Boats, ladders, and reduced productivity
Last Thursday wasn’t a great day for me. In the midst of a few other tasks, I decided to run down to Panboat and complete the physical install of a Simrad NSS4 so I...
Category: When things go wrong…
Moving forward after Ian, and a boat search
It’s been just over six months since Ian ravaged Southwest Florida and, with it, the life my family and I built in Fort Myers. Ian sunk our home on the water, Have Another Day, and destroyed the marina we’d called home for three and a half years. Our lives have continued. We are settled in our house, we’ve found a place to keep our center console, Panbo(at), and overall we don’t have much to complain about, but boy do we miss living on the water.
Three-strand or plait anchor rode? And which windlass?
Gizmo needs a new anchor rode and windlass, and in my experience replacing boat gear is a lot more satisfying if it’s also an improvement. That’s how I got interested in the somewhat new plaited 8-strand rodes that seem to offer multiple advantages over the 3-strand nylon line I’ve used all of my boating life. But, wait, does plait have its own problems…
Reflections on loss post Hurricane Ian
For most of the last six years my wife Laura, daughters Molly (15) and Madelyn (12) and I have called our 2003 Carver Voyager 570, Have Another Day, home. That ended on Wednesday September...
Ben Stein & family lose their boat to Hurricane Ian
Ben Stein and his family evacuated from Fort Myers on Tuesday night, that’s the great news. But at about 7 pm last night their beloved boat and home on the water Have Another Day sank in her slip at a well-engineered marina 14 miles up the Caloosahatchee River as Ben watched the aft bilge pump try to keep up via remote monitoring. Here in Maine I’m near tears at their loss…
Digital Yacht launch GPS160F for legacy Furuno products
Digital Yacht have introduced a new version of the GPS160 which is a simple replacement for older Furuno plotter and GPS systems. Devices like the Furuno GP32, Navnet and GPS310/320 utilise a specific format for GPS data and this new sensor emulates that for essential compatibility. Some of these older GPS sensors have suffered from technical issues with the GPS system roll over changes which can render a chart plotter becoming useless without a working GPS input. The GPS160F provides an economical and reliable solution to these problems…
ACR: Search and Rescue Operation off Key Largo Saves Five Lives
Sea angler Jacob Tanner, from Broward County, Florida, has told how activating an ACR Electronics EPIRB (Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon) saved his and four other lives when a day out fishing went terrifyingly wrong. Jacob had taken his uncle and three of his uncle’s friends out in the family’s 25ft leisure fishing boat off Key Largo and had started kite fishing while drifting in around 150ft of open water. Waves were about 5 or 6ft, but slow rollers quite a distance apart…
FLIR C5 thermal inspection camera, finding issues before they’re big trouble
If you’re like me, at some point in your boating career you’ve probably found an electrical problem on your boat only after things got a little scary. Perhaps the problem was one of your making or maybe, like my example linked above, the boat came that way. Now that I’m doing more work on the DC systems aboard my own boats and others, I went looking for a way to ensure the quality of my work and the health of the systems aboard. For the last few jobs, I’ve been verifying my work with a FLIR C5 thermal inspection camera. I think it delivers real peace of mind.
Drug smuggling, the sailing feats we rarely hear about?
When I got serious about sailing and seamanship fifty years ago, I read all sorts of offshore cruising and racing accounts, particularly interested in the problems that came up and the solutions found. It seemed valuable to learn that, say, a well-found 46-foot ketch could pitchpole stern-over-bow in certain situations and how the crew survived. But eventually I realized that there was a whole niche of especially extreme ocean voyaging that was almost never discussed, except maybe quietly in remote harbors or jail cells…
Mostly successful docking despite runaway bow thruster
There’s probably no good time for a bow thruster to get stuck in ON mode, but it happened to me while backing into our marina slip on a windy day. Moreover, that maneuver included...
