a clean white sheet of paper...

About that report on environmental impact, BP guilty of eleven felonies but no jail time, and in the we-are-so-screwed-when-guys-like-this-are-running-the-show department...

There's an observation in the film "Longitude" (or the book) where the man set the task of repairing the clock notes that the designer never ever went back and changed anything but simply beavered forward with fixes on top of fixes on top of fixes...

Well, I'll admit I'm not so sure how common this state of affairs is in clock design, but it is a standard operating procedure where boats are concerned!

I'm well aware of this because, while I strive for a simpler boat, I find myself battling the cancer of over-complication on a daily basis and most of this is caused by simply wanting to keep forward momentum and not wanting to backtrack on problems.

Or, as Joe Pike would say, "The only direction I know is forward"...

Now, I'm sure, where Joe Pike is concerned, forward really is the only way to go but as far as boat design, systems, and suchlike, not so much.

Take our electric propulsion system for instance...

We chose to go with electric propulsion because it was simple, reliable, and affordable. For as much as we used an engine it made sense and once we set down that path there was no looking back.

Over the years as things changed and the EP system evolved, it started getting a bit more complicated in terms of related systems (chargers, solar, genset, etc) because I kept adding things. Hardly surprising that half a dozen years later we are now looking at a much more complicated and admittedly kludgey system than what we used to have.

That said, while currently over-complicated and kludgey, it is still, in my opinion,  simpler and superior to a diesel for our needs...

But, while researching more and more stuff related to the VolksCruiser concept I found myself looking at electric propulsion in a different light and found it wanting (for those anti-EP folks I should point out that for the VolksCruiser, diesel sucks as well).

The fact is, I was only able to do this because the VolksCruiser is pretty much a blank sheet of paper with no preconceptions and, as such, very different from the problem solving I deal with on "So It Goes" where almost all of the systems are in place and I have those Joe Pike tattoos pointing me ever forward.

Time to get out a clean white sheet of paper...

Listening to the Youngbloods

So it goes...