Small works...

About that dumb idea, some really, really good advice, and in the "not exactly surprising is it" department...

Here's some proof positive from David Bold that you don't need a fifty-foot boat to sail across the gulf stream and cruise the Bahamas with some style.


Cruising the Bahamas in 3.6 meter ENIGMA from David Bold on Vimeo.

Listening to a whole bunch of good people

So it goes...

The purge continues...

An education of sorts, about what you'd expect, and a pretty good reason to rethink using Dropbox...

I've been cleaning out lockers and organizing them in an ongoing spring cleaning purge and it's amazing just how much stuff falls into the what-is-this-why-did-we-ever-get-it category.

I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time...

On the positive side, you also find a lot of stuff you knew you had but has somehow migrated to places they don't belong. For the record, I have no clue why or how a pair of new Lewmar blocks had found their way into a box set aside for electrical oddities shoved away in an unreachable space that I'd put aside for fixing film and video gear.

Listening to ? & The Mysterians

So it goes...

A small and tidy package...

I've spent months researching various inflatable kayaks and so far most have come up short in one way or another. So far, when all is said and done, they all seem to take up just too much space in the cockpit locker to make them a better choice than a real tortured plywood sea kayak. Inflatables cease to have an advantage if you have to keep them stowed on deck.

This one by Innovahowever, looks promising...



I'm pretty sure I can find that kind of space!

A galley and a cunning plan...

Way back when, I decided we needed a cunning plan to get a settee seat across from the "booth/dinette"... To get said settee the galley had to be moved which resulted in the loss of a quarter berth which has caused all sorts of problems with accessing storage with an ongoing series of cunning plans to sort out the galley/under cockpit storage and so on...

BEWARE of CUNNING PLANS!

The worst part of the whole affair is that when the dust settled the settee never really got used and became a horizontal surface that collected "stuff". On the rare occasion that you might actually want to sit on the settee you could not because of the stuff... So it does go!

The current thinking is to move the galley back to its original location, replace the stove (with a new Camp Chef), recover the quarter berth and since we are deep in wood butchery land by this time, add a water tank or two (as we have that trans-Atlantic passage coming up) and swap the location of the 48V battery bank to make for a bit easier access... More soon come as the plan develops!

Always something to do on a boat...

Listening to Gasoline Alley...

So it goes.

Other peoples boat projects...

I've been helping a friend with a Catalina 38 sort out his wandering bulkhead and chainplate situation. As long as we were at it, the decision to dump the starboard settee in favor of a galley which would better suit their lifestyle and remake the old galley as a dedicated sleeping berth for their youngest daughter...

The thing is, with the older classic plastic, it really is pretty easy to change things around if one feels the need. The hard part is simply making the decision and doing the deed. In this case, the actual labor was less than a couple of days but took more like a week. The hard part was simply sorting out what was really wanted and getting past the having-your-cake-and-eating-it-too syndrome we all fall err to from time to time.

All in all, the new galley works with a big increase in accessible storage which the original C38 layout was sorely lacking in. While maybe a trick of scale, the entire salon now seems quite a bit larger as well...

You might notice the Camp chef stove which is easily the best bang for the buck that you can find with a boat friendly stove at less than $200... One of the new galley tasks was to sort out a gimbal for it which was quite an easy process and the stove balances quite easily with its new gimbal with no added weight needed.

On less being more... The tiny house movement

I'm not bragging but I am fairly good at seeing developing trends. If I have a problem it is that I tend to get on whatever wave I'm riding a little before it seems acceptable or doable in an easy fashion... Electric propulsion being a good example, We are maybe two or three years away from electric propulsion being fully accepted and the "Bee's knees", yet I have been doing the electric propulsion thing for nearly six years. Before that is was catamarans and ULDB sharpies...

Being a bit ahead of the crowd is not something I advise as a general rule as its stressful and breaking trail is never an easy thing, nor is being laughed at or ridiculed. That said, I would not have it any other way as I enjoy doing what seems right.

Another trend, already well entrenched, is the "Tiny House" movement, people building and living in little houses that are based on what they need, not what they want... For us boat folk, it is interesting to look on as the Tiny House brigade finds out what people on boats have known for ages. Which is not to say that these intrepid folk can not teach those of us on boats a thing or two. They are coming to the whole living in a tiny space from a new direction with fresh eyes and I expect to garner some great ideas from this direction.

For people living in little boxes, they as a group are surprisingly "out of the box"... A GOOD thing!

Cross fertilization is a needful thing and watching the Tiny House folk mine the small trailer tech is an interesting development as all of a sudden the tiny house blogs I read are looking at little teardrop trailers and VW vans. They are hungry for ideas, and truth be told, I don't even think they have reached the main course yet!

For those interested in the Tiny House thing a great place to get started is the Tiny House Blog