Installing deck hardware is a great couples job for a Friday after work. Jon had already made the UHMW polyethylene* plates for each piece, over drilled the bolt holes through deck and plates, filled them with epoxy, let them dry, then re-drilled to the right size. I arrived after work and we bedded each piece […]
Boats & Boatwork
First we choose a boat, then we spend the rest of our lives working on it.
This is the section of the site for these topics. Read about Choosing Boats or you can look up Performance Parameters for various boats and compare them.
The Elusive Perfect Dinghy
The imaginary perfect dinghy is beautiful, strong, light, able to carry large payloads yet easily driven and maneuverable, small and stowable, affordable – this list of seemingly opposing requirements makes choosing a dinghy is as complex as choosing a mate! But, like choosing a mate, we are happy when we find what is “perfect for us”, or […]
Straw, Sticks or Bricks? Best Boat Materials
Steel boats are great. Until they’re not. Seeing rusty drips down the side of a boat? Might make you wonder if steel is a good material for a sailboat. Read about Renovating a Rusting Steel Boat to find out what we did when our 50 year old boat got a bad case of the rusts. Or read […]
Renovating a Rusting Steel Boat: a Cautionary Tale
Steel boats with wood decks will rust. Eventually. And if your steel boat is 49 years old, as our Phoenix is, that “eventually” has come. But if there is enough good about the boat to be worth the work, even a rusting boat is recoverable, if you have the skills and the time. Interested in […]
Anatomy of a Hull
I submitted the last blog article without explaining my terms – so sorry! I forget that only .01% of the world cares about all this! But in case you wonder how a boat goes together… Phoenix is a mix of steel and wood. Wood holds water and water rusts steel, so this is intrinsically a […]
Connect a Laptop to HF Radio
Once offshore the internet is inaccessible by a laptop without assistance. To connect a laptop to HF Radio you will need a packet-data modem such as the Pactor to connect to your radio, then some additional hardware to connect your Pactor to the laptop. With this system you can connect to the internet for basic things like sending and receiving email and receiving […]