Sail Evenstar

O Captain! My Captain!

2012-01-20T12:56:00.002-05:00

Here's hoping it ends better for me that for Walt Whitman's protagonist.

So it's official, I received my USCG Master's License this week. So now I'm not only morally responsible for what happens with our boat, I'm a bit more legally responsible as well.

Specifically it is a "Master - 50 Ton Inland with Auxiliary Sail Endorsement", and "OUPV Operator, Near Shore" which conveys certain rights, privileges and legal obligations. In theory I could skipper a commercial sail or power vessel up to 50 gross tons on Inland Waters (As defined by the USCG), or a commercial vessel with up to six passengers up to 100 miles off shore. It also means I need to pay close attention to what I am doing on the water since the rules change somewhat if you are licensed versus and amateur/recreational operator.

No, we're not going to charter Evenstar.

Practically speaking, the license may afford some opportunities in the future to earn some money doing things like delivering boats, operating launches or tour boats if we was in an area for a while, and might help make occasional opportunities like that happen. With any luck it will also smooth some of the various entries into countries that demand things like "Certificates of Competency" to prove you aren't an utter idiot with your vessel before they admit you to their country to terrorize the locals with your anchoring habits. The ultimate goal in getting this was to hopefully make life easier and open a few doors.

However it might be time to get rid of the "Marriages Performed by the Captain of this Vessel are Valid Only for the Duration of the Trip" sign before we have any regrettable accidents.

Parts is Parts

2011-11-24T11:29:00.002-05:00

One of the many items on the to-do list is to assemble a list of spares. In some remote parts of the world, if you can believe this, Federal Express does not guarantee delivery by 10:00 a.m. next business day. In fact I've experienced just that in the wilderness of Block Island - the mysterious impact of so-called "Island Time", in that case it meant that all FedEx deliveries (whether you paid big bucks for "next morning" or the discounted "next afternoon") were put on the same ferry and all arrived on island on the 4:30 ferry.

Apparently in some places even more remote and uncivilized than Block Island it can sometimes take days, even weeks to get things sent to you. I shudder to think how Amazon.com does business there.

What this adds up to for Evenstar and her crew is that we need to float around with enough engine parts under the floor boards to be able to assemble a completely new engine if needed.

Perhaps that's a slight exaggeration but I know for what this is costing I probably could buy a new engine.

So to minimize the costs and allow room on the boat for storing things other than engine parts (such as food, clothing, children, etc.) I need to come up with Yet Another List - in this case a list of all the things on the engine which would put is in Deep Doo-doo if they broke. If our starter breaks when you are anchored on a remote atoll where we've not seen another boat for a week, or the raw water pump seizes up when we're getting ready to leave somewhere the day before our visas expire - we need to be ready. The boat must be able to move in order to comply with safety, legal, and other demands.

But some things, sure they can wait for parts to be shipped from the closest distributor, put on a plane, then a boat, a smaller ferry, to a skiff with an antique outboard, thrown in the back of a WWII surplus Jeep then strapped to a goat to be delivered to our remote location. There is nothing the generator does that can't actually be replaced with another function. We can charge batteries, make hot water - really anything but heat and air conditioning can be done by the engine. It just takes longer or uses more fuel. So the generator parts we just will carry some of the more common and easy fixes, and if that is down for a week or three we will deal and FedEx will get a little richer.

But the engine, the rig, and all the safety gear that needs to be there.

So the spares list is forthcoming. A sampling for the engine:

Raw water pump
Oil pump
Circulation pump
Starter
Fuel pump
A fuel injector
A set of valves
Oil & temperature sensors
Thermostats
Hoses
Belts, filters, gaskets and other consumables

Of course there will be spares for the dinghy engine, the generator, the wind generator, the electrical system, electronics, cooking, plumbing - this list will grow over time. I'd love to hear some suggestions!

To Gadget or Not To Gadget?

2011-10-14T13:05:00.003-04:00

...that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
Without the latest electronic
or electro-mechanical doo-dad at my ready hand...

Apologies to the Bard...

In the past few weeks we've gone to a couple of Boat Shows. Of course as a boat owner I love them, the latest and greatest of tools and technology and a wonderful chance to see some new and different solutions to a lot of vexing problems.

Mid September we went to the Newport International Boat Show. We went by boat and anchored in Newport. We had a wonderful time and saw some neat stuff. My son the aspiring yacht designer managed to get on and have a look almost every sail boat in the show and my daughter collected the usual small bag of candies and plastic floating giveaways.

Last weekend, with out fall cruising declared "Over" to get an early start on boat and house projects we decided a boat related weekend was still in order. So it was off to Annapolis for the U.S. Sailboat Show over Columbus Day weekend.

There were a lot of really, really cool things at both shows. We spent money on things we'd been planning to get (mattress for the master cabin, a pressure cooker, SSB ground plane) but we almost slid into a wild orgy of spending on a lot of really neat looking gadgets.

The thing is, I could make a really excellent case for why we might NEED one of these things. I'm really good at that. But at some point common sense has to prevail and what you need versus what you should have versus what would be nice to have. In other words if someone gave us one of these for a gift we'd be thrilled and keep it, but we don't think we should shell out the money on it as a "need" when there is so much else.

So things like a cordless electric winch handle. Our winches are BIG, and three of them are powered. More importantly our hydraulic roller furling has a winch-handle shaped emergency furling control. But on the bow it's blocked by the pulpit so you can only use the tiny little emergency handle to furl it up. I've done this. Do you know how long it takes to furl an 800+ square foot sail in with a six inch emergency handle in pitching seas? If this thing fit in there, it'd be ZOOM the sail is in. Of course...it has to be charged and ready. So we either need to continually charge it or it won't be available for an emergency furling failure. And our power winches can take a real handle and be operated manually - you can do it the old fashion way even though it's work. Ultimately we figured this is something that would never come out of the box for us, and if it did we probably would have forgotten to charge it.

Or image stabilized binoculars. I can read the fine print on a shoe box 200 feet across the show tent while hopping on one foot. Spotting a name on a fishing boat you are trying to hail can be a challenge and these would make it much easier. But again, how often we we need this instead of our regular binoculars, and at what cost? The quality environment proof ones are quite expensive.

Maybe a diving hookah - we may still come back to this. This is an electrically powered air compressor with dive regulator's attached that lets you work under the boat as long as you have battery power. Or you could get the integrated floating model to add unlimited diving in water up to 30'. But the real use would be cleaning the bottom, unfouling the prop, replacing zincs and other underwater jobs. All of which you can do with a snorkel, it just takes a lot longer. But it's an excellent workout.

LED Cabin light fixtures and waterproof gear bags? Clothing and safety Gear? Cockpit cushions and cooking gear? Bifocal polarized sunglasses - OK, I should have bought those. You name it and I was there salivating like a man just let out of a year on bread in water at an all you can eat buffet.

These are all great products by the way. Good quality and well thought out for the most part. We would enjoy owning and using them. We just couldn't cross the bridge from "Want" to "Need".

Fortunately reason has mostly prevailed and we only bought what we intended to (although the price and quality may have been a bit more than expected). We are running down research on a few things though we've not really expanded the list. Much.

By the way I have an excellent list of going away presents, just in case anyone needs it.

Out of the closet and into the fire...

2011-07-24T08:22:00.000-04:00

So, we're leaving.

By June of 2012 our house will be sold, my wife's practice will have wound to a close, the kids will be winding up their school year and we will be living on Evenstar heading for a permanent live aboard life cruising all over the world.

I said it, it's out there.

It's been a long time coming and a looong time not talking about it. But for various reasons - primarily business related with regards to my wife's practice - we had to keep fairly mum. Which is difficult when you have a life changing decision made for years that you have been striving towards and hoping for and you can only share it with a couple of people, lest word get out and make a mess of things before all the plans are right.

Sure the astute observer could see the upgrades we've been doing on the boat and maybe read between the lines in some of my comments. In many cases though the people in one part of our lives (the non sailors) and the people in the sailing part of our lives don't always see the whole elephant and connect the dots. Certainly we've shocked, surprised, and saddened a lot of people with this news. You can't make this big of a change without it, and we also are to a certain extent surprised, shocked and saddened because there are many parts of our lives - primarily relationships with family and friends - that will be changed as we head off shore.

Late this past January we realized that in spite our best plans certain key events that we had placed as triggers to make this happen...weren't happening. With our children both changing schools (elementary to middle, middle to high school) it seemed an opportune time to Just Do It as a certain shoe manufacturer is want to say. So she sat down with her partners, explained out intentions and our plans to leave in August of 2011 (that date isn't happening, as the astute observer will also note!).

Perfect timing? No, but then no time is perfect to completely turn life upside down and make a monumental change like this. There were also certain pragmatic issues, such as the timing with hiring replacement physicians and leaving behind patients. The end result of a long series of discussions was a slightly longer exit plan with a better resolution for all parties. We've waited a long time to do this; a few more months is disappointing but worth it for the cleaner exit.

Our initial thoughts are to spend the summer of 2012 kicking around the East Coast, working our way up to Maine and eventually making it down to Hampton, VA to join the Caribbean 1500 rally to the Virgin Islands in November. From there we plan to spend most of the winter in the Caribbean, heading to the Panama Canal as spring approaches and spending much of 2013 on the West Coast, in the states and South and Central America. When the seasons and weather are right, we point Evenstar West and head across the Pacific.

Of course that's a rough plan; our mileage WILL vary and we know that it may all change. As much as it changed from January of this year to June. As much as it will change next summer.

But for now - we have a direction and a plan. And we have a lot of work to do. We have to pare down the contents of a house we've lived in for 15 years, "Stuff" we've accumulated in almost twenty-five years together, to fit in a small storage area and a couple of boxes in some family member's basement. We've got to finish the sale of the house and most of the stuff in it, finish the long list of boat work (though I have a bit more time now!) and adding to it once again. We've got one more long winter to endure. Then...we're off.

All I've Got to Do

2011-05-17T14:59:00.000-04:00

That seems to be the rallying cry of so many of my boat projects.

I've got the propane upgrade mostly done...all I've got to do is drill a hole through the boat and run a wire from the solenoid to a switch and connect up the new oven.

The new inverter/charger is pretty much installed...all I've got to do is figure out why the temperature sensing wire is throwing spurious readings that make lights flash. And find a 300 amp fuse that fits in my oversize fuse posts.

The VHF is working fine, all I've got to do is move the remote RAM Mic to a better location. Best to do that while I'm drilling holes for the propane since I involves me climbing into the same lazarette.

The Teak is done, looks great. All I've got to do is a few lazarette covers and replace some more bung plugs.

You see where this is going.

Seems rather to be the story of so many of these. Getting them working (or almost working) is pretty straightforwards. Getting them perfect...not so much all the time.

"Pretty Much Done" on a boat; seems like being "a little pregnant" or "mostly dead".

