The Kid Casino

WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU RUN AGROUND DON’T PANIC — doing the wrong thing can put you on harder.

Now that you’re on the bottom, take a minute to evaluate the situation. Check the bilge to be sure that you haven’t holed the boat and aren’t taking on water. What is the nature of the bottom? If it’s soft sand or grass, chances are good that the boat is undamaged, and that if you need to motor or kedge off you won’t grind a hole in the boat.Your objective is to get safely into deeper water.

Motoring off — If you have a motor or engine your first inclination will be to start it up and try to back out. This may work, but be careful. In sandy or muddy bottoms you are likely to suck sand up into the cooling system and render the motor useless. A powerful engine in shallow water can actually push sand from the stern to under the keel, making the situation worse. If you’re on rocks and you reverse hard, you may drag the hull along the rocks and damage or even hole the boat.

Set out an anchor. One of the first things to do is to set out an anchor to keep your boat from being pushed even farther onto the shoal. If you have a dingy you can use it to carry out an anchor. If you don’t have a dingy, and if conditions are calm, maybe someone wearing buoyant flotation gear can swim an anchor out. Be aware that this is not an easy task and a person can become totally exhausted very quickly. If your boat is a small one, your anchor is also probably small enough and light enough for you to be able to throw it far enough for it to work, but be careful if you do this. You don’t want to go overboard with it. Keep as much tension on the anchor line as you can. This alone may help free you up, especially if you have a rising tide, or if passing boats create enough of a wake to raise you up momentarily.

What is the state of the tide? If you’ve gone aground on a rising tide, you may just be able to wait a couple of hours until it rises enough to refloat the boat. If you’ve gone aground on a falling tide, however, you need to get into deeper water fast, or you may be stuck where you are for an entire tide change. If this happens, and if the boat is likely to end up lying on its side, close up hatches and companionways to keep it from flooding. If you’d be better off lying on one side than on the other, try to kedge off an anchor from what you want to be the low side. You may also be able to control which side ends up high by shifting crew and gear weight. Where is the deeper water? It may seem obvious that deeper water lies behind you, but it might be even deeper beside you. Of course it’s not directly in front of you — if it were, you wouldn’t have run aground in the first place. To find where the deeper water is, you have some options. If you have a lead line you can lower it off the boat from all sides to get a measurement of the depth. You can make a lead line by taking a light line and attaching a weight to the end. You could also very quickly put a boat hook or an oar in the water.

How do you get there? If you have a centerboard, raise it. This will decrease the draft, possibly enough to free the boat. Can you sail off? If you were sailing down wind when you ran aground, harden up and try to go to windward. If you were sailing close hauled, tack immediately and move crew weight to leeward. If sailing off on a reach or downwind would put you into deeper water, ease the sails and fall off toward the deeper water. Move crew weight around to heel the boat in the direction which is most likely to help it to slide off - this alone may reduce the boat’s draft enough to free her up. If this doesn’t work, drop sails, as the wind on the sails will continue to push you harder onto the shallow water. Furl them out of the way. On deck they will become a slippery liability.

Kedging off — Once you’ve set an anchor in deeper water, you may be able to winch it in and pull the boat off that way. Again, moving crew weight around may help immeasurably. It may help to rock the boat by shifting crew weight back and forth as you winch in on the anchor.

Use a halyard — If you know that heeling the boat in one direction will help, hand a halyard to someone in a dingy who can then carefully motor off the boat’s beam and pull it over farther. If you don’t have a dingy, a crew member can grab a halyard and swing out over the beam of the boat to try to increase heel.

Get off and push - This technique is obviously only safe and effective in very shallow water, and thus will only work with a very shallow draft boat, such as a day sailor or a multihull. Before getting in the water, be sure to put shoes on. Make sure that the boat won’t sail off without you, and that you have a way to get back onto the boat.

