Captain's Blog

Tracker Issue

2010-08-06T09:15:00.009-04:00

Maryanne let me know that the yotreps yacht tracker program had stopped working. For some reason the webserver has stopped executing perl scripts which aren't in the cgi-bin directory. I don't know why. Someone at my web hosting company must have changed a setting on the server. I don't know if this a temporary problem, or if they will fix it soon.

Anyway, I moved a copy of the program to the cgi-bin directory, and it works fine. But anyone using the program to track their boat will need to change the html code on their blog in order to access it. For example, my code changed from:

to:

Sail Fail

2010-01-18T19:34:00.003-05:00

After several weeks of very cold weather, we are having a spell of warmer weather. I decided to go check on the boat, which I hadn't seen since sometime in November. I even had fantasies of taking her out for a sail.

This was not to be, as I'd forgotten how much more slowly water warms than air. While air temps on land may have been in the 50s, the water was still frozen and the air above it was not much warmer. I also planned on using the boat's heat pump, but it didn't work at all when its intake pipe froze. It didn't work much better unfrozen. Not too much heat to pump out of really cold water. The pipes at the bathhouse were frozen too, so no showers. It was a fairly cold and disappointing few days hanging out on the boat at the marina.

On my last day there, a couple boats tried to break through the ice to the inlet. They weren't making much progress while I was there. That's them in the photo, stuck with a couple hundred yards to go to the inlet. There was also a guy at the marina getting set to sail to the Bahamas. Seems like he's getting an awfully late start.

Monster Rock

2009-11-23T20:59:00.003-05:00

Older Salty knows something about fishin'!

Death with Dignity

2009-11-16T19:17:00.019-05:00

Recently when I stop at the gas station in Deltaville for gas and beer, the cashier always asks if I need some ice. I assumed that she thought I'd want ice to keep the beer cold. This time of year that would be completely unnecessary.

I've caught a lot of fish this fall. The rockfish have been heavy down here. This time out, I put the line in the water and caught one before I'd even left the anchorage. I thought about throwing it back. I'd heard fisherman on the radio the day before bragging about the 30+ inch fish they'd caught, and I wanted to bring home a big one.

It was a good thing I kept the fish. I didn't get another hit the rest of the trip. There were no gaggles of birds feasting on bait fish this time. That's a tell tale sign of big rockfish feeding. And the dolphins have left the bay too. I think rockfish trophy season may soon end.

I've caught a fair number of fish in my life. I pond fished as a kid, bringing in blue gills and an occasional bass. I've caught a number of blue fish since sailing on Split Decision. And some spanish mackerel, croakers, and jacks.

My gutting and filleting skills have improved, but I'm still squeamish about the killing. That's where the ice comes in. That's how most fisherman around here kill their fish. Hypothermia. Another way to go about it is to pour some hard liquor over its gills. I've read on the internet that works, but haven't tried it. My technique recently has been to stick a screw driver through its head, which is bloody and very unpleasant for both the fish and me. But it's probably a vast improvement for the fish over my old technique of just letting it bash around in the cockpit until it expired.

But next time I'll buy the ice.

Man the Pumps!

2009-11-12T16:49:00.008-05:00

The only sailing I did today was in the basement of our new (to us) house. The house is what in sailing terminology would be called an "old shoe". An old shoe is a very seaworthy boat with classic lines. That's what our 1920s Craftsman Four Square house is. Except it was not particularly well cared for by her previous owners. Among other deferred maintenance is a wet bilge. (For you landlubbers, that would be a leaky basement.)

The remnants of hurricane Ida have been pouring rain on our house and I awoke to find several inches of water in our basement. I set off to Lowes this morning to purchase a bilge pump. While waiting for it to pump out the water, I sailed my catamaran around.

i can haz wokfish?

2009-10-24T18:23:00.015-04:00

On my trip to Tangier Island this week there wasn't much light on the bay until after 7 am, and the sun didn't rise until a while after that. But I was awake much earlier and wanting to sail. So off I was at dawn's first light.

This also happens to be a great time to fish on the Chesapeake in the fall. There's a reason why hunters and fishermen wake so early in the morning to head out into the woods or water. That's when the animals are feeding.

The first day out, the wind and waters were calm as I sailed out of a creek and into Fleets bay. But that didn't last long as I sailed into a flock of birds diving into the water. They were fishing from above on a school of bait fish. At the same time, Rockfish were fishing the school from below. The water was alive with action as the little fish jumped to escape the Rockfish, but were also being gobbled up by the birds above.