The 2011 List From Heck - Updates

2011-05-10T09:54:00.001-04:00

There is no doubt that all of my loyal readers have been sitting on the edge of their seats since February wondering "how the heck is he EVER going to finish that stuff in time to go sailing before September?" The short answers is...he probably won't. At least I won't do it all myself, some stuff I've gotten help with as planned.

Of course the list has gotten longer too. For every item I scratch off I find two new ones. So to the status updates!

Watermaker
This is done. The only thing left to do is turn it on and test it. To do this I need to completely flush out the fresh water system so it has clean water with no antifreeze in to flush itself in maintenance mode. This one we can basically scratch off the list.

Wind Power
This is still on the list, to be done by Ferris Power Products now that the winter cover is off the boat. That is a matter of scheduling them in.

Inverter/Charger
Done. Well except for one nagging bit of weirdness, the temperature sensor that came with the unit doesn't seem to be reading right. This is important as changing charge voltage to adapt for battery temperature can make your battery last longer and/or charge more efficiently. It works, but it causes a couple of LED's to blink in a truly annoying fashion. So I have to chase that down, as well as find a 300amp ANL style fuse with a slightly larger slot for the fuse block bolts. Until then, don't use the hairdryer and the waffle iron at the same time.

Life Raft
There is a very nice Switlik MD-2 life raft sitting in the shed. It will get to the boat...someday.

Anchor
Some changes here. We've not ordered a new Rocna anchor yet; that will be done once I have a chance to build a scaled mockup anchor out of plywood to see if it fits the bow roller. In the meantime we also opted to add a 150 lb Luke Storm Anchor, also known as a Fisherman's Anchor. This is the Anchor of Last Resort, when you pull in someplace and no other anchors will stick to the bottom because it is something tough to anchor in, a beast like this is what you need. It breaks down into three inconveniently large and heavy pieces for awkward storage...but it's still easier than trying to move it assembled. I'm the only one in the family that can pick it up when it is put together. In fact, I'm the only one in the family that weighs more than this anchor.

Sea Anchor
The sea anchor is acquired, as well as my own personal 600 foot drum of New England Ropes 1" Mega Braid. This line will be cut into two sections, about 500' and 100'. The larger section will become the permanent rode for the secondary anchor - for when you just have to drop a hook in 80' of water. Probably with a 150' fisherman's anchor since you will be anchoring on a slap of granite. This will also be as the rode for the sea anchor. The 100' section will be the bridle for the sea anchor. The anchor itself is in a disappointingly small yellow bag, I figured for what this cost and the amount of line it requires it was going to be the size of a 55 gallon drum, instead it is about a medium sized kitchen garbage can.

Stove
Old one is off the boat, and the incredibly nasty and dirty area behind it has been cleaned out. The new one is in the shed. On top of the life raft.

On Board Computer
I know what I want to do and I've researched it darn near to death. I just don't have any more room in the shed if I go out and buy the thing right now.

Sail
Many earnest discussions have been held with sail makers and friends in the sail cloth industry. We're dithering still - it will get ordered. No work there for me really except writing a check anyway.

Propane system
I'm getting closer to maybe actually doing this. Really. It does not make me afraid just because I might blow the boat up if I screw this up. I did finally find all the parts I bought for this several years ago.

SSB (Single Sideband Radio)
The old SSB was no longer working. It has been removed and a replacement ordered. There is some chance it was not as dead as I thought and I might be able to fix it...but I'm not sure I want to know the answer to that. The new installation will require an additional antenna, and maybe some carpentry.

Main bilge pump
Still looking for a suitable replacement pump. 24V pumps are a nuisance.

Hatch Lenses
Done! The new lenses are back and look nice. I have some bits of latch hardware to install, but the hatches are all in and bedded. So far, no leaks with some heavy rain. Though we really will have to take her out in some snotty weather and dump a few thousand gallons of seawater on them to really test them out.

The following items I must shamefacedly admit have even less progress than the above items.

Davits
Pumps
Teak.
Head valve replacement.

New Stuff
Just yikes, it never, ever ends. Some new things I either need to do, or forgot to mention before.

Engine raw water intake hose. This rubs against the steering mechanism, and in fact has almost worn through. This needs to be done before the boat leaves the harbor, a failure here could be catastrophic with sea water gushing into the engine room, the race will be to determine if the engine is drowned before it over heats.
Autopilot Install. Yeah, I never finished this last year. Still out there.
RD-33 Installation; a new alarm display monitor for the aft cabin.
Generator Exhaust hoses. Some nasty looking hoses in the exhaust system for the genset need replacing.
Battery Monitors; with the replacement of the old Freedom 25 Inverter/Charger it became obvious that the Link2000 monitor (which never worked well) needs to be replaced as it is neither accurate or useful.
Dodger lights; there are some lights under the hard dodger which ought to be replaced. At a minimum with LED bulbs, but preferably with some new fittings that have three way switches to allow for a red LED light after dark. Night vision is not under rated.
Leak fix over the tool/SSB cabinet. Just getting the part seems to be the biggest hassle of all, some changes in the builder's parts department seem to have caused some confusion. I need to patch this hole before I stick a new SSB in there, and I have a new shelf to build and install to replace a weak shelf the prior owner put in.
WiFi rewiring. May also include moving the GPS antenna, this depends on the installation of the wind generator. If the wind generator uses the old radar hole I will need to move the cables that now come through it; I expected this however. Either way I used the wrong cable type for the WiFi antenna and it doesn't work to well so I need to do up some new cables there.

The List - 2011 Edition

2011-02-25T10:20:00.000-05:00

Every spring it is time to break out "the list" - the lengthy description of the chores, repairs, upgrades and projects to get the "Ship" into "Shape" for the season. The list is generally extensive and expensive...this year is no exception. It may be your humble author's privilege to omit a few perennial items from the list in order to save the inevitable "what, you haven't gotten around to that YET??" response from the gentle reader. For example it is quite embarrassing that I've been carrying the parts around to upgrade my propane plumbing for the last four years and still haven't actually done it.

This year is special in some ways, as some long term upgrades we've wanted to do are finally queued up. Some of these are beyond...well not my skill so much as my confidence in said skill. I'd rather not, for example spend the next five years tracking down leaks in the watermaker; I'd rather have a contractor to blame on this one!

So without any further adieu...the Massive Project List for 2011

Upgrades and Additions:

Watermaker. This is a big one that I am going to a professional on. We've selected the unit - a Spectra Catalina Mk II. Our existing watermaker is old, cranky, leaky and broken. Although it made tasty clean water, it required you to run the generator in order to make water. The Spectra is a 24V DC system which makes 12 gallons/hr while consuming 7.5 amps. So we can make water off the batteries with a fraction of the power. Also the new ones are smart, the Spectra has a "self flush" mode which cleans itself periodically even when you aren't using it - this gets you out of the business of having to "pickle" the membrane if you don't use it for a week (like the old one...).
Wind. Finally time to add a wind generator to our charging capacity as we continue our quest for renewable energy on board as well as limiting out consumption of diesel. There are a number of marine wind generators available on the market. However there are fewer 24V wind generators out there, and the Air Breeze is one of them. This particular model tends to do well in higher winds, and in fact doesn't deliver much charging below 10 knots of breeze. In the teens it matches and starts to outstrip it's competitors and over 20 knots of sustained breeze it produces more power than we typically use in a day on board.
Inverter/Charger. We've had it with our Freedom 25 unit. It does not reliably charge; there is a 15 Amp breaker on it that constantly shuts off. If you REALLY baby it you can get it to charge. And I mean...prop up the bed cushion and board over it to get air circulating, put a small fan in front of the exposed crack, and do not do any other charging and maybe this breaker will stay unpopped long enough to get through the Bulk charge cycle and stay on to charge your battery. This is really annoying when you are running the generator expressly to charge the batteries. We are still settling on a model - Xantrex (Freedom) no longer offers a replacement for this odd beast. Since it is from a Euro powered 24V boat it needs to be 24V on the DC side and 220/50Hz on the A/C side, so once again options are limited. I'm leaning towards a little more charging capacity since our generator produces 6,000 Watts of power using only 2,500 of it to charge seems a little wasteful.
Life raft. We've been without one for a few years and it's time to rectify that. We've extended our cruising capabilities some and will go further still. We're leaning towards a Winslow, but the array of options and extra equipment for any life raft is bewildering at best. Spending thousands and thousands of dollars on something you hope you never get to use is...aggravating. Drawing the line on what to get and what not to get for safety and ditch bag gear and where to get it from. On the other hand if you need it and you don't have the safety gear it can kill you.
Anchor. Evenstar has two large primary anchors. Unfortunately they are identical 105 pound CQR anchors, a design which is tried and tested and effective in most conditions. However having two identical anchors on board does not give you any options when you are not in "most" conditions. There are some weaknesses to the CQR. The newer Rocna anchor has tested well since it's introduction in 2004 and we are leaning towards adding one as our primary anchor on the all chain rode and retiring one of the CQR's. We have a small (for Evenstar, I think it was a good primary for our last boat) Danforth style "lunch hook" we keep in a locker in theaft of the boat but that is primarily for emergencies where you might need to keep the back of the boat from moving.
Sea Anchor. Different from an "Anchor" anchor, in that a sea anchor is used to slow the boat in nasty conditions when you are in deep water. Essentially a large, tough parachute like device you toss in the water at the end of a lot of rope and chain. In seriously bad storm conditions you deploy this thing to slow you down and stabilize the boat. If we're hoping to take the boat off shore in conditions where you are more than one day from land you need something like this in case you can not avoid the nastiest weather.
Stove. The old stove has never quite been right. The control knobs have always been stiff and the plastic knobs popped off on a couple of the controls ages ago. A small pair of vice-grips should not be required to cook dinner. Also we're pretty certain the oven never had a thermostat, though we can't really tell because the numbers on the dial have never been visible. This is a direct request from the Fleet Admiral.
On board computer. We have a creaky laptop on board which is getting on in years; the batteries don't charge the DVD drive doesn't work, etc. etc. The plan is to replace it with a "marinized" permanent desktop that runs on 24V power. This is a PC in a smaller, special case which will integrate permanently into the boat's electronics, with a proper LCD monitor (also running on DC power) mounted on a swinging arm at the Nav station. The swinging arm allows the PC to double as a video player. We will never have a TV on board, but we do like to watch movies when you are trapped on board by bad weather.
Sail. We're still going around on this one. But the two full size headsails that came with the boat, well they were pretty ugly and blown out when we bought her five years ago. They have not improved with age. I'm forgetting how to trim a genoa, since it is not actually possible to trim either of our blown out headsails into anything approaching an efficient shape. The big choices are between a woven sails like our Hydranet main (which we love) or a laminate sail made from a carbon fiber and Technora blend. That sounds very high tech and like something I would have put on my last boat for racing, but there are cost and other reasons that it might make sense.

