Hauling out

Given the oil leak we decided to get Robinetta towed to the yard again. This is getting to be a habit, and not a good one. I called the yard, and they were happy to move her on 2nd November. High water was at 17:30 (when it would be dark) but there should be enough water 2 hours before, so I walked to the yard then.

I was waiting by the slip as she appeared in the distance.

Mussel encrusted anode and prop

Once she was hauled out I could see how much fouling there was on the hull. There were clumps of limpets, and plenty of mussels on the depth sensor and the bottom of the hull. The most obvious patch were growing on the sacrificial anode. This, of course, can not be anti-fouled but I have never seen it infested as much, and wondered if this could be the cause of the engine problems. However the yard manager said not, that the anode should still be effective despite the mussels. Unfortunately the fact that the mussels were growing there probably meant that there was a short in the connection, so the anode was not protecting the engine...

fouling on starboard bow

fouling on port bow

I asked the person cleaning off the hull if there was a better anti-fouling paint for the local area than the Teamac-D we use (which was fine last year). He said that all the boats had been badly fouled this year, so not to worry.

Robinetta is now safely on a cradle, with additional props. She is not going anywhere for the next few months

 

After the Storm

 It was calm today so we rowed over to check on Robinetta. She looked Ok and the cockpit cover was only partially pulled away. The crutches had come away too but they weren't broken.

When we examined the cover, it was badly ripped along the edges. It's old and not a great loss. Alison took it off completely which allowed me to look at the crutches.

The bolt was gone. An easy fix. I got some threaded rod and the hacksaw and cut it to length and put on some nylock nuts. The rod was a bit undersized but some tape fixed that and we had operational crutches.

Meanwhile, Alison checked below. The bilge pump had been doing its job. The bilges were reasonably empty and clean and a manual press of the electric pump worked normally. Hurrah!

The next step was to check the engine. It wouldn't start. Not a thing.

I assumed it was the battery switch, as I hadn't got around to replacing the springs and a bad connection was likely. But it wasn't that. I checked it and tried both batteries and bypassed the switch. Nothing.

Time to get the trouble shooting guide out.

It said if the engine doesn't turn at all, either the solenoid is stuck or the ignition switch or the wiring is bad. You can bypass the switch by holding a screwdriver between the battery and the solenoid.

Looking at the engine, there was a lot of salt around the impellor. Not good.

The screwdriver worked and the engine started. So either the switch has got damaged or worn out, or the plug to the switch has come loose. That could have happened in the storm, but at least we had a way of starting the engine to get her ashore next Monday.

We let the engine warm up and charge the battery a bit and turned it off.

Alison went down to close the raw water inlet and saw oil in the bilges. That wasn't there 10 minutes before. I felt the external oil pipe. It was corroded and oily. ****!

That pipe was new last winter and should be copper alloy. They are not supposed to corrode.

Alison called the yard and arranged for them to tow her to the slip.

That's not what we wanted.

Storm Boelo

 

Storm Boelo has been the second named storm of the weekend. It hit the Clyde especially hard as shown in these BBC News photos from Helensburgh and Gourock.

North of the Rhu narrows is really sheltered but the wind still funnelled around and came in from the north where the fetch is longest.

Robinetta looked OK when I took this video this morning and again this afternoon.

 

You get a closer view from another nearby yacht.

Heading Back Down

 We spent a peaceful night on the Yorkhill pontoon. This is a council run pontoon, and needs to be booked ahead. 

We left the pontoon at 09:55, as soon as we saw that the bridge had swung open. We had meant to follow Waverley through it, but leaving before her meant we might be able to get to the Renfrew bridge and share the swing there too rather than needing our own.

We got a great view of the Glenlee as we motored towards the bridge. 

Waverley took a lot longer to get moving than we expected, and she did not come past us until we were passing Braehead. 

Her wake kicked up a in the narrow channel, reflecting back from the sides to toss us about quite a bit. I was glad we had not waited to follow her under the Govan-Partick bridge.