Accept tow? As a last resort, if all other options have failed. This may require a VHF call to a towing company. Be careful — a big powerful powerboat may be able to pull with more force than the boat’s equipment can handle–the boat’s hull can be damaged. The boat must have a cleat strong enough to take the strain of a tow, which may be considerable. If there is no cleat strong enough, consider tying off to the base of the mast. If the mast is stepped through the deck it will take the strain, if it’s stepped on deck it may not. The line used as tow line also must be strong enough to take the strain of towing — if it breaks under the strain of the pull of a tow boat, it will become a lethal weapon.

When you may not want to refloat the boat — if you have a hole in the bottom you may be better off right where you are, at least until you’ve been able to carry out enough of an emergency repair to keep the boat from sinking.

Linda Cullum is from Cape Cod, MA, with a second home in Vermont. She is the author of Learn to Sail! with Multimedia! an Interactive Sailing training CDROM which teaches all aspects of Sailing incliding Knots, Piloting, Rules of the Road, Weather with digital video from Sail Magazine, narration, animation and quizzes.Visit her site at http://learntosail.net Happy Sailing_/)

When was the last time you saw an eagle descend from the sky, or stood in awe as a glacier cracked and an ice berg emerged?

Imagine your sense of wonder as you glide past glacier after glacier or your first sight of a cresting whale. While we have much to be proud of in our Alberta parks, I think Alaska is mother nature’s most spectacular show piece.

This year over 30 ships are providing you the incredible delights of warm, pampering service combined with the awe of this magnificent journey.

Remember, there are no roads to Glacier Bay, nor to many other top Alaskan attractions. That’s why exploring these pristine areas by ship is such a privilege.

Cruising Alaska offers us breathtaking views of Alaska’s natural wonders, as well as nights of thrilling entertainment, fine dining, pampering service, and an endless variety of activities.

From the moment you depart the convenient port of Vancouver, this will be the vacation you have only dreamed about.

As you cruise along the Glacier route, you will experience a magical, unspoiled land where walls of ice rise up from crystal blue seas and landscapes of wild flowers give way to snow-capped peaks.

Alaska is a mecca for lovers of wildlife and vast wilderness. It is a place where you see sea lions gathering to bathe in the sun and the bald eagles circle overhead searching the waters for salmon. And you might see humpback or orca whales as they acrobatically breach the water’s surface.

You’ll be spellbound by the beauty of the Inside Passage. You’ll pass quiet bays, wooded islands, innumerable mountains and waterfalls cascading from granite cliffs - a panorama interrupted only by sightings of sea lions and whales frolicking in the waters around you.

Even more fun can be had as you visit ports as interesting as Ketchikan, southerly most port on the Inside Passage route and known as the “salmon capital of the world”. This port is also renowned the world over for its famous totems. Enjoy a stroll down famous Creek Street, the towns “red light” district; visit Misty Fjords, America’s newest national monument or attend the “Salmon Bake” and sample the local fare.

Juneau, Alaska’s capital and your first taste of the gold rush era, is a contrast of wild, natural country and thriving city. Explore the fascinating City Museum, quaint St. Nicholas Church and stop at Juneau’s favorite watering hole, the Red Dog Saloon.

The treasures beyond the city limits will beckon you too. Tour Mendanhall Glacier by motorcoach or helicopter. This river of ice, with craggy rock sentinels 3,000 feet above sea level is a natural wonder.

Skagway, a magnet for gold-seekers in the late 1890’s, was referred to as the “roughest town on earth” with its over 80 saloons. You can relive the racy Klondike days in this colourful turn-of-the-century town where cancan dancers and other entertainers in 1890’s garb will welcome you or take an authentic horse drawn taxi into town and explore the “Trail of 98″ museum.

The plank sidewalks, false front buildings and narrow-gauge White Pass and Yukon Railroad will make you feel as if you were back in the days of the Gold Rush.

On northbound cruises, you’ll also visit Sitka. When Alaska was still Russian territory, this was her glittering cultural centre in the West. Today, evidence of Russian culture can be found in the priceless icons and paintings of the onion-domed St. Michael’s Cathedral. Remnants of Sitka’s Indian culture are preserved in the National Historic Park.

