2025…
A needful read, Dave Z opines on plywood boat building, and Trinidad declares a state of emergency… Yeah, interesting times and it’s only day two into 2025 but I’m already avoiding my daily scan of the news. Time to get to doing.
A needful read, Dave Z opines on plywood boat building, and Trinidad declares a state of emergency… Yeah, interesting times and it’s only day two into 2025 but I’m already avoiding my daily scan of the news. Time to get to doing.
Ecocide is today’s word, USPS RIP, and in the “Longish reads that are spot on” department… When reading a certain forum that shall remain nameless, I’m often confronted with the surfeit of negative posts that are just saying no, you can’t do something. While I’ll admit that there are any number of folks who should …
So, yeah, about that Islander 36 project boat… Confronted with a boat like the Islander, my first impression is “Ugh”. My second is “Get rid of all the crap and clean the sucker up and there might be a good boat in there somewhere”. And, my third reaction is “I need to do the math!”. …
I’m trying to get my head around the idea that if building a single smartphone produces 87 kilos of waste and 110 kilos of CO2 emissions what the holy fuck does it take to build a Bendytoy 32? Seriously, there has to be a better more sustainable way to do things. If that makes any …
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 …
One thing you have to keep in mind is that no one is designing or building what I’d call a VolksCruiser. Take that Pop 25 from the last post as a good example. It starts out with a hull and accommodation that just screams VolksCruiser yet when it comes to the rig it starts getting …
It occurred to me that you just don’t see a lot of homebuilt cruising boats in the Caribbean these days and I find that all kinds of depressing. One reason is that DIY boatbuilding has become something of an antisocial activity in a “We are what we buy” world. A world that seems to look …
The other day I found myself listening to someone going on about their stainless steel bespoke water bottle as a must have for the cruising sailor. I was not impressed. The argument that an expensive water bottle is good for the environment is somewhat dubious in that its fabrication requires energy which is, more often …
I’m sure if you’re considering getting a boat and going cruising on a budget you’ll be getting a shit load of push-back from just about everybody that it just can’t be done. Kind of a bummer that. The truth is, there’s a plethora of good inexpensive sailboats just waiting for someone to find them and …
I’ve been following the build of a Bolger design of late and it’s akin to fingernails being dragged across a chalkboard to me. Admittedly, it’s a very common mistake that’s being made but I find that the misuse of epoxy just drives me batshit crazy. Epoxy is great stuff but it is expensive and it …