Clash of the weather titans

Best to be wearing brown foulies if you can read this. (Image courtesy of NOAA via John C.)

I have exactly one experience with weather routing at sea. In 2009, while I was part of the delivery crew for Bruce and June on Ainia. a Bristol 45.5, Bruce consulted with the very experienced and highly regarded amateur radio enthusiast and hobbyist marine weather forecaster Herb Hilgenberg. As I related here, my skipper would check in with Herb on a pre-arranged schedule and would provide our local weather conditions, a "micro" take on the "macro" high seas forecasts given by the various governmental and for-hire weather routers, from which Bruce also obtained and pored over data in the form of downloaded GRIB files.

That was the deal: You gave Herb the data points as he requested them, and not before. Think of a queued-up list of widely separated yachts listening to particular frequencies at particular times, and only speaking when requested to do so. I suspect it was the only way for Herb to keep things straight. Herb treated each boat as if it was a mobile weather station, and thereby collected sea state, wind speed and direction readings available only to a small yacht which would often be sailing perhaps hundreds of miles out to sea. In return, he gave back his interpretation of weather trends for each vessel's stated area and intended route, plus his considered suggestions as to the least stormy directions in which you could sail.

All this effort was made for free, since 1987, and with very few days in the year away from the microphone.

Some hobby. Some value. I understand he has taken contributions to offset the cost of his extensive array of equipment and the no-doubt non-trivial amounts of electricity it takes to be a southern Ontario, bungalow-based oceanic radio network.

Not actually Herb's radio shack, but likely a reasonable fascimile.

Basically, the H.H. story is of a man who, having sailed and found the forecasting wanting, turned his retirement hobbies of weather forecasting and ham/SSB radio operation into a public service, even if that public, outside of the offshore sailing community, is largely unaware of his existence near the shores of Lake Ontario. H.H. has been directly involved on the comm side in many rescues and has received praise and citations in equal measure. I have heard that some people will not consider departing on deliveries of yachts from the U.S. coast down into the Caribbean without what they consider to be Herb's sage advice. I met Herb at a Safety at Sea seminar in 2010 in Toronto, and it was slightly surreal to see a rather ordinary looking man of senior years very nearly adored by a small crowd of people wearing clothing usually seen at regattas. Herb's the sort of rock star you become in the cruising community when his is the only voice you can hear over the wind screaming in the rigging and the smell of the crew heaving down the sidedecks.

Yes, you need all these buttons.

Recently, I checked out Herb's very 1994-style webpage to see if there was anything new. He's not a young man, and I wondered if he would still be offering his service when we finally push off for our own adventure. Weather reporting/forecasting, GRIB files and ship-to-shore communication via SailMail or an equivalent service are the reasons I purchased a single-sideband radio (SSB). That particular item will be installed when I restore Alchemy's mast and will no doubt produce some blogging as SSB installation and tuning is a somewhat information-dense and variable process that rarely goes ideally on the first try.


Books have not only been written about SSB/amateur radio installation and operation on seagoing sailboats, they've been written about just this model.

TL Sparks as a name is an inside joke to radioheads.

Now, there has been a move toward the use of satellite phones in the cruising community, particularly the Iridium type, which is considered to have the "largest constellation", i.e. most worldwide coverage. Picture the analogous GPS "constellation": the more satellites in view, the better the confidence in the reported position. Satellite phones work a little differently, and perhaps one day I can get into that. The point here is that they are getting, if not cheap, cheap enough, cheaper than SSB rigs, are familiar in the slightly bulky manner of a circa 1993 cellphone, are portable, and you can speak privately on them AND hook them into a netbook to download weather maps, e-mails and all sorts of data, limited only by your credit limit. There's a whole other level of satellite communications above these phones called IMMARSAT, but that's beyond the scope and budgets of most cruisers. It is a method, however, of keeping up with American Idol 1,000 NM from land. It's more or less the standard on commercial ships these days.

So is SSB on cruising sailboats done, antiquated, superannuated? Is it the "landline" or "dumb phone" of small boat communications? Are there apps for it?

