From the picture below it seems that Chinese engineers have found a way to convert water from a rain drain into electricity!

Seems the Olympic sailing events in Qingdao will be interesting. I found this article by Laura Baldwin on Sail-World.

240 boats try and remove sea-weed from the Qingdao Olympic course area

Australia’s 470 Coach, Victor Kovalenko shared these photos and insight from the current training camp in China.

‘As you can see we have one more problem in Qingdao apart of light wind and strong current, it is seaweed. The local government has employed 240 fishing boats to clean Qingdao bay and they are working really hard but… Sailing is almost impossible now!’

Other days the fog has been so thick that a GPS has been needed to find the way back to shore.

470 stars Nathan Wilmot & Malcolm Page probably didn’t think they would be sailing in conditions like these when they named their boat ‘Dead Calm!’

This gives ‘going green’ a whole new meaning.

The blasting of the inside of hull and deck is well underway. Here the first pictures. Note how the engine is hanging belowdecks, nicely wrapped up to protect it from the dust.

I paid a quick visit to Kobe last week. From my hotel room overlooking the harbour, I could see the ‘Kaiwo Maru’. She is a fully rigged four masted sailing vessel. Together with her sister ship the ‘Nippon Maru’, they serve as training vessels for the Japanese Merchant Marine. Always impressive to see these beautiful tall ships.

Last week the blasting of the hull was done. Here some pictures of the blasting pot, the blasting process, and the finished hull.

Then the first coat of epoxy primer was applied. ‘Waratah’ looks very different already. Next week the inside of hull and deck are going to be blasted and prime coated, followed by the outside of the deck.

The two main suppliers of equipment for my S/V ‘Waratah’ project, Central Boating and C-Dynamics, are based in Cape Town. I thought it was a good idea to visit them while I was in South Africa, so I spent a few days on the Cape.

Cape Town is beautiful, with lots of buildings in old colonial style, and a very nice water front area. It was winter in South Africa, so there was a lot of rain, but with a temperature of about 18C during day time this was not a problem. The characteristic Table Mountain (Tafelberg) had its hat of clouds on most of the time.

I also saw a steel hull 3 mast square rigged sailing vessel in one of the dry docks. It’s the Dutch vessel ‘Europa’, and from what I could find out, it came to Cape Town in April after a trip to Antarctica.

A few more pictures taken during my recent visit to South Africa.

All the cut-outs for hatches and windows are ready. A lot of time had to be spent on grinding the welds of the hull. Paper disks have to be used in order not to cut into the steel plates and reduce their strength.

I took some time to check the final position for the winches. All winches are Lewmar self tailing 2-speed winches. The ones most aft are for the main sheet (40 CST), then further forward the primary winches (54 CST) for genoa and spinnaker, then the secondary winches (46 CST) for the staysail sheets, and finally, on the second picture, the winches for halyards and reef lines (40 CST).

Not often does one have the chance to visit a real gold mine. So I was very fortunate, that on my last visit to South Africa Wynand arranged that I could go down in the gold mine where he works. The mine is in Virginia in Free State, a few kilometers from Welkom where my boat is being built.

The name of the mine is Harmony Merriespruit 1, and part of a bigger complex of gold mines. Harmony is the fifth largest gold producer in the world, with operations and projects in South Africa and Papua New Guinea (PNG).

We went in at level 37 (of the in total 51 levels of this mine) and then worked our way down to level 40, at a depth of about 1300 m.

All in all an amazing and unforgettable experience.

Speaks for itself, hehe.

On one of the forums about cruising I frequent, I found the site Animated Knots. It’s the coolest site about knots I have ever seen. The contents of the site also can be purchased as a program, to run independent from the internet.