Repairs & Maintenance

Propane system. Yeah, I will shamefacedly admit to still not having completed this. It WILL be done, as the stove upgrade is this perfect time to do it anyway. We will have two 11 lb. propane tanks installed in the propane locker and a solenoid this spring.
SSB. I need to learn how to use it, or have someone come to the boat that does and can tell me if mine works. Because I can't heard anything on it. If it's broken it needs replacing (move it to the list above!) or fixing.
Main bilge pump needs replacing or repair. Sprays water in the engine room when you run it now. Bilge water; this ain't no Evian or Poland spring spraying on my engine. Yech; not only is it unsafe its nasty.
Hatch Lenses. Our hatches are very crazed (cracked) and in some cases like the V-Berth, leaky. They will be pulled off the boat and delivered to some guys that will replace the lenses with nice new clear material and replace the seals so the leaks stop.
Davits. Need some love, and new cables. And a new handle.
Pumps - Oil Change and Seawater. There is, in theory a built in pump for changing the oil on the boat. I've never seen it work; I'd like to. There is also an emergency bilge/fire pump, also non functional. This is a sea water pump that can draw from inside (emergency bilge pump) or outside the boat (fire suppression pump). Also something that should be working and isn't.
Teak. There are some loose bungs, and I've still not forced myself to recaulk all the lazarette and locker covers on the deck. This may not happen in the Spring, I still feel somewhat traumatized from my last teak adventure.
Head valve replacement. One over enthusiastic guest last year over twisted one of the valves in the forward head. Sadly, it is the valve that keeps the stuff in the holding tank from back flowing in the water, not the valve to send the bowl contents over board. If it was the latter the head would still be usable. Fortunately I have spare valves on hand, as they are special and come from Europe.

There are of course some smaller items as well and a few more bits of equipment to add. But this is the current moderately comprehensive Master List.

Wish me luck.

Mt. Desert Island

2011-02-18T14:01:00.000-05:00

Mount Desert Island (MDI) was the ultimate destination for the Great Maine Expedition of 2010. In our original plan it was our furthest point East in Maine, our turnaround point, the spot from whence we would begin our trek home.

Of course that was before we saw the predictions for Hurricane Earl. As a result of Earl we ended up spending almost a full week in Northeast Harbor on MDI - which really isn't a bad thing if you discount the whole "whoops my boat might get destroyed" aspects of it. Mount Desert Island is a wonderful places and we could have spent a lot more than a week there without getting bored.

View from the Harbormaster's dock, Northeast Harbor

This post is probably going to calve itself into a few - there is just too much to say about this part of the world. The towns are charming (if a bit touristy in some places), excellent dining abounds, Arcadia National Park is breathtaking, the water is beautiful, the harbors are loaded with gorgeous boats, and wildlife is everywhere.

We also got lucky - locals were complaining about the "heat wave". The whole time we were there until the hurricane came through the weather was to die for - hot sometimes (unusual for Maine) and not a wisp of fog.

Mt. Desert Island has a free bus system courtesy of L.L.Bean which provides excellent access to the major harbors and towns and stopping off points all over Arcadia National Park. This bus is a crucial part of making all of this work - you can pick it up about thirty feet away from where the above picture was taken and take it anywhere on the island (eventually). We didn't actually figure out how good the bus was until we got there - it's a fairly recent development that our cruising guides didn't wax especially poetic about.

Unfortunately we didn't consult our cruising guides enough though, that cost us some wasted time trying to do things like laundry, when we didn't realize there was a drop off in town instead of going in to Bar Harbor to drop it off instead (and schlepping back when they sent my pants home with the wrong customer). Each town is different, and each town has a pretty decent set of services.

Some highlights of our week there included....

Hiking and walking in the park. We hiked to the top of Pemetic Mountain among other locations.
Wild blueberries. Slowed down the hiking a lot but boy were they good.
Renting bikes and riding on the Carriage Trails
Ben & Bill's Chocolate Emporium; somehow we overlooked the fact that our favorite ice cream shop in the universe (that alone makes the trip to Oak Bluffs on Martha's Vineyard) has a store in Bar Harbor Maine.
Seeing the island from the bus; yes you saw a good deal
Seals swimming by the boat
Porpoises on the long dinghy ride to Southwest harbor.
And endless variety of gorgeous sail boats to look at
Visit to the Hinckley yard in SW Harbor, even if we didn't get to see a boat being built
Did I mention Ben & Bill's?

Actually the summit of Pemetic Montain

Arcadia National Park is crisscrossed with miles and miles of beautiful, well maintained trails. Their difficulty ranges from really easy short flat walks to steep and sweaty mountainous exertions. We opted for somewhere near the middle of those.

One of the walks we did included Pemetic Mountain, with the gorgeous vista panoramic view of the whole island. It was longer than we expected and we got head faked by half a dozen "peaks" which we thought were the top since we couldn't see past them. Someone in our party pointed out that these could NOT be the summit, since there was no sign kindly pointing out that you were in fact there, at the summit. One of us was right...

Part of this trail winds around (can I get a synonym for "scenic" or "lovely" here?) Jordan Pond and starts and ends at the Jordan Pond House where you can have lunch overlooking the pond, a large meadow and the "Bubbles" off in the distance.

The Bubbles, as seen from Jordan House

By the time we got back for lunch - all options include one of their famous Popovers which are worth the walk - we were pretty wiped. As it turns out we made a wrong turn and went to the top of Pemetic backwards...most hikers went the other way on the trail loop because it was easier. We ended up turning around and heading down the way we came to avoid the steeper downhill but got a longer hike out of it at the end of the day. Blueberries were all over the place on the way up (and back down) and kept us fortified throughout.

Some of the other walks we took included the Bar Harbor Shore Path, which is a short trek around the outside of Bar Harbor - a nice walk where you can see some of the ocean and the rocks in the intertidal area and some of the outlying islands. Hiking out of Bar Harbor through the Great Meadow also brought us through some wetlands, although sadly we were never able to spot an actual moose much to my great disappointment.

It was pointed out that spotting a moose is NOT normally something one expects to do while cruising on a sailboat, so perhaps one should be happy enough with the seals, porpoises, ospreys, eagles, ducks, etc. etc. But I digress.

After the hurricane passed through and we were held over for the weekend we decided to rent some bikes to explore the Carriage Trails. These are wide gravel roads which criss cross the park, easily suitable for bikes or horses. They are...steeper...than we expected, but we got through them after some shifting lessons for the younger members of the party with shorter legs. Because of all the rain there was a lot of runoff, and many of the tiny, almost dry streams from the week before because beautiful babbling waterfalls and streams. Even though it was all a bit damp it didn't matter - the added beauty made up for it and the ride was a joy. With hindsight we should have given thought to getting bikes a lot earlier as there were a lot of places to go and the Island Explorer buses had the capability to move bikes and let you off in different trails.

There is a lot more to cover on MDI - the towns and harbors, our quest for hurricane safety, restaurants and dining - subjects for another post.

Not the summit of Pemetic Mt., but lovely nonetheless

Desperately Seeking...something.

2011-02-13T14:15:00.003-05:00

February might well now be my least favorite time of the year.

Reasons? Obvious to any sailor bound on land by weather that will not end. It's freaking miserable outside, the boat is under wraps and it's too cold to work on it. Not that you can get down the dock over the inches deep ice and snow that have accumulated...bringing a "buddy" to pull you out of the water is suggested for any such venture.

At the risk of - OK, maybe even with the intentional effect of - sounding whiny, spring can not get here soon enough. Now past the point in life where skiing is of interest, after a day or two tobogganing with the kids I've pretty much had my fill of the snow.

I am hoping that reflecting on the high points of last summer will help snap me out of the dreaded winter doldrums. When last I posted out here I left you all perched on the edge of making it to Mt. Desert Island in Arcadia National Park. Which was a wonderful cruising destination, although hindsight being 20/20 there are some things we learned to do differently next time.

In the mean time...some teasers. I don't think I've removed myself from gray winter enough to produce the truly enthusiastic gushing of happy prose this deserves, however we can start down that path with a few breathtaking views.

I promise to return shortly with more detail, as our adventure proceeds forward into the Hinckley infested waters of Mt. Desert Island!

View from up high on the way to Pemetic Mountain

The family heads down from Pemetic Mountain

The Road to Portland

2010-11-25T00:16:00.000-05:00

In a departure from my ongoing and belated travelogues from Maine this past summer, I am offering here a "reprint" of an article which I recently wrote for Sailing Anarchy on our new sailing dink. Finally the reason I've been alluding to, but never described, the newest addition to the fleet.

As originally published at SailingAnarchy.com

“Here's a picture of several anarchists fondling one while making smartass and disparaging remarks at the Providence Boat Show last year. The anarchist in the back (who I will not identify unless he chooses to come forward) sorta looks like he's about to hurl in it, which I think accurately reflects his impression of the boat.

The question you have to ask yourself, is that if you DO get shipwrecked and have to use it to stay alive, do you think you can spend a week at sea with a bag over your head? Because that thing is PAINFULLY fugly. Heavy & ugly; I can not imagine it could get out of it's own way.

On the plus side, if memory serves from the feel of the deck and hull you SHOULD be able to easily use it as a cutting board to fillet any flying fish that are not too repelled by it's hideous appearance to fall into the boat.” - B.J. Porter in Cruising Anarchy, April 6 2008.

Isn’t the internet grand? All the wonderful stuff you spew out there, captured for posterity to someone can throw it back at your head two years later.

So last June I drove up to Portland, Maine to pick up my very own Portland Pudgy from the factory. How quickly things change in two years. This article is a brief overview of my “Road to Damascus” moment, where I went from hating these things to buying one of these things and coming to love it – and what I learned along the way.

The Need

Our family spends a lot of time cruising in the summer, pretty much every weekend we can which is almost all of them. Right now we’re coastal cruisers, but some day hope to take some time to see the world. But even today two children now 13 and 10 we are getting to the point where they have more independence and can sometimes go their own way. A few years back we bought a small sailing dink which they loved but outgrew. Needless to say I didn’t fit in it either; it was strictly a toy for the kids. Looking forward though our thought was for a “second car” for the boat, an expedition vehicle that we could use so the kids could take off and explore harbors and beaches or a separate group could leave the boat without stranding everyone else. Also a backup dinghy in case something happened to the RIB – be it theft, loss, punctured tubes, deflation or mechanical problems nothing says “your vacation sucks” when you can’t get off the boat any more.

Our requirements? It would need to fit a couple of people while being able to row well, sail reasonably, be impervious to beaching on rocks and sands, stow easily and be manageable by a couple of older kids. Motoring ability was not a real factor since we expected this to be a wind & muscle powered vehicle. Cost is certainly a factor, but not the driving one as this is a long term purchase expected to be with us for years.

The Market

There are a LOT of dinghies on the market, and a lot of options. Fiberglass dinghies, sailing dinghies, nesting dinghies (from kits), wood dinghies, used, new and host of possibilities were out there. Eventually we ruled most of them out, for example most of the fiberglass or wood dinghies were, frankly, too pretty to be dragged up on a beach. Dyer makes a beautiful boat but I’d never want to drag it across rocks. I’ve not the time, space or inclination to build some of the nice looking nesting options. So boats that you couldn’t kick around got eliminated. Boats with too big and awkward rigs, too little capacity, insanely expensive price tags and the like all were eliminated.