Why, yes, there are, and I doubt SSB is done for those who like a variety of tools to solve, in this case, the problem of distance communication on a boat at sea or on the hook in Random Lagoon, population you.

While it can cost three to four grand to get transceiving, apart from a yearly SSB-to-email service fee, it's pretty well free to yak, network and receive weather faxes. For people cruising with a kid, such as we propose to do, it's a great way to send and receive lessons by email in distant locales (pictures are generally too big and best sent from Internet cafes ashore). Various "cruiser nets" exist and it's a standard method of finding out which seaside facilities are open, which port officials are on the take, and which panga has sunk right at the reef entrance...stuff you won't find in cruiser guides or marked on charts. Yes, it's semi-public, although it can be made pretty private, and yes, propagation and other technical factors can limit its range and function. And let's not forget that offshore, when you yell MAYDAY on an SSB emergency frequency, every SAR/Coastie in range hears you; with a satellite phone, a single phone rings on a single desk, because you are, after all, just capable of calling one phone number at a time.

Still, many fans of SSB consider it indispensable and the sat phone something good for the ditch bag. People who like SSB on boats like weather nets and these familiar voices, who provide important information, after all, for people living on little boats, are generally trusted.

Trusted too much? The marine writer Charles Doane would seem to think so. In an article that seems to be critical of Herb Hilgenberg's forecasting skills,  he cites a few cases suggesting  that Herb's forecasting leans toward the conservative side, pinning his "correspondents" to shore instead of profitably being at sea on passage. The comments on Doane's article range from fairly blunt disagreement and suggestions that Doane is ungrateful, to broad agreement from experienced cruisers that Herb is indeed sometimes wrong or too pessimistic. Herb's reply to Doane on hisown website seems to indicate that this criticism has discouraged him to the point of retirement.

This I would consider a loss to the greater cause of cruising safely.

Frankly, I don't get the criticism of Herb's service. Isn't this akin to saying you don't like the colour of the bookmobile lady's dress and therefore feel disinclined to borrow books? The crossing guard's stupid hat is the reason for your six-block detour? Herb is not a professional, nor does he claim to be. His forecasting is based on careful observation, but he lives down the road from me, near Toronto, some distance from much more than road salt. When he is predicting conditions in Greenland or south of Bermuda, he has the same governmental "macro" charts and forecasts available to him as is available to anyone else through many means. The quality of his "micro" forecasts (the reason sailors have found him useful) is the same for any of his counterparts around the globe: the accuracy and the density of reporting boats is critical. During a race situation such as the ARC or the Caribbean 1500, he would have perhaps a dozen boats reporting in to him: a dozen well-staffed and experienced weather stations in effect who understand his needs and can give him current and accurate conditions from which he can build a plausible forecast.

Damned useful it has been, too. But it is only a forecast. Doane suggests later in his article...and were I the writer, I might have led with this..."Herb probably is more conservative than most other weather-routers, but all weather-routers are--and should be--inherently conservative {italics mine}. Whether they're getting paid or not, they can't help but feel responsible for their clients, and a big part of their job, as they see it, is making sure those clients understand just how bad things might get on any given passage."

A small point: In Herb's case, they aren't clients as Herb is not being paid by them. They are helping a guy with his radio and forecasting hobby. Really, no more. You hear Herb and take his advice or do not. Doane continues: "Routers do provide a useful service, but it is not good when sailors become too dependent on them...Too many sailors these days believe that hiring a weather-router or joining a rally or bringing some professional crew aboard provides some kind of insurance, as though the risk they are taking can be hedged or transferred to others."

Well, now we are getting somewhere. Don't blame the guy who is better at guessing than (perhaps) you. See "don't shout at the GPS for your crappy navigation". Also, "don't blame the cross-wind for your crappy docking." None of those elements, the forecast, the GPS, the wind, for Neptune's sake, has a stake in your successful boating. You, the skipper, do. You, the crew, do. Indifferent of objects and nature in general is something in which I personally take comfort. The sea, if approached unwisely, will kill me without a second thought.

