west coast of ireland

Ok, sorry to those who've looked here before for news on this trip and found nothing - had all the best intentions but... the laptop which I bought for the trip didn't last very long - battery life turned out to be less than 2 hours, I took the sleeper up to Fort William from London and left the bag with the charger in the luggage compartment.. . same bag also had all the charts for Ireland and the nautical almanac and a pilot book and all my clothes and my iPod: bag wasn't there when I got to Fort William. And ScotRail couldn't find it.

Which left me in a bit of a dilemma.

After a few days I decided that the bag wasn't coming back, so I bought a minimal set of charts for Ireland (the imray c charts) and got a generic laptop charger.

Out of curiosity I measured the voltage coming off the laptop charger. It was set for 12v but the output fluctuated wildly and I saw more than 60v coming out of it for a short while. So I decided that wasn't such a quality piece of kit as it claimed to be. There was 12.6v in the boat battery so I plugged the laptop in to that. Didn't quite work - it couldn't make its mind up whether or not it was charging so kept on cycling between 'battery' and 'mains' mode, i.e. the screen went bright then dark every second or so. No good trying to work with that.... Found a charger for a portable radio that claimed a 12v output, put the multi meter on that - 16v... So a nominal 12v outputs 16v. Plugged the computer in to that and it was very happy for about two hours before it suddenly rebooted itself and died. As in went completely dead. So that was the end of my good resolutions for doing some work whilst away and blogging progress.

Met Andrew in Portrush and he was using something called usgrib on his laptop - this gets grib charts for just about anywhere, these are apparently the things used by the met office when they put together the weather forecast for a sea area. Sea areas are vast and they have to give a summary of what is happening there in a few lines. The are conservative, so if a gale is happening anywhere in the area it is likely to get a mention in the forecast. However, there may not be a gale coming to the bit of sea which you intend sailing on, which you can see if you check the grib file. Andrew said this had saved him a lot of time on his trip (he was circumnavigating the British Isles, but going clockwise, opposite direction to us) - he had been able to set off when others had been obliged to wait because of a bad forecast.