First Sail: Video.

Here's a short video of me and Jim sailing Sprite 2 in Langstone harbour. We had an hour sailing up the harbour and back in mist and light winds. The engine worked, the rig worked and the light wind we had was just right for trying stuff out.

The little wind we had shows she sails quite reasonably. The occasional gust we had made her pick up and scoot along quite well.

I'm actually quite impressed.

Now to sort out somewhere for all the rope to go, because it was getting on my nerves continually being sat on!

Here are some more pictures of the historic event:

The sails work quite well. 3 knots when the wind picked up a little.

Not much wind at this point as evidenced by the lack of wake.

Jim posing at the front of the boat. lol.

All in all its been 9 months since I took ownership if Sprite 2, but really 2 of those were abandoned due to the storms, so in reality its taken 7 months of work to get to the point I can sail her. To keep costs down its been slow but steady progress. Now everything works as it should I can concentrate on the less major jobs.

The main priority is to source a depth sounder, as I'm paranoid about running aground. Especially in Langstone where the bottom is very close to the surface. Its a hard task finding a cheap one on eBay. It looks like the transducers already on Sprite are for a NASA instrument, probably a Clipper Duet, but Duets get quite (very) expensive. I might try and get a different depth sounder that's compatible with the NASA transducers rather than get a Clipper Duet. I can save money by ditching the speed log as my phone's GPS function can tell me that.

As it was I used my phone's chartplotter app to keep to the deep water channel rather than use real under the keel depth data.

Locker tops come a close second as priorities. Then I'm thinking of resealing all the deck fittings as it gets warmer.

All I can say is thank you to Sprite 2's previous owner Pam for letting me have her and I hope she still watches this blog and is happy that Sprite 2 is now back sailing again.

I've already dug out the tiller pilot that Pam gave me just after I got Sprite 2. There's a problem with the wiring to it. The tiller pilot works OK on a power supply at home, but plug it into the socket in Sprite's cockpit and it sits there forlornly with dim lights. I suspect corroded wiring reducing the amount of current to the tiller pilot. It needs a LOT of current to work properly! Hopefully it won't take months to fix like the charging circuit, as I have wire now!