I spent 2 years refitting Stops to go cruising across the south pacific, a project I coined “wide blue yonder” to keep my motivation up, especially when I ran into many roadblocks installing American equipment on a French boat! I tried to do most of the work myself to save on labor costs and also…
After trials and tribulations with UPS freight, I finally got the 4 man offshore RescYou liferaft from Viking.. Don't use UPS freight if you can avoid it. I know some serious cruisers like Evans Starzinger and Beth Leonard don't carry a liferaft, but it's comforting to know you have another vessel to jump into if…
Just had a survey completed by Peter Minkwitz a Marine Surveyor. No issues found (phew!) apart from a corroded below the waterline thru-hull. To be extra safe I am replacing all the other 7 "below the waterline" thru hulls to add to the other 3 I replaced in March… Unfortunately it will cost 2 B.O.A.Ts…
New sails from North finally arrive. A new 120% furling genoa and a powerful G2 asymmetric spinnaker with a snuffer that can be carried pretty deep up to 130 AWA. I wanted a powerful easy to handle downwind sail for light airs up to 12 knots. Hoping the G2, which is the most powerful cruising…
Based on my energy usage projections I planned to generate 80-100 Ah/Day of energy without using the engine but when the engine was on for motoring I wanted to maximize the energy it could generate. The alternator would be a backup to solar and wind as well as a way to fully charge up the batteries…
A single side band radio with a modem for email and weather downloads was one of the top items to get done before setting on my big trip. I had a satellite phone as backup but didn’t want to it for downloads because of the minute costs. Also good to have a second system. The…
Based on my energy usage projections I needed to generate some 80-100 Ah/Day of energy without using the engine. I was looking for Solar to generate about 40Ah, but the problem was where to put the solar panels. Choosing the best solar panel and location I knew that even a tiny bit of shade was…
This blog post e-mail was sent over high frequency radio to Honolulu Hawaii from the boat in san francisco and then routed to the internet by the Sailmail receiving station.. Pretty cool especially when the cabin lights started glowing!! 3 weekends of toil installing the Icom M802 SSB radio with Pactor modem paid off.. Chet
Based on my energy usage projections I needed to generate some 80-100 Ah/Day of energy without using the engine. I was looking for Wind to generate about 40-50Ah, so wanted something powerful but also quiet. Typically the wind generator would be running 24X7 and didn’t want it to be noisy. SSCA has a great equipment…
Stops only had a 29 gallon diesel tank which didn’t give her much of a range if we hit a long patch of no wind in the doldrums. Also diesel wasn’t that easy to come by in the south pacific so I knew I needed the ability to carry more. Jerry cans would be an…