The Thread

So in light of all this I’d been watching dinks for several years. I was leaning towards the Walker Bay dinghy with the RID Tubes on it and a sailing rig but I knew my decision was a couple of years off. It looked like an ungainly agglomeration of functional parts but it appeared to meet most of the requirements though I didn’t love the solution. I’d seen the Portland Pudgy at the Providence Boat Show and had a chuckle over it before when a thread on the boat was started in the Cruising Anarchy forum. Frankly on its own it was an easy target to mock as the boat looks ungainly and the marketing materials for it aren’t the slickest. It is positioned strongly as a life raft which on the surface looks faintly ridiculous.

But eventually the inventor of the boat, David Hulbert, showed up on the thread and made some comments that got me thinking. There is a lot below the surface of the boat’s design which isn’t obvious. And David’s a creative and responsive guy, he’s been continually refining the boat based on owner feedback and you can see the improvements and changes. And he got me thinking more, and when I started to look at it this odd looking little boat I realized that there was that functional beauty to it and that it might work for us.

The Boat

Even though I have one strapped on by bow I still don’t think the Portland Pudgy is a thing of beauty. It is, well, pudgy looking. But it DOES have a lot of beauty from a pragmatic standpoint. When he designed the boat David Hulbert was looking to fill a need that he had and couldn’t fill with what was commercially available. His goal was a boat that can row, sail, motor and act as a life raft – perhaps not with performance that sets the world on fire but still do it all well enough to satisfy. He wasn’t looking to build a racing dinghy or a sport boat; I think his goal was something more in line with a sport utility vehicle or a lawn tractor. Flexibility, safety, functionality and fun were the over arching themes.

One of the appeals of the Pudgy is that it is completely self contained. All of the gear – sailing rig & blades, oars, exposure canopy, sea anchor and other gear stows inside the boat. Everything packs away when it is on the boat, there are no rigs jammed into lazarettes and cupboards or oars in inconvenient places. There are inspection ports you can slide all this folding collapsible gear into – one of my only design suggestions is to add one more port to the other side of the boat so you can put the rig on one side and the oars on the other. After discussing with the designer their single port choice makes sense if you are buying some of the more advanced options like the life raft kit or the electrical system; that port side area is reserved for those components.

It is also pretty tough to damage. While we were at the factory one of the workers was installing some hardware onto a hull. He was pounding it, hard, with a heavy hammer. The sort of blows that would shatter gelcoat and fiberglass weren’t even leaving mark on the molded plastic hull. It is a heavy boat, a few pounds heavier than some of the sailing dinks and that is one of its only weaknesses that I’ve seen - but as a boat approved for four people the weight is competitive with other boats with similar capacity. Capacity wise this boat is rated for 557 lbs. of people, motors and gear and it can hold it. In a USCG test it took 1855 lbs of weight to submerge it to its gunwales.

There are a lot of nice little well thought out features too – for example it comes with a Ritchie compass installed, a wheel on the keel to help you drag it, and grip handles on the keel to help you right the boat if you manage to capsize it. One of our favorite features is that the boat is self bailing when empty. When hurricane Earl near-missed us on our vacation in Maine we had the only hard dink on the dock that wasn’t full of water after the torrential downpour.

One of the big selling points is the Survival Package, which includes an exposure canopy (which adds 430 lbs of floatation), a boarding ladder/fender, an HD Para-anchor, and some other gear which turns the dinghy into a four person “proactive” life raft. By “proactive” Mr. Hulbert means unlike most life rafts you can sail this boat to safety with the sailing rig installed. We didn’t go this route; it’s not what we bought the boat for. Apparently when rigged for rapid deployment is truly does deploy quickly (in tests it took 17 seconds to inflate the exposure canopy with CO₂) and it has actually saved someone’s life in the field.

The Company

David Hulbert is the brains behind the boat, its inventor and the head of their small manufacturing operation. Working from a small industrial building in Portland, the hulls are molded elsewhere in New England then brought to the shop for finishing and installation of the accessories and hardware. Hulbert explained that initially they had some production problems with the molding process which was one of the largest hurdles they had to overcome. But now they have a reliable molding process and the boats are coming off the line quickly. To date almost 500 boats have been sold, one popular customer niche has been the Alaskan fishing fleet – they have proved quite popular as on board life raft/safety boats. Hulbert says standard procedure for delivery is drop shipment anywhere in the country (or the world).

As for the future, the boat is being continually refined. It is an evolutionary process that Mr. Hulbert describes, with feedback from customers he’s taken some active steps to make the boat perform better and be more useful. He has some stiff competition though, and lacking the distribution channel like the Walker Bay has I can imagine it is an uphill battle marketing what appears to be a superior product whose greatest strengths don’t leap out at you the first time you lay eyes on it.

The Field Test

After a couple of months with this boat on our deck the overwhelming response is that we love it. We’ve had three kids (ages 13, 13, & 10…not small) in the boat sailing around, our two have gone to beaches and into town on their own, I’ve sailed it and rowed it, my wife has rowed it places – all of us agree that it’s a smart little boat that does what it is supposed to and does it pretty well. It tows well and we’ve even hauled it behind our RIB to get more people to the dock in a single trip. We store it lashed on the foredeck and hoist it on board with a block and tackle – some use the halyard but we found the extra purchase made the process a lot easier. To launch it we literally just toss it overboard, it is self bailing after all and isn’t going anywhere no matter how much water you get in it.

Will it set your pants on fire under sail? No – from what I could tell I was tacking it through about 110 degrees...and this is not a planing hull! Of course I’m not sure I tack my Laser at better angles that that so it could be a comment on my sailing ability as well. But it moves along well enough to suit, and it is fun to sail. We clocked it over four knots in a good breeze which isn’t bad in a 7’-8’ long boat. It is very stable - in 20 knots of breeze with all sail on it’s not at all tippy. And it’s a very dry boat; one trip across Block Island’s New Harbor in 15+ knots of breeze the people sailing the Pudgy were much drier than those of us pounding into the chop on the RIB.

As a sailboat the Pudgy has been substantially improved since its initial release. The company recently re-engineered the sailing setup to add a larger sail that can be better trimmed, a longer telescoping boom, and longer leeboards to reduce sideslip. The rig can be easily reefed and breaks down to stow in a small bag that fits in one of the watertight compartments. Although the rig would benefit from the addition of a vang (and that does pose some engineering problems which Hulbert is working on) we had the opportunity to sail the boat directly against the original configuration when we came across another Pudgy in Maine with the 1.0 version rig – and the new setup is a marked improvement.

There are a few areas where it could be improved, such as the addition of a vang. While I understand the need for the non skid flooring it is pretty painful to sit on with bare skin, you need a towel, floatation cushion or something on the bottom of the boat if you are going to spend some time in it wearing only shorts. An easy way to remove the seat (it flips back and forth for two rowing positions but is in the way when you are a big guy like me sailing), and a second access port on the port side of the transom would be nice (all the long gear gets stored on one side of the boat, which makes it list one way when the rig and oars are inside). According to Hulbert the exposure canopy, CO₂ cylinders, para-anchor and other survival gear store in the port side which makes the boat float level again. But all in all the field test is a complete success, we love the boat and are very pleased with the way it works for us.

Quite a swing from my original take on this little boat!

Related Media:

Portland Pudgy Corporate Site

Video of the Portland Pudgy under sail, with the original and new rigs.

David Hulbert on the Pudgy

Next Stop - Mount Desert Island

2010-11-22T12:33:00.000-05:00

After several days of relative isolation in Pulpit and Seal Bay, we made the call to move directly to the Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island. We considered doing some meandering on the way with a couple of stops in between, but instead opted to push through in one quick trip, and maybe meander on the way back towards our jumping off point for home.

The Pot Infested Waters of Jericho Bay

It was an easy and pleasant trip through lobster pot infested waters. This picture really doesn't do them justice, and at one point we figured that the sheer number of pots in a certain no-wake zone in the Deer Island Thorofare were done more out of a perverse desire to passively enforce the speed limit rather than to actually catch lobsters. How could there be that many lobsters right in one spot? I have no idea how a catamaran could possibly navigate that particular stretch of water.

The trip involved crossing Jericho Bay and slipping through a couple of "thoroughfares" which are not nearly as congested as they sound. Except the lobster pots of course.

Deer Island Thoroughfare Light

The sailing that day was light and mostly down wind, we tried to sail as much as possible through the worst of the lobster pot minefields but eventually we ran out of air. The reason for this is simple, not only is the sailing usually more fun and fuel efficient, but far more importantly nothing under the boat is moving. If I've going to run over a lobster pot I'd rather do it without wrapping any ropes around my propeller. So if we are sailing at least the propeller isn't spinning up trying to suck pots into it.

Bass Harbor Light

Maine has a number of scenic lighthouses, nestled among all the other ruggedly beautiful features of the coast. Sailing there is just one beautiful sight like this after another, alternating rocky shores, empty islands, fishing villages and lighthouses.

Our original plan - almost until we got to the turning point for it - was to initially visit Southwest Harbor on Mt. Desert Island, then move to Northeast Harbor a couple of days later. They are quite close to each other and easily reachable by fast dinghy, however as we later found out they are quite different in character and facilities though both nice in their own ways. As we approached it seemed that based on our cruising guides moorings in Northeast harbor were more readily available and less confusing so we opted at the last moment to head for Northeast.

At this point we were blissfully unaware that Hurricane Earl was working it's way out of the Caribbean and how that would affect our plans, however when we arrived in lovely Northeast Harbor we quickly found out that we had a new wrinkle in our vacation plans...

Seal Bay

2010-11-11T08:54:00.002-05:00

Two days of peace, (mostly) quiet, and solitude. With seals. Lots of seals.

Just coming in to the harbor you could see them popping up to look at you when you went by. At low tide many of the rocks and small islands had regular residents. Needless to say the kids were thrilled and on constant lookout for them. When we first came into the harbor the tide was high and you couldn't see all the favorite basking and sleeping spots that are exposed at low tide. So we saw seal heads popping up and seals swimming, but we didn't really get a good feel for just how seal infested these waters are. It wasn't until we took a dinghy tour closer to sunset that we discovered the truth.

Our favorite Maine Cruising Guide suggests that you enter new harbors at low tide. The reason is straight forward - with the relatively large tidal swings (10-12 feet in most of Maine) at low tide most of the hazards are exposed. A glance at the chart for Seal Bay (see below) shows you that yes indeed, there are many hazards that are covered at high tide. However for us the timing didn't work, so we carefully plotted an approach into the instruments and in truth it made picking our way through here seem more like a video game than scary navigation.

