8th/9th November: Sails off Seatern/new trunking

I was thinking of going sailing on Wednesday, 8th November since the weather and tides looked OK. However wet and windy weather is forecast for the weekend and, in the end, I decided to use the day to get the sails dry (we’ve had some heavy rain recently) and take them off Seatern. Given a northerly wind, I had to single up the mooring lines and let Seatern drift out towards the river. It seems early to take the sails off but, given the way the weather looks and given that I haven’t got out on the water much in previous winters, it probably just as well. Hopefully it will free my mind for other tasks!

The next day (9th Nov) I put some new split plastic trunking on the ethernet cable to the shed. To give access to my wi-fi network when on Seatern I use a sub-net served from a booster in the shed on the jetty which is connected to the main router in the house by an ethernet cable. Recently the link had become unreliable – OK for sound but no good for streaming BBC iPlayer for example.

When I looked at the cable it was amazing anything got through it! Both the outer sheaving and the insulation on the individual cores had become brittle, presumably due to UV exposure. Bare copper was exposed on all the cores, fortunately they weren’t shorting but it was obvious why the cable hadn’t been working when it was raining! I replaced the cable a week or so ago with some better quality (giga-byte rated) cable and wondered about protecting it.

The split plastic trucking was featured in the Practical Boat Owner November 2017 issue as an alternative to spiro-wrap and I bought some to encase the ethernet cable. I hadn’t come across it before but it seems good stuff and I’m wondering about using it on Seatern to protect the cables to the chart-plotter and to the hatch top instruments since it will provide more mechanical strength as well as UV protection compared to the spirowrap.