Without a first thought, actually. Ocean water is not sentient and is not capable of malevolence. Attributing motives to "evil black boxes" or "menacing greybeards" or "vanishing tethers" is very poetic, but it's poor seamanship. So is taking your helm instructions uncritically from a guy at a radio ashore as if they arrived on properly buoyed stone tablets or a burning bush on a burning liferaft.

Ultimately, whatever forecaster is being consulted is still only capable of offering an opinion or guess at local sea level about what conditions you will be experiencing in the future. The guesses are based or at least formulated in both science and experience, but they are representations of possibility. This is quite different from the view from the helm. You, the skipper, have that viewpoint. It is the important viewpoint. Listen to other viewpoints, always, but the skipper's judgement must trump all others, and not just in a legally binding sense. Unless one is impaired, disabled or otherwise required to stand down, the skipper has a moral duty to ensure the safety of vessel and crew. You can't blame others or transfer or cede that authority, in my view, nor should you be tempted to do so.

I suspect that what people see as the "conservatism" of Herb or indeed any weather router (including the paid ones, who may be thereby even more dangerously plausible) is simply the process of maturation at work. The weather titan's proclamation become, with the maturation of the crew as experienced mariners, just one more element in the mix.  If Herb learned how to forecast, most skippers eventually can, as well. And they should, because it is them, on the boat at sea, who have to decide the best direction and the soundest methods for staying safe at sea and arriving alive. 


I hope Herb is still working the airwaves when we are out there, and I hope we can consult him as a valued source and in turn, contribute the readings he requires to forecast. But even though I can recognize his voice, I would never assume he was on our boat, nor would I ever assume he had any role or responsibility in either our misfortune or our success. That's on the crew, not the weather guy.

UPDATE, June 14, 2013:  Looks like our wish is denied. Noonsite.com reports that Herb H. has put down the mike.

Thank you, sir, for a valuable and selfless service to the cruising community. Enjoy the absence of static in your ears.

Product preview: Think this might be useful on a boat?

Like so many evil things, it worked.

This is Scotch-Gard, and like it says on the can, it's a "heavy duty water repellent". It used to be quite common to see people set up a tent on a sunny day and spray the hell out of it with a can of this. And it worked. The other place you could see cans of it flashing in the sun was over biminis and dodgers in spring as it would waterproof all but the most ragged of "cockpit cloth", and would do a fair job making cheapo nylon jackets imitate Gore-Tex or other miracle water-resistent "high-tech" gear. You'd have to get closer than a boat-length to realize you were looking at at $20 Boat Show special instead of Gill Offshore Whathaveyou sweltering under new Sunbrella.

Turns out, however, that the various formulations of Scotch-Gard weren't great for the environment or, likely, for human health, and it was phased out...although it is still available for sale in many places, which is somewhat of a mockery of the process.

While alternatives to Scotch-Gard exist under the category of durable water repellents, some are very expensive and do not either work well or last particularly long. Others can compromise the breathability of clothing, which is something people pay big bucks for, particularly in foul-weather gear.

Throw in the nicest Spinlock DeckVest and we are cresting $1,300 and you still have a bare ass.

So when I came across this somewhat surreal video...

...I had to look more closely. "Ultra Ever Dry" is the product of an industrial firm that seems to specialize in oil spill containment, absorbent pads and decontamination of the type required when the trainload of peanut oil hits the abbatoir at speed. Apparently, it's superhydrophobic, a term I only grasp thanks to being one of four kids taking Latin in high school. I find it significant that it's some sort of industrial goo that's got nearly 5,000,000 YouTube views.

Just watch the video. I won't spoil it for you. I will just say that if this stuff really works as shown, and won't give you buboes atop of tumours, or children with sunroofs and gills, it could be an incredibly useful product all around the average cruising boat. That's a place where, as you might assume, things are always getting wet.

Propositioning, or getting a right shafting, Part 2

Machinations and fabrications, it's all getting done aboard the beached steel whale known as Alchemy. This proper update is primarily pictorial, most of this tending toward the self-explanatory.