Into this mess I sailed, and my reel was promptly sent spinning when a Rockfish mistakenly took my lure for breakfast.

I could have spent all morning bringing in fish, but the legal limit is two Rockfish a day, and one was plenty for me anyway. They are big fish. I did put my line back in the water at the end of the trip, so I could have a fish to bring home and share with our new kittens.

I imagine if the pic below was on this website, it would be captioned "i can haz wokfish?"

Back in Port

2009-10-23T15:07:00.004-04:00

Had a great fall sail on the Chesapeake this week. I went to Tangier island.

Raised the Spinnaker

Caught some Rockfish.

Hung out on the island.

Saw some dolphins (really, there are dolphins in the video!)

And some sunsets and sunrises.

Sorry for the quality of the pics and video. They were all taken with my cellphone camera. I'll also try to flesh out the blog post with more commentary soon, but I no longer have my verizon aircard and the internet at the marina is pretty bad. I just wanted to get the media uploaded before I worked on the commentary.

No One Noticed

2009-08-17T07:11:00.003-04:00

I got new glasses. My old pair went overboard about a month ago while raising the jib in some rough weather. I imagine some crab walking around on the bottom of the Chesapeake wearing my old glasses now.

No one has commented on my new glasses. Well, except Amy. But she helped pick them out. She's my style consultant, and says I look much hipper in my new glasses. I pretty much trust her fashion advice. The only thing I'm not happy about, is that she won't let me wear mock turtlenecks anymore.

I also got a new hat. Bryan found it on the beach and gave it to me. In case you can't read it, it says "Master Baiters", and has a picture of a fish on it. I can't wait to wear it for Amy! I think she'll be pretty pleased.

Just for Fun

2009-08-15T16:30:00.003-04:00

Sailing with Thoreau

2009-08-14T11:18:00.006-04:00

Bryan seems oblivious to the shark pursuing him while body surfing behind Split Decision. We didn't quite get up to speeds where we could break out the water skis, but had a good sail on a single tack to the Occohannock river and back.

We didn't have much luck trolling Bryan as bait, but did catch a couple bluefish which made good fried fish sandwiches. I caught a crab whose meat made it into my morning eggs. Bryan also found me a new hat while beach combing. I don't want to spoil the surprise for Amy when I get home, but it is classic.

Funniest incident of the trip was when we nearly collided with a motor boat in the middle of the Chesapeake. We saw him coming from about a mile away. He just kept coming. He even adjusted his course to intercept us. He ended up crossing, I am not kidding, 30 feet in front of our bow. I probably could have T-boned him if I wanted. After he passed, he got on the radio and called me an idiot.

House

2009-07-20T17:55:00.002-04:00

We bought one. Actually a month ago. But the sellers didn't move out until today. That's Amy sitting on the front porch before we did the final walk through this afternoon.

And to somehow tie this post into sailing, because this is a sailing blog after all, the house is about 15 minutes closer to the boat. Hurray!

A Plethora of Posts

2009-07-12T06:10:00.001-04:00

I'm working my way through a very long boat todo list. Eventually I'll get Split Decision shipshape. Yesterday's tasks included going up the mast in a bosun's chair. I've only been aloft once before, years ago on my old boat.

Pic is from the spreaders, half way up the mast, where I was working on the steaming light. Amy and my boat neighbor Art are below, waiting to haul me down.

Yacht Club

2009-07-11T07:17:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago I took the admiral out for her first overnight of the season. By coincidence, the yacht club at our marina went to the same cove. They graciously invited us to hang out with them. It's a pretty low key club, and we may join, if only to be able to say that we're members of a yacht club. I told Amy if we joined, I'd have to break out her old Hilton Head name, and start calling her Muffy again.

All the other boats had to anchor out and dinghy into the beach. We backed up to the beach, stuck a couple anchors in the sand and walked to the get together. Split Decision is the closest boat in the pic.

Summer Cruise

2009-07-09T14:44:00.004-04:00

Just back after a week long trip from Deltaville, up the Patuxent and back. The weather was awesome, and I did lots of sailing. Winds were pretty steady 10-15 everyday, and at no point was I hot, becalmed, drenched by a thunderstorm, or overwhelmed by insects.

