Afloat!

We are afloat at Crinan!

Robinetta was craned into the canal yesterday morning and the mast dropped in around noon. It was a horrid soaking wet day. As we untangled the rigging I realised I had managed to get three separate ropes the wrong side of the VHF antenna cable.

The only untangled halyard suitable for hauling Alison up to fix it was the one we call "spare" which has no purchase. Luckily the yard people were there to help haul.

The next problem was the batteries. As expected they didn't start the engine so we drove up to the chandlers at Crinan and bought one. So we now have one good battery. The remaining old one will start the engine a few minutes after a charge from the engine, but not reliably. We will make do with one until I can get another, cheaper one. We took Worm with us on the roof of the car. The staff at Crinan basin were happy for us to leave her beside their office overnight, and coming through the locks will be easier without a dinghy in tow.

lunch stop just before Bellanoch Bridge

This morning we bent the mainsail on and headed through the locks with two other boats. One was single handing and had booked an assisted passage so we had the benefit of Scottish Canals staff to take our lines and work the gates and sluices. I helped with the gates.


The canal has now formalised the working day, so that the assisted passage had to pause at lunchtime. We were given the choice of staying in the lock, or leaving it to tie up just downstream. The rest of the group stayed in the lock, but it was too noisy for us, so we took our lines back on board and went on a little further to tie up at a rather pleasant pontoon for lunch.

We got to Crinan about 3 pm, having missed the north going tide through the Dorus Mor so we are staying the night in the Crinan Basin.


We used the time to fill the water tanks and get the new echo sounder working.

Our venerable Seafarer 3 became very unreliable last year and I decided it was time to retire it. I didn't want to fit a new transducer - that's a major job on Robinetta. Actisense make a 150 kHz compatible version of their DST-2 box. This is a microcontroller which has sensor inputs for a depth transducer, log and thermometer and outputs NMEA. I've hooked it up to the chart plotter so we finally have a depth display in the cockpit. I need to calibrate it but for now it seems to be working.

I could do all of this in theory with an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi but the depth sensor needs a high current pulse and non-trivial intepretation of the response. The Actisense has been around for a while so it seemed worth trying. We now have four NMEA compatible devices on the boat. The depth sensor feeds the chart plotter and the chart plotter feeds the DSC radio and the tiller pilot. In theory the radio can send DSC position data to the chart plotter but I haven't wired that up. I wired the chart plotter to the tiller pilot last year but it didn't seem to work. I'll try it again.

In the Crinan Basin