Measure for measure, this bargain digital micrometer has been very useful

Keen-eyed followers of this record of minor achievement may recall that I needed a different Aquadrive-to-engine flange adapter plate, as I had gone and changed engines. These sort of things can happen when one buys boat gear three or four years out of sync with the actual completion of specific systems. Eh, je ne regrette rien.

The new adapter plate, obtained at a turn your head and cough price from the efficient and knowledgeable Brent of Mermaid Marine of Charlottetown, PEI, proved sufficiently Germanic in its honed exactitude to pass the penultimate fitting, of the dry kind. But a number of processes had to come to fruition before a real live welder was brought in to lay the strong seams.

For one, the engine stringer stages had to be fabricated.

A bridge over troubled bilges.

...and laid in place...

Yes, this will be cleaned, primed and painted. All of it.

Then the engine had to be flown and "blocked" with planks designed to stop (or at least slow) its descent should the chain fail fail during the welder's labours noted in a recent post.

Only apparently half-assed: This reinforcement has raised and lowered the engine a few dozen times with nary a creak.

In order to raise the engine above the level of the pilothouse floor, which itself was necessary to place planking under it and give maximum scope to anyone working in the engine bay, some modifications were made to raise the cross-beam about one foot higher than originally designed.

Not seen is how damn frosty and windy that day was. Or indeed most of days during which this work has been done. Boo-freakin' hoo. I'm Canadian. It's character building, this boat building.

The touch-up colour for Beta Marine engines is Plasti-Kote Enamel 209. Now you know.

That one-belted double wheel is the "double power take-off" custom selected for this engine. It will enable either two smaller alternators to be run (redundancy) or one alternator and an engine-driven compressor or bilge pump.

Reaming the cutlass bearing. Like most boat related activities, it sounds like nasty slang from a drama set in a particularly grim prison.

Getting the new Aquamet 22 shaft in was enough of a two-man trial that myself and the redoubtable Captain Matt have renewed confidence in the integrity of the Thordon Elastomeric cutlass bearing getting oiled up in the previous shot. There's plenty of life left in it to judge by its reassuring lack of play.

As for this shaft, it's arguably the strongest thing aboard.

Back inside, the engine mounts looked "dry-fit OK".

Thanks to the four-inch tall stringers, there's plenty of clearance below the oil pan and above the as-yet unplumbed and somewhat provisional day tank.

One minor difficulty was resolved by the removal of the lowest pilothouse companionway step, which will be hinged shortly in order to allow fabricated engine bay doors to open along the entire length of the engine bay opening.

Now you see it...

...now you don't. The bungees hold the tongue and groove trim over the steel bulkhead in place.

The needed adapter arrived and was found Aquaquate, so to speak.

Adaptation of the species

After that pricy little item went on, we had to slip on the Packless Sealing System, confusingly and redundantly frequently called the "PSS Shaft Seal". The principles on which this popular device operates are well known enough that I won't recount them here, but the important bit for the novice to grasp is that this replaces the traditional flax-string stuffing box, which is the only barrier between the sea and the interior of the boat via the prop shaft's "tunnel".

I could grow fond of the accordion.

Traditional stuffing boxes must drip as part of their operation. PSSes do not. On a steel boat, this is desirable and worth the cost of purchase.

Set-screws on the shiny part against which the "bellows" of the PSS presses are a touch unusual in that they are stacked one atop the other. I have to obtain spares of these little hex bolts should I ever, Neptune forbid, have to disassemble any of this stuff.

After the welding came the drilling and the fitting. If this process seems excruciating, time-intensive and laborious, it's because it is. The idea is to line up the new engine on its new mounts and stringers with the old shaft log (and the new shaft, new prop, etc.) as if it was a solid coupling. The Aquadrive is there to mitigate vibration, to isolate shock loads from shifting on the transmission, and to allow "play" in the engine's drivetrain so that wear is greatly lessened on the component parts.

