Sailing Licenses in Germany

I want to sail. There are lakes nearby where people are sailing and I want to sail the ocean as well. And I want to be able to charter a yacht. So what is the fastest&cheapest way to get the necessary licenses? Probably moving to another country…

To sail the lake nearby I need the SBF Binnen Segeln (sailing inland license). To get that you have to make a fully fledged course with 10+ hours of practical sailing on a real boat. If you already got the SKS Segeln (advanced offshore sailing license you need to charter boats) you get the inland licence almost for free, all you have to do is to pass the theoretical exam and pay a small fee. One may ask why we need an advanced license to charter boats offshore / why the SBF See Segeln does not suffice? Well, the offshore sailing license is not a fully fledged course but just a theoretical exam for sailing and a practical exam for motoring. So yeah, you get the license to sail on the ocean without ever touching an actual sailboat (you have to look at pictures though) but you need a fully fledged course on sailing to sail on the small lakes around town. Dafuq?

 

Wedding Presents #1

I try to avoid weddings wherever I could. After a couple of years it was time to re-evaluate my stance on them. Yep, still not my kind of party even though I really like the folks who got married.

They wanted money for a present, attaching it to a postcard is not that personal so I needed something different to attach the dough to. Since the groom is a petrol-head liking trashy things (driving things like MZ Motorcycles and a Buick) it seemed appropriate to dig through the trash container and spend an hour welding together trash.

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forgot to take a picture of the finished product, this is only tacked together

Unfortunately the heart broke during transport when I strapped it to my bike with a ratched strap (one half fell off). I cobbled it together on the spot with a ratchet strap. Luckily nobody was upset getting a broken heart made almost entirely out of brake parts as a present. You probably could take that the wrong way…

The most upsetting thing to me was that one of my welds broke. In the end not too surprising since brake discs are mostly made of grey cast iron and you can’t MIG/MAG weld that. That means you can but it’s by far not as strong as it might look like. I forgot to take a picture but you could clearly see the grainy structure of the cast iron still sticking to the weld. So the weld actually didn’t break but pulled all the tiny grains it was attached to out of the brake disc…

Digging through the drafts folder #1

Searching for some unpublished posts I found these pictures.

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Old leaf springs, old shock absorbers ,hole in the front spring mount

The old leaf spring is so worn out that it bends upwards an somebody removed the wedges on the axle which adjust the castor (tilt angle of the axis which leads the steering assembly to go automatically back to “straight forward” if you loosen your grip on the wheel.

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Bigger shocks, three layer spring (the hole was fixed soon after as well)

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The new assembly gives a couple of centimeters more ground clearance, yay