NEWS-Page April 2015: TANIWANI ready for another sailing season
At the
time of writing this news page, Taniwani is still
parked safely under the runway of Madeira’s airport, but ready to launch for
more adventures in about a week.
Being
near the boat at our house on Madeira, we had regular work visits to Taniwani to work off a longer list of winter tasks. Most notable are new windows, which we never
would have been able to acquire, without the relentless follow-up of our friend
Tony in the UK. While the new Perspex windows are quickly fitted, obtaining
them from Lewmar is one of the greatest challenges a
yachtsman may ever experience.
The
difference clear windows make to the appearance of the boat is quite
astounding! Taniwani looks almost as new now, and once the rotting genoa tracks will be
replaced, (another Lewmar product), everything will look perfect again. But this task is planned
for our visit in Galicia at the Lagos Boatyard in Vigo. Owner Alfredo and
family are celebrating the 100 year anniversary of their traditional boatyard this summer
with a somewhat smaller version of the Rally Bayona
and off course we plan to attend.
So, what’s
the plan for this year? Well, much of the same. Some cruising in the Madeira Archipelago
and then sailing south to the Canaries. Eventually, when weather in the north
gets warmer, on to the Azores where we hope to meet up with our son Felix and
friend Floortje. Also Noel and Sandy on Whisper plan
to join in there and then move on together to Galicia for Alfredo’s event where
we hope to meet more old friends.
Eventually all would progress south along the shore of Portugal until we
leave for Porto
Santo and Madeira again from Sines.
Let’s
hope all goes as planned. We will keep you up-to-date via the blog site.
You get
to the BLOG via the link below or by clicking BLOG on this menu bar. Once on
the BLOG site, you may subscribe to get a notification every time we add a new
entry.
www.taniwani.blogspot.com
Since 2012 Taniwani has an AIS transponder, (we had AIS reception
since 2003), which now sends out Taniwani's position
data. While this is usually only 'seen' some twenty miles around and just used
for collision avoidance, there are now ground stations at various places,
operated by volunteers, who feed the data into the Internet. And there are
several sites that let you see this marine traffic. For example http://www.marinetraffic.com/ais/ .
Taniwani has now sailed over 66,000 miles and has just
turned 15 years. As almost every year some older equipment was replaced and our
list of equipment including our rating has been updated accordingly. While many
items are outdated, there are still quite a few that haven't changed much over
the years, and may be that lasting stuff you are looking for. What we think of all our equipment after such
extensive testing can be found as always at:
Equipment Rating
If you want to send us E-Mail while we are on board, please use the Radio Email below and include the text "//WL2K" in the subject line:
This address will send your mail to our Amateur Radio mailbox, which we can get to via short wave radio. We check this mailbox daily when we are living on board. But don't send big attachments that way, anything bigger than 20k will not be transferred. Also, if you haven't received mail from us, or we have not yet been added to the white-list, don't forget to add "WL2K" (without the quotes) to the subject line otherwise your mail would be rejected by the spam filter.
While on land or near good internet connections we also check our regular mail at, this off course can take big attachments:
