I’ve always been intrigued with the idea of windvane self-steering. In fact, my first interest in sailing or cruising came about when I read about Robin Lee Graham’s quest to be the youngest circumnavigator in National Geographic. The hook for me was a picture of Robin Lee Graham fiddling with a self-steering gear and something …
Being that I keep a weather eye out for used self-steering gear it’s hard to ignore that the current pricing for thirty year old wind vanes are just nuts. The other day I was quoted $2,200. for a 45-year old Aries which appeared to be in horrible shape. But, what the hell, boat folks are …
One thing no one ever tells you is that all boat building and refit projects is mostly a lot of sitting around doing nothing while you try to figure stuff out. Which is not always a bad thing. So far this month, I’ve put in a couple of hours of actual work on the boat …
There are days when the insanity of boat gear makes me want to scream and shout. What’s even worse is how compliant we all seem to be with this kind of norm where boat stuff is concerned. Talk about marine quality… The last few days I’ve been trying to fix a traveler car which retails …
Every day or so, West Marine sends me an email trying to sell me something and, while I seldom ever buy anything from them, it is a connection I keep an eye on in the hope that, one of these days, they’ll come up with something truly needful. I’m still waiting on that but my …
Every project in my experience has a “day from hell” or something like it and yesterday was the Islander’s day from hell. Funny though, it started as a day with high hopes with no problems foreseen. In fact, it was a day of high expectations with nary a sign of a problem at all. One …
The funny thing about most boat projects is that the initial plan seldom resembles the final outcome. This can be good if your plan evolves in a positive way or all kinds of bad if you lose control of your plan and find yourself with an out of control budget. For me, the central concept …
The nice thing about most classic plastic boats is the fact that they were mostly built like tanks. Fiberglass and polyester resin were cheap and did not require much in the way of expensive labor to slap together so, for the most part, a lot of very strong boats got made in the late 60s …
I mentioned earlier that I’d found an inexpensive stove that I was going to try on the Islander and it arrived yesterday. The stove in question is this one… I’m actually pretty impressed. Inspecting the stove it appears that making it into a gimbaled stove will be non-problematic and at a cost of maybe ten …
In one of Lin and Larry’s books they talk about their yearly purge of getting stuff off the boat that is not needed or not earning its keep. One of the best bits of advice I’ve encountered where boats are concerned. Just this morning I spent several hours going through boxes of the previous owners’ …