But there are definitely some spots that make you shake your head when you see them at low tide, like the ridge just South of Davids Island that is completely hidden at high tide and you will see in a picture below quite clearly at low. But it's a great spot for the seals, and we discovered in the evening that when the water drops the seals come out to rest. In particular there was one rock that was a local favorite, and after our first evening there I set an alarm to get up at low tide the next morning and head out with the camera. It was well worth getting up for, and this particular spot was pretty clearly Seal Central when the tide was out. This rock can not even be seen at high tide.

Apparently THE place to chill if you are a seal.

With all of the little nooks, crannies and islands you can see in the chart above there are a lot of places to explore. The channel between Penobscot and Davids Islands is dry and exposed at low tide, but deep enough to take the dinghy through it at high tide and is a cool little trip. Hay Island is open for camping. It is small, and the brush is dense but that is where the kids found a spot to pitch a tent and spend the night. We anchored between Hay & Penobscot so we were in visual sight from the tent but it was still a cool night on their own and a change from pitching a tent in the back yard.

While here it was a non stop parade of wildlife. The eagles we saw were too far away to make a decent photo but where sharp through the binoculars. The ospreys were constantly out hunting. More varieties of ducks, grebes and other aquatic birds were always swimming and diving around the boat.

As it turns out it my timing was good the morning I went to shoot my seal photos. The next day as the tide was falling, we saw to our horror that a boat had found it's way onto the big rock the seals favored. A number of boaters in the bay took our dinghies out to try and help them but there were pretty firmly on and the tide was falling so fast that there was little that could be done after a very short time. If you are running aground in fair weather, doing it when the tide is heading out is pretty much the worst time you can do that since you will be stuck through the whole tide cycle. Even if the boat is OK it is a long and ego bruising wait for the boat to float again.

Fortunately they didn't seem to hit hard and did not puncture the hull or cause any apparent serious damage. But I am certain they spent a long night because when this picture was taken there was still and hour or two more tide to go out. My guess is that some time around 2:00 - 3:00 in the morning the tide came in enough to float them free, because the next morning they were floating and anchored a few hundred yards from the rock and seemed fine. Although I can not imagine they were well rested.

I wish there was more we could have done to help them, but those tides really move fast up in Maine. The object lesson - if you MUST come to a new harbor when the tide isn't low, at least do it when the tide is coming in, not out.

The seals on the other hand seemed a little puzzled by this new occupant of their favorite resting place. The next morning they were scattered all over the bay and their favorite rock was empty.

Off the Grid - Pulpit & Seal Bay

2010-11-08T13:06:00.000-05:00

One of the good/bad things we learned about Maine is that it is really easy to get away. Away from cell signals (because much of Maine appears to be in the 3% of the country AT&T claims not to cover), away from WiFi (because there isn't any) and generally out of touch. It is nice to be away from it all and not to be able to be reached, but sometimes you also miss out on things. Like hurricanes being birthed in the Caribbean and things like that.

Pulpit Rock

Pulpit Harbor on the island of North Haven is such a place. It is a beautiful, peaceful and extremely well protected harbor. The entrance is guarded by Pulpit Rock, which is capped by an Osprey nest that has been continuously occupied for over a century.

There's not a whole lot there though, which is part of what makes it nice.

Only a couple of hours sailing from Rockland, we saw porpoises and seals en route on the short trip over. When we arrived the kids immediately lowered the Portlad Pudgy and started exploring the harbor. Seeing a sister ship to our dinghy AND another Hallberg-Rassy in the harbor was unusual, but we had a pleasant visit from the owners of the other vessel and the kids had a good time sailing with the other dinghy.

Pulpit was only a short stay for us - one night, because there's not actually a lot reachable there from a dinghy. It is pretty small and fairly quickly explored; though pretty you can't dinghy around for hours exploring all the nooks and crannies because there aren't many! We opted not to hoof it into the convenience store the cruising guides spoke of and spent a restive evening enjoying the quiet and tranquility.

To the South of North Haven lies the island of Vinalhaven, the name of which has nothing to do with long chain polymers. It's actually named after a gentleman named John Vinal. On the Northeast side of Vinalhaven lies the entrance to Winter Harbor and Seal Bay. If you take a left on entering you can pick your way among the rocks and channels into Seal Bay.

Sunset on Seal Bay

Seal Bay will get some more detail since we spent two nights and the better part of three days there. Remote and secluded the bay is home to a variety of wildlife. In our stay there we saw (as you may guess) loads of seals, osprey, bald eagles, and more more swimming and diving birds than we could keep track of.

The bay has a number of smaller islands and inlets with lots of room for exploring. Nearby Winter Harbor is reachable by dinghy with a completely different aspect to it's rugged natural beauty. High cliffs and boulders instead of tall trees and shaggy shores.

Some of our adventures there included the aforementioned dinghy tours, reaching places at high tide you couldn't go through at low (ten foot tidal swings will do that) and the reverse - climbing on places covered by the tide. One of the islands allowed for camping, so the kids took a tent ashore and spent the night on a tiny little island, something they'd dreamed about doing and prepared for of course by actually bringing a tent. A couple of days of rest and relaxation, sight seeing, relative solitude (except for ONE awful boatload of people that came to the end of nowhere to whoop it up like they were tailgating for an Eagles game) and quiet meals on the boat.

And seals. Lots and lots of seals.

To Be Continued....

Rainy in Rockland

2010-10-21T12:27:00.000-04:00

But still a good time.

On making landfall in Maine at Tenant's Harbor we promptly...went to bed. Hey, we were up all night. But we did get up after a few hours and go ashore. It's a small place with not a lot in walking distance from the docks but still nice. We saw our first harbor seal to the delight of all, and saw several of them as we motored around the harbor. After dinner in "town" (at least I think it was town, sometimes approaching someplace from the water you sort of miss the "town" if you don't walk far enough) and some walking about in the misty rain we decided perhaps this was not a long term stopover, especially as it was supposed to rain in another day or so and there wasn't a lot around to do.

After consulting the cruising guides and making our best guess at the weather we figured that Rockland had enough going on for us to weather out the rain. Heading out on Tuesday morning we decided a trip up the colorfully named "Muscle Ridge Channel" was the best way to go. That turned out to be a good choice. Though narrow and twisty in parts eventually it widened enough and the wind cooperated to be able to set some sail. It is a beautiful and scenic passage, and the view of Owl's Head Light was spectacular. Outside of dodging approximately 347,000 lobster pots on the roughly eight mile trip it was uneventful and pleasant.

Rockland gave us our first feel for how much more informal things are in Maine. We decided to pick up a mooring (unusual for us) because we didn't like the incoming weather or the anchoring options. Our first attempts to call for a mooring over VHF failed, and we finally reached Beggar's Wharf Marina via cell phone. As it turns out they didn't have anyone in Rockland that day but I spoke with the owner who gave me directions to an empty mooring and we made payment arrangements. We never actually met, and I never laid eyes on anyone from Beggar's Wharf but we managed to hand off everything. As the name might lead you to believe it's not a fancy place but there are heads & showers if you need them, and a "lounge" where you can play foosball & pool and surf the web on Clinton-era PC's that do work. And their moorings are reasonable and I received a ton of good local information from the gentleman I spoke with.

Rockland has some decent places to eat and some nice museums. We availed ourselves to a number of these on Wednesday when the rain came down in a vengeance. We visited the Puffin Project which was interesting (if small), the Farnsworth Art Museum and the Rockland Lighthouse Museum.

I'm not an art guy at all, in fact my appreciation for art is in general only marginally more enlightened than Beavis and Butthead watching music videos ("ooh, nice hanging dead fish...aah, nice fat guy in a ruffled collar" was the gist of my running mental commentary walking through the Louvre). Generally, it's not my thing especially paintings. But the Farnsworth was still a cool place, there's a lot of local Maine flavor and some nice Wyeth galleries there (I like Wyeth...his paintings look like things and are pretty, which is helpful for the art ignoramus like me who is left cold by the more esoteric stuff). I especially liked the "studies" from Wyeth where you could see his work in progress from the sketches that became some of the finished works in the gallery.

The Rockland Lighthouse Museum is more my speed. I actually learned how a Fresnel lens worked which is a cool bit of physics I won't get into here - suffice it to say ingenious for the time it was invented and what it did. It's a fascinating place with a lot of good background on the how's and why's of our government navigational systems and I recommend it to any mariner.

We ended the day racing through the rain, arriving soaked to the skin at the Beggar's Wharf building. While we waited for the rain to abate (it never did...) we warmed up inside playing foosball and pool by the light of the Christmas strings run all over the building. It was fun family time - really an unexpected hour of hard laughs and good times with the kids and in many was the highlight of the day.

Getting There is Half the Fun

2010-10-19T06:00:00.004-04:00

Or maybe "Well That Wasn't so Bad After All".

Although I'd taken Evenstar off shore and out of sight of land when she came home from Florida that was done with seven other friends, several of whom had off shore delivery experience. Back then I didn't know the boat and how to handle her as well as I do now, but having others around that seem like they know what they are doing is a big confidence builder. While we were well over 100 miles off shore on that trip we'd not likely go more than 30 miles offshore on this one - but out of sight of land it looks the same wither way.

After throwing around ideas for getting Evenstar to Maine early to maximize our cruising time there we decided that it would be best if we brought her ourselves. We certainly could use the experience and logistically it was becoming quite difficult to get my act together to have the boat ready to go a week earlier for delivery with everything else that was going on. The call was made to take her ourselves, stopping in Provincetown on route to break the trip up.

Due to a commitment on the Friday before departure we weren't able to leave until Saturday morning, which as it turned out worked out better with the Cape Code Canal currents. Getting to Provincetown was an uneventful, almost dull trip under power. Light winds either in our face or nonexistent the whole way there. We'd invited our parents to meet us there for dinner at the Lobster Pot, which in spite of the exterior that screams "Tourist Trap" in huge red neon cooks one of the best bake stuffed lobsters I've ever had in a restaurant and I knew my father had to try it.

After a nice brunch with my parents on Sunday they left for home and we headed back to the boat. Our plan was to leave around 2:00 (1400 in non-lubber time) in order that we arrive at mid morning. Coming into a completely unfamiliar harbor after a long trip in the dark was not something we had any desire to do. The winds were picking up throughout the day, and a storm was predicted to come through Provincetown that night so we were happy to leave.

With predicted 15 knot winds from the East that were supposed to turn more Northerly towards morning we hoped to be reaching for most of the trip. The stay sail was rigged and ready on deck as we headed around the tip of P-Town. For the non sailing readers - the staysail is a smaller sail that goes inside the large head sail on the front. It is very useful when heading across the wind, but not too useful heading down wind and can actually be quite a hindrance when trying to sail up wind as it does not let you sail as close to the wind.

As we rounded Provincetown and got on our course for Maine the wind was perfect, an easy 15 knots with some stronger gusts right on the beam of the boat. With all sails set we took off and were easily able to maintain eight knots of speed or more across the Stellwagon Bank.

We were fortunate to see at least half a dozen Humpback Whales as we were crossing Stellwagon, but they were pretty far off in the distance. The children were thrilled though and kept a sharp lookout for hours for any sign of whales and dolphins. Although Humpbacks are known to be curious and friendly this time they just weren't interested in checking us out.

