... I would like to withdraw some of my coins and transfer them to an external wallet, in particular my Gridcoins, GRC, to my GridcoinResearch wallet. However I can find no options to withdraw them either in my Dashboard > Portfolio or in the https://wallet.bitshares.org/#/deposit-withdraw page.
I discovered the main source of this problem was the settings for the Privacy Badger web browser add on (https://www.eff.org/privacybadger) which was blocking some needed content from OpenLedger, I have adjusted the settings now so the content is displayed giving me many more deposit-withdraw options. I have made a separate post (https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php/topic,25909.0.html) about the Privacy Badger settings in case others have been caught by the same problem.
However, regarding GRC, this remains the most recent OpenLedger blog entry:
... A relatively recent OpenLedger blog entry, 8th December 2017, says the "GRC, EMC, DASH, ETP gateways have been opened (https://blog.openledger.info/2017/12/08/grc-emc-dash-etp-gateways-have-been-opened/)" ...
Contrary to that, selecting GRC to deposit or withdraw results in the following message being displayed:
THE GATEWAY SERVICE FOR THIS ASSET IS CURRENTLY DOWN, PLEASE TRY AGAIN LATER
which appears to have been the case for a few months, hence my original two questions remain mostly valid should anyone wish to comment.