This means the Aquadrive installers must "zero in" on the initial alignment just as with a more traditional boat drivetrain installation. Another parameter that has to be addressed is the proper torquing down of the bolts that connect the shaft to the "yoke hub" and the CV joint to it and the engine's flange.

The old prop serves an unaccustomed purpose.

This is done with the prop shaft held in place in a somewhat unusual fashion. The old prop and some F-clamped lengths of wood served to keep the shaft still while the bolting down of the part of the Aquadrive that grips the (non-keyed) shaft end happened.

Torquing about a revolution.

Lest it appear in these photos that I am restoring a rusted-out wreck, most of the visible rust here is actually superficial waste from previous grinding operations. There's little point in removing it until it's warm enough to paint in, I hope, April.

Thus endeth the dry-fitting.

What follows is me finalling the alignment (see Part 3...yes, really) by using a bevel and tiny, tiny movements of the heavy engine until I feel confident that I can scribe drill marks atop the stringers. Then up goes the motor again, down goes the drill and in go the engine mounting bolts.

Is this my good side?

There's no point in putting on the new prop and Shaft Shark or indeed painting all this until it's all aligned to an obsessive level of precision, or to whatever level of which I am capable. Then back goes Mister Rudder. There's a day tank to create and a new instrument panel and engine controls (and some provision for temporary fuel and batteries) to install next. Seems a lot of work to drive to a dock all summer, but such are the baby steps of Adventures in Refitting.

Introducing "the one-fingered boat"

What's the current phrase? "I'll just leave this here":

Behold the brave new world of recreational sailing. This design from a very reputable firm is  conceptually divorced not only from our own experience of sailing, but in most respects (apart from the clever stowage notions I like to poach from newer designs) is very different from the direction we are going with our refit, which is notable for the complexity involved in making things simple, strong and enduring

So for us, "one-fingered" has a particular meaning in this superficially harmless product spiel, and quite another when put against the agenda of a sail voyaging family planning to be several thousands of kilometres from the nearest Swedish electrician.

And a sailing family, I might add, have come to appreciate the implacable enmity of electrical circuitry and salt water. Or even Lake Ontario's dampness, really.

I have considered Halberg-Rassy to be, along with Oyster and Swan Nautor and J-Boats, to be in the top tier of production builders. You can reasonably predict who I consider to be in the bottom tier. If they've gone this route, it must be because "the market" demands it. No builder of such an unlikely and fickle purchase as a forty-odd-foot sailboat can afford to ignore potential buyers, even if they require the largest sort of training wheels and soft-spot helmets. So the absence of a peek into the engine/machinery spaces, or a look at where the vast amount of batteries must be stored to power this push-button boat is perhaps purposefully absent. "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain" should be on every bill of sale, perhaps.

An early meeting with the Hallberg-Rassy focus group, perhaps?

So here's a little test for readers, a little "market research" for this benighted boat blog, if you will. There are no right or wrong answers, merely opinions.

Watch the video and submit answers to the following questions:

• 1) What is interesting about this design, and why?
• 2) What is questionable about this design, and why?
• 3) What is problematic about this form of new yacht review?
• 4) Would you consider purchasing this boat, or a boat similar to it for your own use?

Answer any and all. If I get sufficient response, I'll consider sending a small, nautically themed prize to the best (meaning in this case most insightful) reply. Consider it my own form of market research, in this case to reveal biases of the readership of a sooty, overextended and cold boat refitter trying to stay a half-step ahead of his own ignorance and talent for self-injury.

Clearly, and rarely, with this video,  I am somewhat at a loss for words here, although I did find notable that the question "how does she sail?" is not asked until the final two minutes.

Medium rare to weld done

Still capable of burning down the garage, but you have to start somewhere.

