The first quote we received was three times what we expected, and we could have had a new kitchen for very little more. The second quote was more reasonable, but still 50% more than we were prepared to spend. Some desperate Googling came up with Affordable Granite.

There were other similar sites around, but some Googling revealed many positive customer reviews for Affordable Granite, and so we made contact. The quote was still over our initial budget, but far less than the other quotes received and we accepted their quote.

Well to cut a long story short, our new kitchen worktop looks fabulous and was not only less expensive than the other quotes that we received, had fewer compromises (decent thickness granite, included a new under-mounted sink and an additional breakfast bar), and was completed in a single week when other companies were suggesting two weeks. Better still our hob and sink were kept operational for all but two days, when one supplier told us that they would be disconnected at the beginning and reconnected at the end.

The actual installation did not go completely smoothly, thanks to our kitchen units being uneven and the adjustable feet having seized up, with the result that we had workmen on site for longer than expected. But at all times this remained their problem and not ours and they did everything possible to ensure that our kitchen was completed on-time.

In short we are delighted with our new kitchen and very happy with the service received from Affordable Granite.

I’ve been looking into the best method for attaching sheets to the foresail. Metal shackles are dangerous and can rip holes in sails, bowlines are unreliable knots when not under pressure, and a continuous line looped in the middle through the clew is likely to compress the clew over time.

The ideal solution appears to be to splice soft eyes into the end of each sheet, and attach them to the clew with a “soft shackle”. Being a lover of knots, I thought I’d give it a go and this was my first attempt. The surprising thing was the cost - I used 5mm Marlow Excel Vectram 12, at a cost of £5.91 per metre, which is enough to make a single soft shackle. The reason is the strength 5mm Vectram has a similar strength to 10mm braid on braid, 2400kgs breaking strain.

I followed the instructions in this video, which resulted in a 5 inch loop, too short for the intended purpose. A second attempt with a 7 inch loop looks long enough; although I have not yet tried it on the boat. The next step will be to splice soft eyes into each sheet.

De-Dietrich’s service agent wanted £195 to come out and fix the oven - a ludicrous price for a 13 year old microwave. Other appliance repair centres would either not repair microwave ovens at all, or particularly excluded De-Dietrich.

Fortunately one such appliance repair person recommended that we contact Visual Eyes in Farnham, Surrey. We did so, and the next day a nice man came and fixed our oven for £40.

Great service, thank you Visual Eyes.

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Having been quoted £250 to replace the halyards and topping lift on my boat, I decided to do it myself, by purchasing the ropes from eBay for £100 and the fids to do the splicing for £33.

Having the fids would then enable me to do the rest of the running rigging: reefing pennants, kicking strap etc.

The only trouble was that I didn’t know how to splice braid-on-braid, and it turned out to be more tricky than I expected. In the end I found a YouTube video to help me.

Surrey Shore-based RYA Training

I was delighted to find this local RYA training centre. Operated from Phil’s back garden, you expect the worst, but actually the facilities are excellent, with a proper classroom with tables, projector, VHFs, tea and coffee etc.

I recently had my Marine VHF training there and I thought the course was excellent and I plan to go on to do my Day Skipper training at a later date.

Following an earlier post on using GPS under Ubuntu, I have been trying to get PolarNavy working under Ubuntu 12.10. Polar Navy is the only Linux chart navigation software available for Linux. I know people will correct me by quoting OpenCPN, but there are no charts currently legally available for the UK, at least that I could find.

Polar Navy has two components - PolarCOM which communicates with the GPS receiver, and PolarView which displays the actual charts. The two applications can connect together, to show the vessel’s current position.

I had Polar Navy working fine under Ubuntu 12.04 i386, but for some reason I had problems running under Ubuntu 12.10 amd64. The problem was that PolarCOM would simply not display the position, i.e. the Lat and Long. I tried running from the command line, and there were a large number of errors when running PolarCOM, for example:\

menu_proxy_module_load': ./PolarCOM.bin: undefined symbol: menu_proxy_module_load (PolarCOM.bin:4487): Gtk-WARNING **: Failed to load type module: (null)

I eventually fixed that by adding the following to the /opt/polarcom/bin/PolarCOM script:

export UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0

Sadly PolarCOM was still not working. The GPS Receiver that I use is the BU-353, a terrific piece of hardware that “just works” under Linux. This is the recommended GPS for Polar Navy, which was a happy coincidence. When I plugged in the receiver it was detected as /dev/ttyUSB0, which I noticed had a group “dialout”. I added myself to that group:

$ sudo adduser dialout

I posted a request for help on the Polar Navy forums and they suggested I connect directly to the receiver using screen. I was unsure how to terminate that session, but ended up killing the screen session (Ctrl+Alt+a followed by k to kill). There is probably a better way - feel free to comment below.:

$ screen /dev/ttyUSB0 4800

But doing so just output a load of binary garbage, which I realised (with help from Surrey LUG IRC #surrey on irc.lug.org.uk) meant that the receiver was no longer in NMEA mode. Apparently GPSD automatically reconfigures the receiver to SIRC III binary. I have no idea why this was not a problem in Ubuntu 12.04.

To fix this problem I needed to ensure that GPSD was not running. Unfortunately stopping the service does not seem to terminate the process, so I also had to kill it off:

$ sudo service gpsd stop
$ ps aux | grep gps
$ killall PolarCOM.bin

Next I placed the GPS receiver into NMEA ASCII mode, instead of SIRCIII Binary mode:

$ gpsctl -f -n /dev/ttyUSB0

Lastly, you may also need to configure the serial port, although I did not need to do this:

$ stty -F /dev/ttyUSB0 ispeed 4800

A quick check to see that we are getting ASCII NMEA sentences, showed that it was working perfectly, with easy to read text output from the receiver.

$ screen /dev/ttyUSB0 4800

To prevent GPSD from reconfiguring the receiver again, I then needed to reconfigure it to use read-only mode:

$ sudo dpkg-reconfigure gpsd

And at the point where it requests switches, I added “-b” (Broken Device Safety Mode), otherwise known as read-only mode.

With trepidation I launched PolarCOM, which immediately showed my current position.

I was a bit surprised to be asked if my prop was left or right-handed. Turns out that my boat is unusual in being left-handed, as the prop spins anti-clockwise. This means that the prop-wash will make it easier to moor starboard side-to, which is important when choosing a berth.