The tide was against us, so we had the engine on full revs to try not to fall too far behind Waverley as she headed for the Renfrew bridge. I was very aware that this was a road bridge. They had promised to keep it open for us until 11:30 if they needed to, but we made it by 11:00, and they closed it behind us immediately.

Once we were through the bridge I lowered the revs, and spent more time looking round. There was quite a bit of rubbish in the river, but the most immediately obvious was this sewage treatment? outflow. It smelt like laundry liquid, and foamed up like it too.

The river was very quiet until we passed Old Kirkpatrick. After this we saw a tug heading up stream, and a small cabin cruiser. Several yachts passed us as we got to the Tail of the Bank, heading upstream to the James Watt marina.

There was one large ship motoring down river after us, I first spotted her as we passed Dumbarton, but she kept the the speed limit, and we were clear of the channel before she reached Greenock.

What little wind there was was on the nose or close to it all the way down river, and even when we had space to raise the main sail it was too light to use. All the yachts we saw were motoring, and our engine stayed on and only our stay sail up all the way back to our mooring. We got there at high water, making for a much easier trip ashore in Worm. She had stayed tied peacefully to the buoy while we were away. This was one of the few trips that she did not join us on.

The Upper Clyde

I'm full of hair brained plans this year. I heard that today was 'Trail West Fest' in Glasgow. It was quite expensive and I wasn't sure if I wanted to see all the bands. But there was an official after party you could buy tickets for that was a cèilidh dance. It was only £20 but it was 10pm to 2am. So we couldn't use public transport.

But then I spotted it was only a short walk from the Riverside Museum and there is a free Council run pontoon there. So I bought tickets to the dance and filled in the pontoon booking.

They took my booking but said we would need bridge lifts.

The last time I looked into going up the Clyde to Glasgow, I wanted to use the Plantation Quay pontoon to visit the BBC offices at Pacific Quay. I couldn't do it because they broke the Millennium Bridge and they show no sign of getting it working to open again.

Since then, two new bridges have been built across the Clyde. They both replace ferries.

The Govan-Partick Bridge is a footbridge between Govan and the Riverside Museum. We used it recently to go to a concert in Govan, taking the train to Partick. 

The Renfrew Bridge is the first opening road bridge over the Clyde.

Neither bridge has a high enough air draft for Robinetta to sneak under.

The 'official' skippers guide to the Clyde, including the Upper Clyde, is published by Peel Ports. The most recent is the 5th edition and it's really hard to find. I eventually tracked down a working link to a PDF, hidden inside another PDF. It predates both bridges and the accession of King Charles III. The only email for Peel Ports bounces.

Peel Ports engagement with the leisure boating community is woeful. They were intending to levy £100 a year to all boaters in the whole of the Clyde Estuary. They were sent home with their tail between their legs by everyone from the Scottish Government to the RYA and the marina companies. I'm not holding my breath for a new guide.

But the bridge management staff don't work for Peel Ports and are wonderful. We coordinated our upstream journey and they arranged opening times with lots of extra time in case we were late. It turned out we would be coming back down on the Sunday about the same time as Waverley and a combined opening would work. I let them know we couldn't keep up with Waverley and they understood.

The tides were great for taking the flood up but not so good for the Rosneath end. We got Worm down to the beach about 8am. Low water springs. There was 100 yards of mussel bed exposed that we normally row over. Also, it's very flat, so getting afloat was tricky.

We got Worm near the water on the trolley. We usually carry her a much shorter distance.

I had to drag her across the shells in bare feet to get her deep enough to float. But we managed.

We usually row inside Carraig an Roin. But there was so little water we decided to outside. We got Robinetta ready to go and left Worm on the mooring. We got the main up passing Rhu Marina and had a nice broad reach towards the Cockle Bank. 

I had estimated we would have enough water by 11am to get through the channel between Cockle Bank and Pillar Bank.

Alison disagreed. She insisted we head to the No 2 red at the Tail o' the Bank. She was right. We clipped the western end of the Greenock Bank and there was far less water over it than the charts and tidal predictions suggested. We saw less than 1/2 m under the keel at one point.