Having found it periodically problematic to find a welder to do many of the jobs required aboard Alchemy, I've resolved to learn how to weld myself. But the currently strained budget and my book-only knowledge makes a slow, careful and heavily protected start with the equivalent of a welding toy, in this case a discounted Lincoln MIG-Pak 140 model. This is a gasless wire-feed flux core type (or gas shielding can be used) suitable for light gauge steel and aluminum. I can get my weld on with essentially scraps, or pieces from Metal Supermarket, and make my inevitable learning-curve screw-ups cheaply. I can also compare and contrast the results of "gasless" versus "shielded" welding. I am already aware that there are definite advantages to shielded welding, but my needs are essentially low-volume, will be done in the open air, and are rarely concerned with end-product appearance, merely strength. There is very little I will make for myself that won't be immediately primed and coated in Something Two-part and Industrial.

The advantage to this particular welding unit for me is that it runs on standard 120 VAC current, although at its highest setting, suitable for 1/4-inch stock, it needs a 20 amp circuit. I figure that I can even use the relatively wee Honda 2000 to power it at half its settings, which would suffice for making brackets and the lighter sort of frames.

Anyway, the steel fabrications I had made a few weeks back for the engine stringers and the thrust bearing "yoke" have been for the last couple of weeks clamped and scribed in place:

To be primed and painted and drilled, etc.

Built to get the shaft, and to like it. Damn, sailing's rough practice.

What was proving difficult was getting hold of a welder to do the actual "melt it to the boat" bit. Greg the Welder, who fabricated our solar panel arch and welded it to Alchemy lo! so long ago, was barely contactable by phone, and despite his best efforts, admitted he was booked until April.

We launch in April. Not good.

I asked a welder at the club if he wanted the job, No, he said, but he put me on to another semi-retired other welder/club member, who already said in the past that he didn't want the job, but who might have an apprentice up for it...sometime...

Argh.

Treblex, the Mississauga-based metal fabrication firm,whose work impressed me and Capt. Matt, my "installation advisor", put me in touch with a couple of names. One called back right away, but said he'd need about a week and a half to get to me. The second guy whose name Treblex gave mecould've been by in three days, but in a mounting sense of panic at the passing days of winter, I'd already booked Welder Number One. Welder Two has some designs for various fabrications I need, and as some marine fabricators have already turned me down, albeit in a helpful manner, for being too piddly a client to work for, Welder Two might get those jobs after all.

Diamond Sea Glaze made this for Beth and Evans of S/V Hawk. I am not her, alas, and I think DSG have gone a bit higher-end. Evans was kind enough to correspond with me about how it has worked on the Big Real Ocean.

Welder One called back unexpectedly earlier this week and said "his guy, Jeff" could drop by Thursday morning. Which is how we got to here, finally:

Fire in the hole!

This is the by-now tiresomely familiar sight of the Beta 60 being kept in suspense. The process was "put welder and gear down hole; raise engine to reveal welding job; place planks as 'safeties' in case chain fall fails; reverse steps to free welder".

He was quite capable of cutting his way out, if I went for a walk or something

The misty appearance is the smoke from burning primer, for which I was lightly chided by Welder Jeff for being too witless to remove prior to his Smith God routine. Bad skipper!

Possibly not to code, but the gantry mods I made were apparently sufficient

The stringers were continuously welded at both ends and "stitch welded" periodically along their sides, Welder Jeff assuring me that this was more than sufficient to stay attached should the seas boil and the winds howl, etc.

The weld is so bright, I've got to wear shades

Here's where the thrust bearing got welded directly to the hull.

And where the Skipper figured out a better camera angle other than "straight down".

Yikes. I went to ground level to confirm my approaching date with bottom paint.

These are "heat marks". They are evidence of "successful penetration". Write your own joke here.

Yep, that's burning bottom paint. Oh, well, now I know how to relate stuff on the inside to stuff on the outside.

Boat osmosis or lava? You decide!

The other side was equally spot-fried, but not, I was assured, "all the way through". Well, I would hope not. That could impede sailing plans. Welder Jeff actually commented that the steel hull at the turn of the bilge was "surprisingly beefy, probably three-eighths of an inch thick or better". Thanks, Welder Jeff. I feel better already.

Now that this particular skills bottleneck has been cleared, I could write, and may yet write, an entirely separate post on the struggles I've had finding tradespeople (marine and otherwise) who were a) competent, b) reliable, c) not extortionate and d) in existence. A brief confab with Jeff on the state of his world underlined how busy he is, how very few young people are going into the trades, how "no one wants to get their hands dirty", and if they do, they are making craploads of money in Fort McMurray.