On the leg up, I overnighted in Reedville and the Honga River. Reedville stinks if you are downwind of the fish plant. It smells like cat food. The Honga river doesn't seem like a popular spot to visit, but I've now been there three times this year. It just seems like the wind is always blowing me there, and I prefer to sail rather than motor hugging the Western Shore to my ultimate destination (as it seems many others do).

I saw dolphins in the Rappahanock, Reedville and Fleets bay. On the way up there were stingrays everywhere. At first I didn't know what they were. They just looked like brown blobs in the water. But then a few passed close by the boat. It was pretty cool watching them swimming, their wing tips breaching the surface.

I was able to motor sail most of the way up and down the Patuxent. The river was nice enough, with plenty of power boaters, but only a handful of sailboats. The river is shallow, but I think it would be a great place for a small daysailer. There are few markers upriver of Solomons. I ignored them and never touched bottom.

I arrived upriver at the Benedict bridge around 5pm Sunday afternoon. Despite having phoned the bridge earlier in the week, and being assured that the bridge opens 6am-6pm everyday, without holiday restrictions, the bridge did not open. There was no response by vhf, and the phone just rang and rang. Guess they quit early on Sunday evenings. I probably should have phoned earlier to let them know my arrival time, but I wasn't sure I'd make it by 6pm.

But anyway, the bridge opened the next morning. I waited until after rush hour to pass through, but on the way back down the river, I had to pass during rush hour in order to catch the tide. My apologies to all the people I made 15 minutes late to work. I can be a selfish ahole sometimes.

There are power lines at the power plant north of the bridge. The posted height is 60 feet, but I had some pucker factor passing under them. One set of lines didn't look very high, and I think it's a very rare sailboat that travels north of Benedict.

Because of time constraints, I only had one day to stay at Fred's place, but we had a great time, and his family's place is beautiful. I'd only been there once before about ten years ago. The river below the power plant is nice enough, but we took his brand new center console stinkpot out and motored further up the river to Jug bay. The river narrows and is much more picturesque than the wide and developed lower river. He let me take the helm, and I had a blast bombing along at 25 mph.

The trip back took two long long days of sailing. The stingrays had all disappeared. I don't know where they went that fast. I tried raising the spinnaker at one point. It would have been the perfect point of sail all day, but there was too much wind for me to raise it single handed for the first time, and I gave up. I need to try it in lighter winds, and perhaps with the admiral aboard to woman the helm.

I don't know that I would recommend the Patuxent to a fellow cruiser. It might be fun to head past Solomons, if the wind and current are favorable. But it is a haul all the way up the river. I wouldn't do it, if I didn't have a reason. That said, I might try to make this trip an annual event.

Pic is Mr. Fred and his buddy Jeff when they motored down the river to meet me in Mr. Fred's new motor boat.

Split Decision Featured in Sailing Magazine

2009-04-29T14:20:00.002-04:00

Our new marina has a lending library in the clubhouse. The Admiral is pretty excited about this. One of her favorite things to do on the boat is reading trashy novels. A lot of marinas have libraries where you can exchange whatever book you've finished for a new one.

Despite my english degree, I'm not so much into novels. I do however enjoy reading old sailing magazines people leave behind. I picked up a few when I was on the boat last week. Imagine my surprise when I saw a picture of my boat in the February issue of "Sailing" magazine. There is an ad for Gemini Catamarans on page 12. My boat is the second closest boat in the raft-up picture near the bottom left hand corner.

I have an original copy of the picture hanging on the wall in my boat. Click on the image above for a larger picture of the ad.

Captain's Chair

2009-03-11T10:57:00.003-04:00

I left Baltimore on Sunday, heading for Deltaville. As a going away present, Matt gave me a 50 gallon water tank and a twelve volt tv. Thanks Matt! I'm not sure how useful the tv will be with the conversion to digital tv, but I'm pretty excited about the tank. I'll use it either as a gas tank, if the plastic is compatible with petroleum, or as a poo tank. My present holding tank is pathetically small, and has been known to fill quickly and overflow with guests aboard. Yuck.

I just need to figure out how to get the tank into the boat. It's pretty big and won't fit through the hatches. I'll have to disassemble some of the cabin woodwork to get it through the head and into the storage locker. Meanwhile, the tank is proving useful as a captain's chair.

