side of my homepage (You can probably see them now). I wasted loads of time playing with the wrong plugins to Wordpress for this. Finally I just created a new RSS feed on my gallery set to dynamically provide random imagesfrom the whole gallery site. Then I used the Photo Sidebar Widget to display the first three images off the feed. This plugin does exactly what I want with no additional baggage, all the other solutions I found were vastly overcomplex (WPG2) or buggy (External Gallery2 Image Block Plugin).

But! I had to modify it to work with Gallery2.3 on my system like so:

Edit file: (you can do this via the Wordpress inbuilt plugin editor if your system is setup to permit it.)

.../wp-content/plugins/photo-sidebar-widget/photo_sb.php

Find the following line:

case "Gallery 2 RSS Module, version 1.1.0":

And add a new line below it:

case "Gallery 2 RSS Module, version 1.1.0":
case "Gallery 2 RSS Module, version 1.1.7":

This allows it to grab a RSS feed from gallery 2.3 (the original line is for Gallery2.2). It totally failed to display any images for me until I worked this out, adding the above made it instantly spring into life.

The bandwidth is terrible, but it’s free, and the view of the coast of France is good.. though not deeply exciting.
Looks like they only open a few ports though, no SSH session to my server, and Instant Messenger (MSN) protocols are blocked too.. which is not so good.  Google came back in Swedish/Danish by default, but this is a Scandinavian owned ferry, and Google is no doubt detecting that the request comes from Maersk’s IT department.

Still, full cludos to Norfolkline for giving some access anyway.. and for not charging me when Belgian stupidity forced me to miss my booked crossing, they just smiled and put me on the next one.

Edit: On the way home I noticed another passenger using MSN (Windows live) quite happily (I didn’t peer too closely over their shoulder, but it was definately working for them) so maybe I caught them on a off day.. or aMSN on linux has particular issues.. I also had a meal in the restaurant and it was not exactly great value for money, SeaFrance is much better for food.