Safe in the channel, we made our way up river. The wind was now right behind, and neither of us wanted to run up such a narrow channel. We stowed the main and pottered up under tick over with 3 knots of tide.

The river looks wide as far as the Erskine Bridge but the navigable channel is very narrow. It's a pretty and fascinating trip, once passed the industrial docks at Port Glasgow.

Near Dumbarton, the Waverley passed us on her way to Dunoon and Tighnabruich. She gave us a happy toot on her whistle!

The tide was weaker from now on and we used the engine to arrive at the bridges on time.

Once under the Erskine Bridge it becomes a much narrower river and the channel is the full width. It becomes much more urban.

It's about three nm between each Bridge. The Renfrew Bridge opened as we got to it and closed behind us. Our timing was very good and I talked to them on the phone. They were really friendly.

It took the foot bridge people a long time to clear the pedestrians off the bridge. The people didn't seem to understand that the little boat they were watching couldn't get past them until they left the bridge.

We circled round until finally, they got the bridge open. It must be hard wanting the public to have a great experience of the bridge while trying to herd them off it!

We were on the pontoon at 3pm. Everything had gone to plan and the bridge staff had been super.

We relaxed until 5pm and then went for a light meal. Lovely. 

About 8pm, Waverley came in.

motoring home

 Julian got up at 1 a.m. to look for meteors, and did see two, but the sky was partially overcast, and there was more light pollution than we had hoped. However we spent a very peaceful night at anchor, with Robinetta and Worm hardly moving.

The overcast night meant there was no point getting up before dawn to have another look for meteors, but we were awake by 6, and the anchor was up by 06:30. This gave us a little helpful tide past Colintraive then slack water down the East Kyle. Julian got the main sail up after we passed the ferry, then went below and cooked porridge for breakfast. I was being spoilt, as there was nothing for me to do except keep on eye on "George" to make sure he was steering straight. 

Julian went below to get more sleep after breakfast, while I stayed on watch until we were nearly at Toward. There was finally enough wind to be worth trying to sail, so I called below to warn Julian, and he came up on deck. George went off duty, and Julian took over as the engine went off. Unfortunately the wind did not last. We managed to sail until just after the Toward Cardinal, and then the engine, (and George) took over again.

We saw only one yacht trying to sail in the Clyde, the other three yachts we saw were motoring. Waverly steamed past us again, then as we reached Cloche Point there were the ferries. I had hoped for a little sailing breeze at this point, but the air seemed still, and we lowered the main without going head to wind. We even took the jib down and stowed it to save time once we got back to our mooring.

We were back on our home mooring half an hour before high water, and rowing away just after, with a fully laden dinghy. Julian had been away for 6 weeks, and I had for 4. It felt good to be home again. 

Lazy Day

We rowed ashore this morning to take a look at Millport. I came here at least once as a child but I only remember the aquarium.

It's a pleasant spot but the view of the harbour is the best bit. The new protection wall doesn't spoil the view at all. The small islands are really pretty, and Little Cumbrae and Arran make a lovely backdrop.

The little museum is interesting. The story is unambiguously that the Cumbraes were part of Sudrey and that the name is Norse. The name probably means that the people spoke Cumbric, as opposed to the Gaelic of Argyll.

We rowed back towards Robinetta, saying good morning to Graham from Carrie as he passed us. The Wylo we had seen in Brodick Bay had turned up over night. It was Graunuaile, so we rowed over to say hello to Richard. He's been to the outer Hebrides and Man too, this summer.

Then we set off. The Perseid meteor shower should be good tonight and I wanted to be somewhere with dark skies. The Kyle's of Bute fit the bill. We decided to go up the west of Bute to get there. A good decision. It's really lovely. Just enough wind came up to let us sail at 1.5 to 2 knots for a couple of hours. We might have got a bit further but we had an OGA zoom meeting so we motored the last bit, but not before we were passed by the Waverley again.