The breeze held nicely as night fell, and the adults began switching off who was on "watch" although neither of us really left the cockpit. There is a distinct advantage to sharing an overnight passage with an Obstetrician - unlike me she's used to being functional all night. As the night progressed the wind began to build, we reduced some sail and still were flying along averaging eight knots through the moonless night. Throughout the night the wind did vary in strength, sometimes causing us to shorten sail other times dropping our speed and making us let out more sail area. One really nice thing about Evenstar's setup is with a furling main and a furling jib reefing (make the sails smaller) is something really easy to do without leaving the cockpit so you think nothing of it. The only sail we'd need to leave the cockpit to deal with was the staysail.

As the night wore on we saw very little traffic, a few commercial ships but nothing ever close. The most interesting was playing ring-around-the-rosy with a fishing boat. This particular boat visible for miles with it's bright lights, so much so that we thought for a while it was a private signal buoy we expected to see out in the middle of nowhere. As we got closer the buoy kept...moving. Steering a boat straight under sail in the dark on a moonless night with 4-6 foot waves is not as easy as it sounds, and in the dark the autopilot is generally better at it than I am since it doesn't have to keep looking at the compass. With no frame of reference it's easy to get disoriented. So when you CAN see something like a buoy you get very excited because you can look at it and use it to check your course.

Unless that buoy is actively setting and retrieving nets.

As we got within a couple of miles we began to suspect this wasn't a buoy so we started taking evasive action. And he kept turning at, making "crazy Ivan" turns back and forth. Of course this is normal fishing behavior that I saw on the trip back from Florida, but it doesn't make it any less disconcerting at 2:00 in the morning!

About 5:00 in the morning the wind finally started to veer North. It was at this point that the staysail became a problem. We'd entered into the area where the North Atlantic and the outflow from Penobscot Bay were starting to mix together and turning into a very confused sea state. With the wind swinging North, for the first time we could no longer hold our course and maintain sail. The problem was they staysail - with it up you lose some of your "point", the ability to sail close to the wind efficiently. So just when we need to point we couldn't do it so well and we were losing speed. With an hour and a half or so to go until the sun came up it just didn't make sense to go out on the foredeck an pull the sail down on the dark, pitching deck. So we sailed as best we could until the sun came up then ventured up to the spray and foam covered foredeck to douse the staysail and secure it.

The wind still continued to head us (swing the wrong way!), so with about an hour and half left to go we dropped the sails and pointed the boat dead upwind under power. With all the chop and slop it wasn't fast, but we were close enough and had sailed 90% of the way.

Then the lobster pots started. This was our first experience with Maine lobster parts. We have pots around here, and they've always seemed a nuisance. After two weeks in Maine I have to force myself to remember that we even have pots here in Rhode Island. Based on the density of lobster pots in the Maine waters one can only conclude that there must be spots where the entire bottom of the ocean is just a crawling and scuttling carpet of lobsters on the march.

Eventually we worked it out, four pairs of eyes make it a lot easier to see them and they are sort of in lines you can thread your way between. Sort of.

We finally pulled in to Tenant's Harbor around 9:30 a.m., pretty much as predicted, and picked up a mooring, grabbed some breakfast and settled in for a nice long nap.

Overall - a fun, fast trip with minimal fuss.

Finally...the Great Maine Expedition Report is forthcoming

2010-10-18T11:00:00.000-04:00

It's not like it's a month and half late or anything. OK, maybe it is, we did get back on Labor Day weekend and here it is mid October.

Finally with the kids back from school, the boat back from Maine and the sailing season winding down I've finally taken the time to load all the pictures and give this all some thought. So finally in little dribs and drabs, it's coming but I'll start with an over overview then get into some more specifics on each trip and destination in further posts.

The Plan for this trip had been formulating for some time, close to a year since I finally browbeat my wife into taking two solid weeks of vacation off at the end of the summer. All of this advance planning meant one thing of course - we had very little plan of where we'd actually be going and when. Sort of a vague "yeah let's start around here and head that way" approach which we carried almost until the departure time arrived. Given our lack of experience in Maine and with traveling long distances together as a family this seemed wise. Of course our initial landfall location changed several times in the last week from Portland to Boothbay Harbor to Tenant's Harbor to Mt. Desert Island and back and forth.

For our final itinerary we decided to make landfall at Tenant's Harbor on the West side of Penobscot Bay. We didn't want to do this in one long trip from East Greenwich so we opted to make Provincetown the first day then leave the following afternoon or an overnight trip, arriving in Maine well after sunrise.

After Tenant's we moved to Rockland in anticipation of a day or two of rainy weather, then headed on to Pulpit then Seal Harbor. Our eventual plan was to work our way to Mt. Desert Island and spend a few days there, then start working our way back before leaving for the long trip home. When we arrived in Northeast Harbor we found that we were being stalked by Hurricane Earl which was expected to come up the New England coast the same day we were planning to be sailing down it. As posted earlier, this led to a longer than expected stay in Northeast Harbor as we opted to weather the storm out there.

As it turned out the storm was a major fizzle and we were perhaps a bit over cautious. But c'est la vie; we don't regret the extra time on Mt. Desert Island at all (though perhaps our harbor choices might be different next time...).

With the notable exception of Hurricane Earl and one day of rain in Rockland we had stunning weather, a heat wave for Maine even. My extensive electronics overhaul served to guarantee us an essentially fog free trip - in fact the only fog we saw was on the evening the hurricane passed through. The lobster pots were mind blowing in their number but without the fog they weren't so bad.

Waiting for the Earl

2010-09-02T07:01:00.003-04:00

Well the Great Maine Expedition of 2010 is drawing to a close - I've got pictures and updates coming but we're a bit more focused on the unwanted visitor coming up he East Coast...

From this picture, and since the state of Maine just went under just went under Tropical Storm Watch, looks like we're going to get a bit of a pasting.

Our storm strategy, after much deliberation over moving from our current location in Northeast Harbor on Mount Desert Island to someplace West (away from the storm in theory and closer to home) or South (closer to home), is tha we decided that discretion is the better part of valor and leaving a well built mooring in a fairly protected harbor on the edge of the storm's path for a more uncertain location didn't seem wise.

So the decision was made and would NOT bring the boat back Labor Day weekend as originally planned but we would leave it here and I would bring it back later with friends. Our thinking was that going West to someplace like Portland wasn't adding any real protection and it wasn't getting us that much closer to home. No matter what we weren't making it back in time for school by water so making a long trip in the wrong direction for a negligible increase in security made no sense. Going South seemed counter intuitive since that was into the storm and we'd have to leave several days before the storm to be assured of avoiding it. It could also mean chopping the vacation in half over a threat that might never materialize, and in general Maine seems to take fewer hurricane hits that RI.

Besides, it would give us a couple of additional days here on Mount Desert Island which is an awesome spot. But that wasn't really a consideration...just a bonus and the subject of another post anyway.

So here we are in Maine battening down for the storm. well not battening much yet, it's not due until late Friday / early AM Saturday so we will batten a bit this morning then probably play for another day and finish battening down tomorrow. I don't want to spend the next day tripping over sails and canvas down below until I have to.

If you are on the various e-mail lists for on line marine suppliers (I am...not surprisingly) you've been getting breathless "get your chafe gear NOW!!!" e-mails for the last couple of days. So yesterday I headed over to Hamilton Marine in Southwest Harbor, which was a pleasant dinghy ride through porpoise infested waters I made with my son. Again...another post.

Going there I prepared Kathy for the worst: some new dock lines maybe, snubbers, chafe gear, etc. I got walking with the fellow in the store who had all the appearance of a local lobsterman that ducked off the boat for a minute to sell me some gear. After talking with him about where I was and what I had on the boat his recommendation for "the absolute best chafe protection" that everyone locally uses? A roll of Gorilla Tape - total cost $9.99 plus tax.

Somehow I feel I'm not doing enough, not having come away with several hundred dollars worth of additional protection for the boat. Nothing but a $10 roll of tape just seems so...minimalist. But I've reviewed my plans with some other local folks and they seem to agree that attaching four BIG dock lines to the mooring while taping them heavily where they touch anything combined with stripping off anything loose that can catch wind will leave us as safe as can possibly be.

The major decision left is to whether the conditions will be bad enough that we should watch the potential destruction of our boat from a hotel on land or stay on board to monitor things and adjust chafe gear as needed. I'm thinking that cutoff is somewhere around 50 knots of predicted wind...

--------------

As a side note...it was not at all amusing to me that in all the concern for the storm here and now I'd completely overlooked the small matter of my house which is about 100 feet from the water back in RI. Fortunately my parents are there to remind me that maybe I should think about that too. Yes, please tie down the porch furniture so it doesn't fly through the picture windows if you get a minute!

It looks like RI will take a harder hit than Maine will since the storm will probably be a Category 2 when it grazes RI and be down to a Category 1 or even Tropical Storm by the time it gets here. So it's better that Evenstar is here but not so great for the house.

Falling Behind...and it's Still Summer!

2010-08-16T08:44:00.001-04:00

Here it is mid August and I've not posted an update since mid June. It's not that we've been idle, just the opposite - we've been quite busy. Every available weekend we've been somewhere and even some unavailable ones. I will try to assemble a brief trip log here, time permitting (ha ha) I will come back and flesh them out a bit. Destinations include Block Island a couple more times, Cuttyhunk, Martha's Vineyard, Stonington CT, and Dutch Harbor for Jr. Race Week. Spinnakers were flown, night sailing done, a new member of the fleet was added and I committed various humiliating acts on my Laser. And of course we are planning for "The Great Maine Expedition of 2010" which starts this Saturday and runs through Labor Day. I really am quite far behind.

So briefly with few details (e.g. where or if we stopped Friday night, various and sundry evening sails, day sails etc), in reverse order which is the order of clarity of the memories...

8/13 - 8/15: Dutch Harbor, Jamestown, RI
The NBYA Jr. Olympics (aka "Race Week" though it happened on a weekend this year) were held out of Ft. Getty on Jamestown last weekend. My son was racing Lasers and my wife was on call so I parked Evenstar in Dutch Harbor to shorten the race day commute from 40+ minutes to a five minute dinghy ride. Excellent way do the regatta, hanging with friends who did the same thing and watching the kids sail. We sailed the kids from my daughter's sailing class with us on Friday to end their season too which was fun.

8/6 - 8/9: Oak Bluffs, Martha's Vineyard
This was our first trip back to the Vineyard in two or three years. We sailed to Cuttyhunk Friday night arriving well after dark and anchoring in an unpleasant Northerly. Up early Saturday and in Oak Bluffs by 9:15, we picked up a mooring and had a pleasant three day weekend on the island. Monday we sailed home much of the way, though it was a beat from the Buzzards Bay Tower to Newport.