Short of encouraging our son to go into the trades so he can support his poor, old, by-then salt-encrusted mum and dad in our mutually pensionless dotage, I can do no more. Well, I can try to improve my own skills to lessen my reliance on others, who aren't likely to be found in tropical lagoons anyway.

That's how this post began.

On Monday, we move to the final positioning, the drilling of the stringers to take the motor mounts, and the final dry-fitting of shaft, coupler and prop with the various extras. Onward, upward, spendward.

Strutting and gassing and lighting

How hard can two rectangles be? I guess we will find out.

Recently, I've had to research every type of "gas spring", which is the name of the category, by the way, for the lifting mechanism of every sort of hatch or platform that is heavier than something a simple bronze or stainless strut would hold open with confidence, which is why it's top of mind.

Related project to the engine bay "clamshell" hatches: For them to open, the last step into the pilothouse must raise or lower out of the way.

The ongoing engine stringer/thrust bearing project (more on this soon) was made easier by the removal of the lowest step of three going from the aft deck down into the pilothouse.

Watch that last, missing step. It's a doozy.

Removing this gives enough "air" to get a welder down and around that engine, which needs to be flown up and secured once the welder is down with all needed gear. It also would be latched in the up position when the bay hatches are upright. After a bunch of fruitless searching for a folding bracket that would fold up, and not down, and yet could support a human's weight in a seaway, all I could find was something representing overkill in several respects:

Works in the right direction, but is too big and too strong.

So my design is much simpler. An eye and hook can secure it, or even a loop of bungee, and a metal "C-strut" can support even the impact weight of a wet crew stomping on it.

Pretty representative of the genre

As for the bay hatches, this type of gas spring is nice, although I could just as easily use the very same sort of sliding hatch strut used on most deck hatches. The doors have to be kept open, and that means only their own weight has to be supported when open. When closed, the frame of the "bay hole" itself, plus the overlapping center "lip" does that job, unless my design, currently under review by a fabricator, is insufficient.

On the subject of where the backsides go, as the pedestal type of gas spring for helm seats are quite spendy, you could get everything from a bus driver's seat mount to a salvaged barbershop chair base to accomplish the same action in a compact manner.

Priced with the customary "Marine means times three" factor

We actually tried to acquire a "salon chair" for $99 last year, but we didn't get a call back. Might have been a dodged bullet, as I suspect the pedestal to seat plates and pedestal to floor connections are both robust and less prone to corrosion than barbershop specs typically are.

The reasons for this particular line of enquiry is because there is a height discrepancy between my wife (and my son for the near term) and myself. We therefore require a helm seat in the pilothouse that can move up and down and fore and aft. Ideally, a sailing helm seat would pivot side to side on some sort of friction fitting, either to make sailing on a heel comfortable (if one was, for instance, on a night watch during a cold rain from the pilothouse in the mid-Atlantic) or to shift side to side in a cross-swell. According to a recent thread I started in Cruisers' Forum, however, that particular sort of pedestal seat base doesn't seem to exist currently. So it may end up being another fabrication job, or we make do with an off-the-shelf solution.

Eh, may be overkill...the measuring tape will confirm, but the arm and foot rests are nice

Strangely, I have done exactly that with the seating solution I envision for the forward workshop. Preliminary designs, taking into account the time likely to be spent in there, the need to shift my weight and the space available, gave me a  very quick idea I might not have otherwise had if I drove a car: a bicycle seat on a post. For better or for worse, I am used to bike saddles, and I can literally salvage everything I need out of my garage. I can even make it spin...

I'm looking forward to this part of the rehab, actually. It's probably within my skill set to do it right.

