I’ve taken a break from monitoring potential VolksCruisers for sale but from today’s cursory glance there is no shortage of boats for reasonable money available. As to the Islander: work continues but most of the tasks are fairly easy and the difficult parts is in resisting the urge to throw money at needless things. The …
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 …
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 …
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 …
It’s funny how easy it is to fall into the spending to solve problems mode. Of course, if you’re using the internet most advice where boat stuff is concerned is buy this or buy that which I find somewhat problematic. For instance,trying to find a part for our elderly engine and trying to sort out …
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 …
I’m really not a big fan of tropical hardwoods on boats. Fact is, I actually prefer plain old pressure-treated pine which in some quarters is called Miami Teak. It is not called that as a sign of respect but a put down. Me? I’m happy to use whatever species of wood that works and I …
Of course, I knew this was going to happen but gee whiz sometimes I forget how stupid sailing gear can be. In today’s instance, I’m talking about the mainsheet traveler and the what-were-they-thinking about when they designed the main sheeting arrangement. Stupid as a bag of hammers. To add insult to injury it appears that …