7/30 - 8/1: Block Island
Yeah, we went there again. We've done Block Island a lot this year, frequently because we're either meeting people there or taking people that haven't been in a while. That's fine with me, it's a fun place to go - this time we took my parents who'd not gotten out with us all year and were likely to only be able to do one weekend due to scheduling. This time we had great breeze on the way home and sailed pretty much from the harbor exit at Block to the entrance to Greenwich Cove. We set the spinnaker South of the Jamestown Bridge and flew it all the way up the bay, doing a conservative take down near Patience Island.

7/24 - No Trip...Kathy on Call

7/17 - 7/18: Block Island

Short weekend with family in town Friday night, so BI is the obvious destination if you can't leave until Saturday Morning and need to get off shore. Got up EARLY and got to the island early too. Sailing home was awesome, we set the spinnaker outside of the BI harbor entrance and flew it all the way to the North end of Jamestown, where the wind shifted too North to carry it any more. What a day, we cracked 10+ knots over the bottom when the breeze piped up off Pt. Judith and successfully jibed the spinnaker a couple of times.

7/9 - 7/11: Cuttyhunk via Newport
Nice weekend in spite of the weather predictions. We got some sailing in and saw our first rain storm on the new radar right before it hit us. It was weird weather, because Cutty seemed to be in a circle of sunshine, with clouds all around on the mainland and the Vineyard. I'm not complaining, it was a great trip and sadly our only extended stay at Cuttyhunk this summer.

7/1 - 7/5: Block Island
For the Fourth of July we met friends on Block Island once again. Crowded, but fun being rafted up with friends. My original plan was to bring the boat out Thursday to secure a good anchorage. As it turned out we used Evenstar to bring a bunch of kids to Newport on Thursday to see the America's Cup, so my two kids and I were able to jump off from Newport to get the boat to Block Island. We had a nice, fast motor sail out there (I didn't want to use the main since the radar mount was having problems and I couldn't use much back stay tension) and anchored the boat. Kathy had to work ad joined us Friday by ferry. The details of the ride home escape me, but I know we didn't sail much due to the back stay concerns.

6/26: Quonset Air Show
Great platform for watching the air show, we took some friends and family for the day since Kathy was on call and Will had a Laser regatta Sunday anyway.

6/18-6/20: Stonington, CT via Dutch Harbor
Although we can drive there by car in under an hour Stonington seemed a cool place to go. We were looking for something different anyway since we knew there were several Block Island trips on the horizon, so we left Friday night after GBSA orientation night and stayed in Dutch Harbor. Stonington is a lovely town and a nice destination. While a little challenged for good ice cream spots, Noah's restaurant is ample compensation - we ended up there for dinner and breakfast the next day. The kids had fun sailing the new dinghy around (more on that later...separate post) the harbor and the town is small but charming. A nice change of pace, though we picked up a mooring since the anchorage did not seem very accessible.

So the rough travel log is there, so I won't forget it if I ever feel the need to expand on it. There are many details to add, but the big trip is coming up. This Saturday we leave for a two week vacation (our first ever) to Maine. Our place is to stop in Provincetown en route, then go straight to Penobscot Bay on an over night through whale infested waters.

Trip Reports - Block Island and Block Island

2010-06-15T09:00:00.053-04:00

Yeah, it sounds a little repetitive. But Block Island at this time of year is nice. It's a little too cool for the beaches but there aren't any crowds. All of the restaurants are pretty much open and there are few waits. The only crowds are associated with sail boat racing which is not, in my view, a bad thing at all.

Trip #1 - Memorial Day
Memorial Day weekend we were still scrambling to get the boat ready for human habitation but we got off to an early start on Saturday morning. It was a lovely day with wind dead on the nose for Block Island. This is a common phenomena and one of our least favorite things about the trip to Block Island - the prevailing winds in this area run about 70% from the Southwest. Which is also pretty much the course you steer to get to Block Island. In addition it means you usually have a significant downwind trip home too, unless you run into the dreaded Sunday Northeasterly which seems to be unnaturally common given the percentages.

Impatient to get there after all of our work to leave we opted to motor instead of tacking all the way there in very light air when we left early in the morning. With favorable tide we made a quick passage out, though the wind picked up it stayed dead on the nose. We had a lot of friends racing out there and knew they'd be beating the whole way, but we just didn't have the patience. So we motored out while we played with the new electronics - running the radar on a clear sunny day so we could test it and learn it. We were quite impressed by the time we arrived on Block just over four hours later.

With a lot of friends from our yacht club on the Island we had a nice weekend with friends and family. Staying out too late, drinking a little too much and eating well - but that's part of meeting everyone there for sure. We woke up ready to leave on Monday with predictions of Southeasterly winds - exciting! After a nice breakfast in town we headed back to the boat.

What a ride home, the Southeasterly winds filled and we had a fast, lovey sail home. Reaching across Block Island Sound under full sail was a great way to stretch Evenstar's legs after a long cold winter of dark and work. Even heading up the bay when we turned to more of a down wind run the breeze was steady and strong. Sailing all but a couple of miles of the trip is nice, and unusually so since on a weekend trip the pressure is to get there! in both directions since your time is so limited once you actually arrive. Having good breeze to make a timely trip as a pleasure we don't seem to get enough of trying to sandwich weekend jaunts between work weeks.

Trip #2 - Back to the Block
OK, we could have done this one in a Trawler and it wouldn't have been much difference.

One nice thing about June trips is that it is light late, so if you leave early enough you can get where you are going Friday night and still drop the hook while there is daylight. Of course...you really want to get there. Again wind on the nose, and foul current to boot. But we were going to make it Friday night, especially since the forecast for Saturday had the day starting to deteriorate into rain as it progressed.

For the first time we got to experience why I went through the trouble to install an AIS receiver. For those late to the party, the Automated Identification System allows information about a vessel to be broadcast over a standard VHF frequency in digital format. This includes information like the name, size, course, speed and destination of the vessel. The information is limited by the same line of sight distance as VHF radio but with an antenna mounted on top of a mast you can often pick up detailed data on a ship well before you see it on radar or visually.

This is helpful for a lot of reasons, but it does have limitations. The refresh rate is fairly low, so fast moving vessels may not update on your screen as fast as they are actually moving. With any of these tools you still have to use your brain, your eyes and some common sense. But it is another too. And the best thing about it? You get the ship name.

Many years ago when we took a trip across the gulf stream the most unnerving thing out there were the tankers. Fast, huge and tough to turn - they can appear on the horizon and overtake you in half an hour. If there is concern of a collision it is wise to contact the ship to let them know of your presence (sailboats are hard to see, and they could run a small boat down and not even know it if you didn't scratch the paint up too much) and to make sure they know of any course changes you (and they) are making to avoid contact. Of course raising on them on the radio when you don't have their name is sometimes difficult...by the time you can read the name off the bow it is usually too late to worry about talking to them. In theory they are supposed to have an English language radio operator...in practice, hailing the "East bound ship in the general vicinity of XX.xx by YY.yy this is the sailing vessel Evenstar" rarely gets a response. Hailing the "Kobayashi Maru" by name on the shipping channels...that gets an answer.

So we had our first civil chat with a commercial vessel, where he indicated his preference for our taking his stern not crossing his bow and all drama was avoided. Very nice. Uneventful, unexciting. Utterly thrilling.

The trip home was in fog, with visibility from 1/2 out to one full mile for much of the way. I've never had such a clear picture of what was happening out there, and it felt really nice. The only unfortunate thing on the trip was the wind - the dreaded Northeasterly all the way home which basically amounts to a motor slog if there's not time to spend 6-7 hours beating back and forth up the bay.

We're headed out again next weekend, and looking for something different. We're expecting a new arrival in the family this week - a little package that comes with sails, not diapers, so a nice dinghy friendly harbor with some good exploration potential is on the horizon.

Ghosts in the Machine...

2010-06-14T12:03:00.000-04:00

So nothing goes off perfectly and this electronics installation is no different. This past weekend we found a couple of glitches, mostly to do with my skill at assembling "Field Installable" NMEA 2000 connectors. These are a necessary evil unless you want to drill giant holes all over your boat to accommodate the huge connector heads even the smaller cables have.

Running cables has probably been the most time consuming part of the project. If you don't want the inside of your boat looking like one of these places you need to spend some time removing ceiling and floor panels, cabinetry, furniture, etc. and snaking cables through the hidden areas of the boat. It looks nice if you do it right and awful if you do it wrong. Of course of your cables attach to things that go outside the boat you actually need to worry about water leaks too...but I digress.

This weekend we saw a little oddness with the NMEA data that was displayed. When one of the displays showed our "Speed Over Ground" at 199 knots I figured something might be up. Using the Maretron N2K Analyzer (I figured I'd need this expensive thing so I bought it pre-emptively...I was right) I was able to isolate the problem to a poorly made Micro Cable connector I had on the GPS. That seemed to sort it out.

There are still other integration issues to resolve - for example the Multi Function Displays are still not reliably showing course information to the other display units and there are still the occasional lockups on the MFD's (these may be related to my babbling N2K Cable...) but overall it is working smoothly.

I've still got a long punch down list and the entire autopilot installation to complete but as it stands now we've got a good solid functioning core set of gear.

Hasta Luego Little Friend

2010-06-04T09:23:00.000-04:00

Recently the family fleet got one smaller. Forgot to mention this highly unusual development, we seem to keep acquiring boats, not shedding them. Anyway our kids have outgrown the little Skimmar dinghy and we sold it on Craig's list.

In about twenty minutes. And nearly had a slap fight in the parking lot of the marina where the boat was between potential buyers. Perhaps I didn't ask enough for it.

Great little boat for the money, but my son has grown about two feet taller since getting it and is almost as tall as me and my daughter could barely fit either. There is a new family sailing dink in the works...details to follow.

Field Report #1 - the New Electronics!

2010-06-03T09:57:00.067-04:00

So the Memorial Day trip to Block Island gave us a chance to check out the new electronics and see how it all works. It was a clear beautiful weekend and a gorgeous trip out and back, perfect conditions to test and play. Being able to see with the MkI Eyeball what the Radar is showing lets you know it's working.

And it is working - very, very well.

In a word: Cool.

Being able to SEE things out there and now where they are when your eyes are blind is nice. And somewhat novel since our old radar was OK but antiquated. The small CRT tube on the nav station showed some monochrome blips that were usually where they were supposed to be.

The NEW radar shows a lot more blips with a lot more accuracy. We saw crystal clear returns off of small Quahog boats (14-18 foot power boats usually made of fiberglass and sometimes wood), sailboats where as clear as day and we even got a faint return off a kayak.

But more than that new radar has lot of of "Stuff" tied to it that the old one just couldn't do. Like overlays over charts so the blips appear on the chart which helps you determine what's a government mark and what's a boat. And ARPA (Automatic Radar Plotting Aid), which allows the radar to acquire "Targets" and then calculate their course, speed, turn rate and flag any intercept threats. And AIS (Automated Identification System), which is a VHF signal required on commercial vessels giving their name, course, speed, destination, size, etc. etc. VERY useful when figuring out where that huge thing is going and getting you a name to hail long before you can pick it out on the binoculars. In fact the AIS can "see" ships that the Radar can not, being that they are both "line of sight" but the AIS signal is received 80 feet above the water and the Radar is only 18-20 feet over the water.