Popsicle Scott

2009-01-21T13:43:00.002-05:00

Self Install

2008-11-27T09:27:00.005-05:00

Nautig now self installs like a regular windows program. Download the setup file here. The initial program setup includes the basic charts and more detailed charts for the Chesapeake bay. For other detailed charts you still need to download and unzip one or more of the following files. They should be unzipped into the "chart" directory.

Charts_1.zip	100 mb	Florida Keys to North Carolina
Charts_2.zip	90 mb	North Carolina to Long Island Sound
Charts_3.zip	70 mb	Long Island Sound to Maine

Beta Test

2008-11-25T19:22:00.012-05:00

Enlarge Map

NautiG program files:

NautiG.zip	70 mb	The program, directory structure, basic charts and satellite imagery
Charts_1.zip	100 mb	Florida Keys to North Carolina
Charts_2.zip	90 mb	North Carolina to Long Island Sound
Charts_3.zip	70 mb	Long Island Sound to Maine
Satellite_1.zip	40 mb	Two more levels of satellite imagery
Satellite_2.zip	130 mb	Final level of satellite imagery

If you can't tell, the above is a flash program. You can drag the map, just like in Google maps. You can click the buttons to zoom in and out. Although, you probably can't see the buttons very well unless you enlarge the map.

The program has nautical charts superimposed on satellite images. Kinda fun, but it's been done before. What I haven't seen, is an offline version which you can use on a boat without internet access. So that's what I've been writing the past few weeks. The files which make up the program are listed above. They include a lot of satellite and chart images, almost 500 megabytes worth, so I broke the program up into separate files.

The first file, NautiG.zip includes the basic files and program to get started. Once you unzip the file, you should see a directory structure which looks like this:

NautiG.exe (anchor icon) is the program. Subsequent chart_X.zip files should be unzipped into the the chart directory. Satellite_X.zip files should be unzipped into the satellite directory.

If you download and try the program, please let me know if it works, and what you think of it. I've installed it on three computers so far: two Windows XP computers and one Vista. So far, the program has run fine on all three. I'll ask family and friends to try the program over Thanksgiving, and then post about it on some sailing message boards. For the time being, the program only runs under Windows, although I have plans for Mac and Linux versions.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Picture from last year's Thanksgiving on the boat in NC.

Kyle and Maryanne Made It!

2008-11-13T14:22:00.005-05:00

And they added my Yotreps widget to their blog. I'm honored. The widget doesn't exactly fit in the sidebar of their blog. I forgot to mention that the dimensions of the widget can be changed. Just fiddle with the width and height numbers in the code below until you find the appropriate size for your map.

<iframe
width="265" height="260"
src="http://nautig.com/wc/tracker/yotrepsHTML.pl?callSign=AI4QI&width=250&height=200">
</iframe>

I'm working on an update of my NautiG/Boyfriend Tracker/Nautical Chart GPS program. Hopefully I'll have something to post about that next week.

Yotreps Widget

2008-11-02T09:40:00.014-05:00

Update: Improved and moved the tracking widget to the sidebar. It now tracks all the boats reporting to Yotreps. Just select the boat's call sign from the list and hit the "get" button. Clicking "Enlarge Map" will take you to that boat's Yotreps page with more information about the boat. Kyle and Maryanne's call sign is AI4QI.

This widget can be embedded in any webpage. I used the code below in Google Blogger. (Change the call sign to whatever boat you want to track.) Let me know if you try to embed the widget in a webpage and have any problems.

Code:

<iframe
width="375" height="300"
src="http://nautig.com/wc/tracker/yotrepsHTML.pl?callSign=AI4QI">
</iframe>

Kyle and Maryanne left last week on their sailing adventure to the Caribbean. They have a Gemini catamaran too, although much newer than mine. They're much more adventuresome than I am. They did a little bit of the ICW to start the trip, but now are way out in the ocean. They're not even bothering to stop in Bermuda, which I hear is a nice place in the middle of the Atlantic to visit.

Being that far out, they do not have cell phone service. But they do have an Iridium satellite phone. They've been updating their position on a website called Yotreps, and sending short updates about their progress. They have a link to Yotreps on their blog, but I thought I'd create a little map for them like the one I used to track my progress.

Sarah! Sarah! Sarah!

