New Toys....

Against the day that I might actually have to sail the thing, I've started accumulating various bits and pieces that I'll eventually need.

I picked up a marine compass a while back, and a last week I came across this http://www.opticron.co.uk/Pages/trailfinder_ii.htm

Note the Inter Pupillary Distance. 58~77mm. For those who can't get a one size fits all baseball hat to fit, the normal ~72 mm IPD on binoculars leaves you with a very cumbersome monocular, with a spare attached.

Many of the other Binocs with a large IPD were Lecia or Swaroski or Steiner, and the prices were quite exotic.

If you are to look through both eyes at the same time, these may be worth a look, so to say.

The are (to my unpractised eye), pretty good, solid, the focus mechanism is reassuringly free of play, and they have a 5 year guarantee.

I don't have any real experience with Optics, so someone more knowledgeable may pour scorn on my advice, but two eyes able to see at the same time is a huge improvement.

I would have preferred the traditional 7x50, but they were ~74mm IPD, and I could not try them out locally.

Snow ?

This is Ireland, we get 3 or 4 flakes of snow each year. That's it. Unless you are up the "mountains" (hills) and you might get enough to make a very short snowman.

This year we had several inches, and real cold. Not the 2 Celsius (35 F) that we usually get, we were getting -10 Celsius (14 F).

I took my 3 year old out on a sleigh. She loved it till she got cold.

People's pipes froze, and burst. Lakes froze over. Some people I work with took 5 hours to get home.

All this means that I have done very little on the boat since I took the pictures.

I've sharpened a few hand tools, and read a lot, but real no progress.