And all this stuff actually worked - we could see AIS signals from ships 10+ miles away or further and track other boats with ease. On a clear day, it's cool. In the fog it gives you a lot more margin for error. Of course you can't keep your head in the boat twiddling the dials and staring at a screen, you have to use your eyes and ears but every little bit of extra data helps.

The other instruments all worked well and easily. Some calibration is needed; we did the Maretron compass but the boat speed seems off. But it's pretty damned good nonetheless, and we were already able to get more benefit from having true boat speed (not GPS which isn't so helpful) to get our sail and boat trim dialed in better.

The Maretron DSM 250 is beyond great as an anchor watch tool (the primary function I bought it for). I can have a nice dim screen with red lights showing me heading, wind speed, time and boat drag position. The "Drag Alarm" feature is nice, you define a starting position (either with the current GPS position or you enter it) and it will notify you with a loud and persistent alarm as soon as your position moves outside a certain radium from that point. Just what I was looking for. The only disappointments are 1) I still can't figure out where to permanently mount it in the at cabin and 2) it highlights how much NMEA2000 sensor information I am not making use of. There are a wide array of possible sensors out there - temperature, weather, etc. etc. most of which leave empty and useless screens.

My only real complaints are the FI-50 series instrument displays. The first complaint is they are a bit too reflective, a less shiny surface would pick up less glare and allow better visibility. The second complaints are specific to the FI-504 "Multi" and FI-503 "Digital" displays, neither of which compares favorably to the ancient Raymarine ST80 "Multi" display. Why? The ST80 allows you to show one large data item, or a "Multiline" display, and you can put any available information on any line of the multiline display. This lets you get a pretty useful display of what you want to see.

Not so with the FI-503 "Digital", each line has a very limited subset of data that can be shown on it. You can't get speed on line one, you can't get depth on line two, etc. etc. And line three is tiny and mostly environmental information (of which I have next to none) or logged miles which I think is pretty useless. So I can't display any data on any row. And the "Multi" does not have a multi line display option - it will show you everything in the system but only one item at a time. So neither device can match the capability of the older Raymarine gear. Disappointing, really. Though I've not read the manual cover to cover I'm pretty certain I'm right on this.

All in all - a very satisfying shakedown. Sure there are things to work out. Since returning from Block Island I've already made some changes, like installing the Power Supply Unit with the Radar. For this weekend I took a shortcut and plugged the radar directly to the MFD (Multi Function Display) which worked fine, but means the Radar is always on Standby when the MFD is on and is sucking precious power. With a separate power supply I can turn the Radar on and off and only let it suck amps when I think I will need it. But that is now in and working. And the antenna splitter I installed to piggyback the FM radio on the VHF antenna just didn't seem to work, the VHF wasn't getting out and the AIS wasn't receiving until I dropped that out of the loop. Of course I don't care a lot about FM anyway but it would be nice to work it out so I could listen to commercial radio if I felt like it.

The punch-down list for the electronics as it stands now:

Reconnect new back stay antenna line to SSB antenna tuner (involves another hole in the deck)
Install Furuno Autopilot, including rudder reference indicator, NMEA 0183 integration with network and a binnacle mounted controller.
Move old Raymarine Autopilot controls out of the way
Figure out why the MFD's aren't telling the course info to the FI-50's
Install the Wave WiFi unit permanently (waiting for "N" connectors); we did test this with a temporary small antenna and got signal and internet from shore.
Tidy up all the wires
Calibrate!
Install an extra FI-503 display on the nav station.
Figure out how to get a decent multi data display on the binnacle along with the autopilot control head.
Update the MFD's and other gear with all the latest firmware, charts, etc.

I'm sure there is more...and there is a much longer list of the "Spring Punchdown" list!

Slackers!

2010-06-02T21:54:00.001-04:00

Ever hear the story of the U.S.S. Yorktown back in WWII? During the battle of the Coral Sea the carrier Yorktown was badly damaged - so badly damaged the Japanese scored her as "sunk" and American experts figured she needed at least three months in dry dock in Pearl Harbor before she could even consider being combat ready.

However the work crews in Pearl, under intense pressure from the Navy because of the knowledge of the impending Japanese attack on Midway pulled of a miracle in the yard and turned her out for combat in three days and she made it to Midway in time to play a pivotal role before finally being sunk by multiple hits from bombs and torpedoes.

Slackers.

If they had seen the shape Evenstar was in in when she hit the water last Tuesday they might have been impressed that we managed to whip her into shape in time for a Memorial Day jaunt to Block Island.

OK, maybe I'm exaggerating just a little. But to see the boat on Tuesday morning go in the water with no mast, ceiling panels down, chairs removed from their mountings, doors off their cabinets, holes in the deck, binnacle, and cockpit, wires hanging everywhere, tools, crud, dust, baking soda, wire snippings, wire insulation, boxes and uninstalled electronics on every flat surface - well the transformation to a functional boat with mostly functional systems in time to leave before 0800 on Saturday morning was quite a feat. With thanks to Chris (of "Teak Project from Hell" fame) for his assistance on a couple of long days, and a sterling organizational and cleaning effort by the whole crew Friday night we got it together and had a nice time.

Even if the boat was still too cruddy for company and we left port with an empty booze locker anyway...

Autopilot Madness - a bit of a Rant

2010-05-23T10:48:00.063-04:00

So yesterday I FINALLY figured out what exactly Furuno meant in their manuals for installing the PG500R "Rate Compensated Heading Sensor" which ships as part of the Navpilot 511 Autopilot system.

I thought it was me, I thought I just wasn't getting it. After all how could these new, state-of-the-art devices actually rely on NMEA 0183 to talk to each other (and everything else) when the rest of the super-slick Navnet 3D products are using far more up to date technologies like NMEA 2000 and Ethernet? To me it read like Furuno was expecting me to throw a "bearskins and flint knives" solution on board the Enterprise. It just was not logical.

Turns out I was right - it DOES make no sense. The Navpilot 511 and the PG500R simply do not speak modern networked instrument protocols. It is NMEA 0183 all the way.

** Technical Interlude **
To the non technical, non sailors who might be reading this (Hi Mom!) you might be wondering "What is so appalling about this NMEA 0183 thing anyway? What about it offends you so?"

In short, it is a communication standard for electronic devices set by the National Marine Electronic Association (NMEA); it was the cat's meow back in the 1980's. It is fairly slow and fairly limited and frequently involves soldering or twiddling with tiny little wires and cross connections and "bridges" trying to figure out which is "Talker+" and should be talking to the other Talker+, or maybe talking to Listerner+. On one hand, it is fairly simple...because it is fairly limited. It also does not include a power source, NMEA 0183 devices speak over NMEA 0183 but they need their own connection to batteries.

The NMEA released a new standard called 'NMEA 2000'. It is much faster, has standardized cabling, uses more advanced protocols and offers a whole lot more of options and power to the equipment network. NMEA 2000 (or N2K) also provides power over the network, so most (but not all) N2K devices just need to be plugged into the network. If they do not drain too much power they need no more external wiring or fusing - it's plug it in and turn it on.

Ethernet is the same basic protocol/network that has been used in computer networking for the last 20+ years now, that it is finally becoming almost de rigeur in marine technologies is more of a comment on the state of marine tech rather than the network itself. But it is fast, easy, and ubiquitous - almost every one of you reading this is connecting through Ethernet somewhere in the mix.

NMEA 0183 = cranky, slow, archaic but with small wires, NMEA 2000 = fast, simple and powerful...big fat cables but with power.

** End of Technical Interlude **

So - what is my bitch? Easy - THIS IS BRAND NEW AND VERY EXPENSIVE STUFF, IT SHOULD USE THE LATEST PROTOCOLS. The NavNet 3D gear on the boat all talks to itself over Ethernet and can use N2K data - why can't the autopilot? Why has Furuno not updated this yet? To get this device talking to the rest of the boat I need to run another NMEA 0183 cable half the length of the boat and wire it in so it can talk slowly to the rest of the gear.

It gets worse though, because my original plan was to have this snazzy new "Rate Compensated" compass supply the default compass data for my network. This allows the Radar/AIS combo to use something called ARPA (Automatic Radar Plotting Aid) to calculate possible intercepts and collision course from target data on the radar. It also would allow me to look at a monitor in the middle of the night to see if the boat has changed directions or swung at anchor.

Unfortunately the default wiring for the compass with the autopilot has the compass get powered by the autopilot. No power to the autopilot = no compass. And of course it also relies on NMEA 0183 to get the data to the Radar/AIS, possibnly even through the autopilot. It CAN be powered independently (like I want to run another power lead to it...not) but it is not designed to do so when used with the autopilot.

Of course this is not an acceptable solution, I have no desire to leave an autopilot powered on all night to get a compass heading on a data display, it is a huge waste of power even if the Autopilot is on Standby mode. They should be independent, this is a throwback to the bad old Raytheon days when the Seatalk bus got all of the power from all of the instruments from the Autopilot processor, you HAD to have the A/P on if you wanted to see wind direction for example.

The upshot of this all is that I decided to add a sensible, modern compass to the mix so I picked up a Maretron SSC200 Solid State Rate Gyro Compass. This appears on the surface to be a far superior product to the Furuno PG500R. Even if the Furuno is capable of more frequent updates the Maretron speaks (and is powered by) NMEA 2000. Additionally the Furuno is very cranky about which orientation you install it in (must be on a horizontal surface pointing forward...not always easy to find in a boat) whereas the Maretron can be installed in pretty much any orientation so long as you configure it accordingly.

Being a belt and suspenders sort of guy myself I am not offended by the concept of extra electronic compasses on board - I'm all for redundancy. But I am offended that this technical offering does not integrate with the rest of Furuno's fine navigation hardware. In truth I could have used ANY autopilot and it would not have mattered one bit since it is all over NMEA 0183 and offers no real integration with the rest of the electronics suite.

Bottom's Update

2010-05-22T22:48:00.000-04:00

We have two coats of bottom paint, the yard came through today with the Saturday workman.

Remaining to do, bottom-wise before launch (with responsibilities):

Reinstall prop, spray paint it and install new zincs - ME
Remove, glass over and paint old ST80 depth/temp sounder through hull - YARD
Install Shaft Shark without opening any veins (yes, we are planning to visit Maine this summer...) - ME
Clean out bow thruster tunnel, service thruster, paint tunnel and reinstall protective grating - YARD
Touch up bottom paint, remove masking tape and paint missed areas - YARD
Swap out old Airmar/ST80 speed thru-hull for new Airmar speed/depth/temp thru-hull; paint accordingly - YARD

And of course when the boat is in the slings the bottom of the keel needs some paint too.

We just might get splashed by Tuesday if the yard can get around to the glass work.