2008-10-27T16:15:00.004-04:00

Amy emailed me this morning that Sarah Palin was coming to our town today. Regardless of her politics, there is something about a woman running for vice president, who hunts and fishes, and was a former beauty queen, which pushes some buttons in my male "joe sixpack" psyche. Amy seems to tolerate my fascination with Sarah Palin, and I guess by emailing me about the event, she also indulges me.

I brought a camera with me, and had visions of getting a photo of Gov. Palin and me together. The reality turned out to be me standing in the cold rain for an hour elbowing a bunch of cold, wet conservatives for a good view. She spent most of the visit indoors, but came out to greet the crowd briefly before leaving. Disappointingly, the best pics I got were some blurry photos of her waving as her bus passed by.

Mostly Unabridged

2008-10-22T10:26:00.004-04:00

Finally completed a version of the book which contains most of the blog, including comments. Most of what was deleted, was for space. With all the pictures and formatting, it can be tough to get everything right without orphaned pictures and lots of blank wasted space. But I'm pretty pleased with the result. You can read it here.

I was able to get it all in under 400 pages. Grampa suggests that this is too long for a book, even if a lot of it is pictures. I'm going to start work on a "tightened up" version of the book. I'd like to get it down closer to 300 pages, while getting rid of extraneous stuff and making it more readable.

If anyone has specific suggestions of stuff to cut, or more general advice on how to edit the book, I'd love to hear it.

In other news, Kyle and Maryanne left Portsmouth, VA heading south on the ICW. I'm not sure where their destination is. But I'm pretty jealous that I'm not going with them.

Amy-Cuda

2008-10-20T19:55:00.002-04:00

I'm thinking about getting this for xmas as a present for Amy.

Unabridged

2008-10-03T12:04:00.012-04:00

Work on a version of a book including comments, is coming along swimmingly. The first version of the book I mostly copy & pasted, and formatted by hand. For this version, I've mostly automated the process. I wrote the perl script below to download the blog and strip a lot of the html formatting from the text.


#!/usr/bin/perl
use LWP::Simple;

open INFILE, "bloglinks.txt";
@lines = <INFILE>;
close INFILE;


foreach $line (@lines)
{
  if ($line =~ /(http.+html)"/){unshift @urls, $1;}
}

open OF, ">blogcontent.txt";

foreach $url (@urls)
{
  $on = 0;
  my $content = get $url;
  @content = split(/\n/, $content);
  foreach $content1 (@content)
  {
    if ($content1 =~ /Post a Comment/){$on = 0}
    if ($on == 1)
    {
      $content1 =~ s/<br \/>/\n/g;
      $content1 =~ s/<br\/>/\n/g;
      $content1 =~ s/<BR \/>/\n/g;
      $content1 =~ s/<BR\/>/\n/g;
      $content1 =~ s/<\/h3>/(-\/B-)/;
      $content1 =~ s/<p.*?>/\n\n/g;
      $content1 =~ s/<span style="font-style:italic;">/(-I-)/;
      $content1 =~ s/<.*?>//g;
      $content1 =~ s/.+, 200.+M/\n\n/;
      $content1 =~ s/(comments:)/$1\n\n/;
      $content1 =~ s/^ +$//;
      $content1 =~ s/<dd class='comment-footer'>/\n\n/;
      print OF $content1;
    }
    if ($content1 =~ /<h3 class='post-title entry-title'>/)
    {
      $on = 1;
      print OF "(-B-)";
    }
  }
}    
close OF;

Also, I've refamiliarized myself with regular expressions. Regular expressions are a really powerful tool for parsing texts. I use them often when programming, but they would be really useful to anyone who had to do large scale editing and formatting of texts.

Not sure if the perl script would be of use to anyone else. If there were a demand from people who wanted to download their blog to their computer, I could probably place the script on my server and hook it up to the web to automate the process for others.

I should have a pdf of the unabridged book completed sometime next week. So far with text only, no pictures and little formatting, the book is about 300 pages. When done, I'm guessing it will be 500 some pages. If that's the case, it should cost about $20 including shipping.

So far eight copies of the book have been sold. At first I assumed that maybe grampa had bought a bunch of copies to give to friends, but additional copies of the book have been ordered. So maybe Grampa and I don't account for all the orders. If you ordered a book, thanks! Please let me know what you think of it (including any corrections/typos).

And wish the Admiral and me luck. We're running in a 5k tomorrow. I haven't run in a road race in years, but I've been working out daily at the college gym. Hopefully I'll have a good time.