A cruise to Alaska us the ideal vacation for couples, families, single people, honeymooners and fun-lovers of all ages and interests.

And there is no other way to do it with so much ease, affordability and excitement than by modern cruise ships.

Sid Kaplan

Cruise Vacations Guide

Sid Kaplan has extensive experience in the travel business. He owned and operated a large retail cruise only agency in Canada and his wife has 25 years experience working for major cruise lines. Their website is Cruise Vacations Guide which offers advice and tips to those looking to create memorable cruise vacations. Shore excursion and land tour information is also provided. Cruise, hotel, car rental and vacation adventure booking online.

MS Email Server - How to handle Spam

By: George H. Biwit

Due to the increasing amount of spam, effective filters are needed to monitor and block junk messages, it is the only way to ensure proper functioning of Microsoft Exchange

Spam e-mail adds trouble and decreases productivity and is a major threat to todays business world . Thousands of deceptive and indecent e-mails are sent to companies in bulk on a daily basis. The term Spam is a commonly used jargon to explain promotional and undesirable e-mails. It is not an acronym so it does not really denote something. Actually, a spam e-mail is usually a commercial mail sent to the recipients who did not request any kind of information from the company or the individual sending it.

Getting huge volume of unwanted commercial e-mails can significantly cost the individuals and businesses a lot of time and resources as they have to sort out the legitimate mails, removing the unsolicited messages and this process, at times, become very exhaustive and frustrating, thus hindering efficiency.

Deleting spam is a time consuming process, email server up-time and performance suffers, and your network faces a security risk from malevolent messages. Added to that, a company also risk that spam e-mails causes harm to systems and network that cannot be repaired which means disorder, work loss and increased costs.

The only guard against the threat from spam is professional asistance ensuring complete security and protection. Make sure your mail server is shielded properly to assure that every byte of passing data is filtered and blocked against spam. Normally a spam filter for an e-mail server is software that analyzes every incoming e-mail, detects spam based on standard configurations and removed the unwanted junk mails so they never end up in the users’ inbox One of the often used mail servers is the Exchange Server developed by Microsoft, and this product from Microsoft makes core mail services fast and reliable.

Spam plugins can be a major help carrying out the filtering on an Exchange Server and avoiding spam mail. Filtering spam at server level allows for an automatic spam dectection and removel process that occurs before spam reaches your internal network and internal computers Automating is a suggested task as it saves the personal computer, and time of users in addition to the network from damage which can lead to data loss and downtime.

No anti-spam technology is perfect, periodically manual checking of all filtered messages by a network administrator is still needed to ensure that Exchange mail server is not blocking any legitimate e-mails.

With the scale of evolution occurring in telly equipment lately it really worthwhile to be familiar with a little of the main improvements. This guide to liquid crystal display tellies (LCD) concentrates on the particular pros of this equipment. This guide gives you all the critical facts on how to obtain the first-class image & makes clear a little of the essential traits to beware of with Liquid Crystal Display tellies.

There at this moment in time 2 compelling advantages with Liquid Crystal Display TVs over Plasma TVs. The first is that they may be largely easier to look at when compared against a traditional cathode ray tube (CRT) TV. This is principally because screens are substantially brighter with a higher contrast and flicker free image. LCD TVs will work as it should in roughly any sort of environment lighting from bright to ambient. Secondly, Liquid Crystal Display TVs have a higher native resolution than plasma televisions of the identical dimension hence making them just right for high-definition output. Even if plasma TVs are at presently superior for sheer display size, as more & more TV outputs come in hi-definition TV (HDTV), LCD technology will for certain come to the front. Catch Sound and Vision’s reductions on Cheap 37″ LCD TV!

How Do Liquid Crystal Display TVs In Fact Work?

LCD technology is pretty tricky and developing every day. This technology is built upon the fact that liquid crystals are, in their normal shape, twisted. The capability of the crystals to let light through can be amended by submitting electric voltage. Very simply put, a light source is sent through a liquid that contains crystals held between 2 polarised screens. By allowing the correct amount of light to go through, the required display is produced.