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March to May 2007
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Well here we are again, the start of a new financial year and for some - stock take time. On my side, the hard spray dodger is almost finished. I just need to paint it and then we (Jan and I) can install it.
The annual Cape Town to Mossel Bay race starts next Wednesday (7th March) and I have been asked to help with Bridge work and running the water taxi. This year there are eleven yachts taking part and the whole event is being sponsored by Vodacom with a lot of fan-fair planned. The smallest yacht taking part is 26 feet in length, and the biggest some 62 feet long. There is also going to be quite a lot of media coverage including TV.
Today, (2nd March) we took Jan's yacht, Oulik, out of the water and trucked her to a plot 6km from Mossel Bay. Last Tuesday Jan and I built a cradle for Oulik and she is now high and dry in preparation for our departure.
The Vodacom Cape Town - Mossel Bay Race started at 9am on Thursday 8th March, 24 hours later than planned due to bad weather in Cape Town. Eight hours after the start, three boats had withdrawn due to bad weather and rough seas. One boat had an emergency with a crew member as he had broken his ribs due to the rough conditions. A few hours later more boats had turned back to Cape Town and now there were only three yachts still in the race. At about 9pm the call was made to scrap the entire race! The winds at Cape Agulhas were gusting at 45 to 50 knots from the east and the seas were huge. It must have been hell beating into the wind, the rough seas and the current!! Such a pity as there had been such a lot of planning and work done to get this race completed successfully. Tertius Cloete, our rear commodore of sailing is not feeling too good about the race being cancelled but safety of crew and yachts are more important considerations.
The annual Buffalo Rally takes place in Mossel Bay this weekend (16th to 18th March) and there are EIGHT THOUSAND motor cycles expected. Last year there were six thousand bikes that attended so this year it is going to be mayhem. Many bikers are expected to stay longer as next week Wednesday is a public holiday. The Rotarian's (or was it Round Table??) have a bar in the rally area and last year they sold over 44,000 beers and 5,000 bottles of spirits - man, that is a lot of booze! This year the theme is "Irish" as Saturday is St Patrick's day (also my fathers birthday - he would have been 78 this year). I will take a walk over to the rally area and get some pictures to put into the "My Pictures" section.
Craig phoned me yesterday and gave me some results of his projects and practical marks for his final exams and he is scoring very high marks (one result was over 90%!!!!). Well done my boy - kill 'em dead.... I'll see you at your graduation.
We have had the worst sea state in Mossel Bay. The sea went berserk on Monday 19th March and lasted till Thursday 22nd March.
There was a tropical cyclone off Moçambique and the moon went into an earth eclipse and we had strong easterly winds. All these factors caused the sea to have 6 to 7 meter swells combined with very high and low tides.
At times we were afraid the yacht moorings will come off the concrete pillars which hold everything in place.
We only had 250mm left on the pillars at high tide!! And at low tide the floats at the walkway touched bottom and were damaged and moved out of position. There was quite a bit of damage to boats with many mooring lines snapping and fenders getting punctured. One of the mooring "fingers" at the end of the walkway snapped five of it's six 20mm high tensile bolts and it was close to being swept away. Many floats will have to be repaired or replaced due to the storm damage. Zephyr weathered the storm very well owing to me being here all the time and to the shock-absorber's on my main mooring lines. Even the big oil rig service vessels left the harbor to anchor in the bay because they were snapping mooring lines that are as thick as a man's arm!!
Happy Easter everybody!!!
I spend an enjoyable Easter Weekend with friends in Pretoria and visited Ann and Craig at the new Orthopaedic Suppliers on Saturday as well. Craig and I had a few hours together and he introduced "snus" to me (don't ask...) - we had a new strap put onto my wrist watch, sat down to a nice lunch and generally chewed the cud. In the mean time I have been busing myself in Mossel Bay fixing computers and doing network installations. This time I am charging for my services and by pure word of mouth have been kept fairly busy. I am sure Mossel Bay will be big enough for me to earn a living from computer work one day.
It is the 21st April 2007 today and also Caroline's birthday! Happy Birthday my girl - may you have many more. I won't tell everybody how young you are today but enjoy every moment.
Caroline sent me a movie called "Borat", this has to be the weirdest movie I have ever watched! Thanks Caroline.
The computers at Orthopaedic Suppliers were not behaving and Ann asked me to help out with getting them fixed. So on Monday 21st May I flew up to Johannesburg. The main problem was that the e-Mail server software was crashing the Pastel accounting program. This is a no-no so I decided to install the e-Mail program on the backup server as well as the Proxy program. I also suspected the Modem was causing problems as it would not allow a call to be terminated. Both the programs and the Modem use "interrupts" extensively and my thinking was that one or more of these interrupts were conflicting with Pastel Accounting. Ann and I worked until 10pm transferring all the settings for the e-Mail program over to the backup computer. The next day I cleaned the main server up and disabled the Modem. On the backup computer I also fitted an adaptor and installed a 3G wireless Modem card. I also installed an automatic "scrubbing" program on every computer to keep clutter to a minimum. We then got everybody's e-Mail to work properly as well as the backup program. Besides a power supply that needs replacing on the backup computer, everything seems to be fine and Pastel is running smoothly again.
On Wednesday morning (also Craig's birthday!) Ann asked me to help move a CNC carver from Randfontein to Orthopaedic Suppliers. The carver machine was bigger than I thought but with the help of several people and a truck with a crane, we got the job done by around 11am.
Happy birthday Craig - 22 is a nice age! May you have many more.
I am very proud of Craig's results in his studies. He is getting above 80% for all his learning subjects as well as his practicals. Well done my boy!!!! Keep up the hard work, you are almost finished and then you will be able to reap the rewards of your studies once you start working.
On Thursday morning I checked all the computer settings at Orthopaedic Suppliers and everything seemed to be working smoothly again. Ann took me to the airport and I flew home getting back at 5pm. I really enjoyed seeing everybody at Orthopaedic Suppliers again and also being able to see Ann as well as Craig on his birthday.
Now that Zephyr is almost ready, I can start getting ready to go sailing. That means I will leave this chapter behind me and start a new one...
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