Stacey being heard, some Panama canal backstory, and something from the “war on science” department… I’m often confronted with the whole “you have to use this expensive marine part” rant and, so much so, I find myself even believing it from time to time. Case in point was yesterday when a connection on a solar …
For some reason or other, the idea of pulling out the raw-water cooled Yanmar 3HM and replacing it with an affordable, minimal electric propulsion system keeps playing around my thoughts. Having spent a bunch of years developing a variety of electric propulsion installations on our CAL 34, I do have some experience but came to …
What happens when you say “Electric Propulsion” three times… Read More »
This week, one of the tasks I actually look forward to is getting rid of all the vestiges of AC power aboard the Islander. Partly because the existing system is right up there with the stick a fork in a power circuit combined with taking a bath with a plugged in toaster. Then there’s the …
AC/DC and a couple of thoughts on a frugal power system… Read More »
Minimal boat, minimal systems. Just about as seaworthy as you can get.
A trend of note.
We caught the lower edge of Tropical Storm Phillipe which was mostly just rain. The good news was that down here we’ve been in a drought situation so rain is no bad thing in general. That said, for a lot of folks being flooded they might decide to differ. We’d actually been hoping for a …
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 …
Today, I’m mostly finishing the electrics aboard the Islander. Or, to be more truthful, I’ll have 12-volts but will be chasing circuits for the foreseeable future because I have a spaghetti factory of wires that I haven’t a clue where they go or what they do. Ah, the pleasures of a new old boat… Of …
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 …
For starters here’s a must read article on marine fuel that both scares me shitless as well as pisses me off… I’m not a huge fan of internal combustion engines and, given a choice, I’d much rather be engine-less or use just a small outboard as we did with So It Goes. The fact that …