Back to the "strutting", I need to investigate gas springs for my engine bay hatch and my steel forepeak deck hatch, both of which will be "unlight". Another dinette-weight project will be the new saloon companionway steps I am planning to frame up, which will cover eight Trojan L16s in a welded, stepped box, which will themselves contain battery boxes for each pair. One of the very few things I like about current showroom queens are the gas springs that allow a companionway hinged at the top to rise with a kid's grade of arm strength and stay put under pulled down, much like a well-fitted sash window.

This is bigger than I'll need...it's from a Beneteau 55... but picture something similar going up like a van's rear hatch.

The point is to take all the half-ton of batteries I intend to carry right to the CE of the entire boat, meaning I can dispose of the lead pigs acting as trim ballast forward...and replace it in part with tools and spares.

The gas springs used for truck engine hoods should be about the right size. You could use gas springs in combination with a locking strut in a number of applications around the boat in a similar fashion, including fold-away or fold-up table or nav station surfaces.

Lastly, today's hot boater tip is that Lee Valley seems to be selling moddable warm white and coloured LED strips for a price I find reasonable, and will do so for bulk discount. Many sailors have for many years been taking out the old auto-type 12VDC incadescent bulbs in favour of LEDs, particularly as the first-generation "cold and bluish" type have declined in favour of "warm white. But this Lee Valley system is more or less snap-together, looks nice (I've seen them in person) and dimmable, all attributes that are like catnip to the amp-conserving average boat fixer. I saw the RGB ones and thought "hey, go from 'blended' white to pure red in the pilothouse with the turn of a pot dial? I can get behind that!"

Part Lite-Brite, part Lego.

Naturally,  I think LEDs are the absolute bomb in any boat place that requires small amounts of light (like inside lockers soldered to a 9V battery and a contact/reed switch), or for "mood lighting" under the lips of cabinets aimed up or down.

We are pretty much at the break point between me wiring up strips off a spool obtained from an "industrial concern" and the price of retail at places like Lee Valley. I thought I'd have to make and measure my lighting, but it's going "prêt-à-porter": just buy what you need and screw it down.

The buzz on boat alarms

The deluxe version?

Despite the oft-repeated goals of cruisers to laze in hammocks drinking out of pineapple mugs, the cruising boats used to get to hammock-positive locales are increasingly complex machines.

One could easily neglect to check certain dials, digital displays or indicator lights on the modern boat, and thus fail to note (or have the watchkeeper fail to note) engine overheating, low oil pressure, water ingress or some other potentially fatal condition, like a propane leak or CO build-up, requiring immediate skipperly attention.

A personal favourite

Having had low oil pressure and cooling water overheating issues on our boats in the past, I am a fan of early warnings. There's a gas/propane sniffer on Valiente, along with a CO detector. I typically check for "output" of cooling water at the stern and eyeball the temperature and oil pressure dials of the very basic Atomic 4 control panel, and so haven't bothered with buzzers. On Alchemy, I will install more alarm setups because more of the critical systems could self-destruct without immediately noticing the process, and also because, frankly, there is a lot more at stake than aboard a Lake Ontario day sailer.

And Canadian-made, by gum

Plenty of alarm widgets or alarm systems exist for the cautious/paranoid/typical cruiser, and some are very clever indeed, and cross over into the solenoid or automatic actuator realms.



But I wonder: why don't boat system alarms talk? Cars talk, GPSes talk, even cheap alarm clocks murmur instead of buzz. Even smoke detectors can shout at one. Even personalized smoke detectors exist.

"Get out of the house, ya little pyro!"

Voice recognition, as fans of "Siri" know, is a thing of the present. So why should a host of boat alarms buzz with essentially the same range of tones?


It should not be massively difficult to replace that growing host of various buzzers with the sort of circuitry that is found in “talking/singing birthday cards”, or “talking seatbelt alarms” in cars and the like. Or to rig just the chips capable of holding a two or three word message, along with a small amplifier, to make a personalized alarm.

Imagine hearing instead of some random buzzer in D sharp, you heard your own voice saying “Fuel pump overpressure!” or “Bilge past six inches!” or the very useful “Exhaust temperature past 100C!”
If one did not wish to actually record specific messages, one could simply throw in random…but distinct…noises on pre-recorded chips, like "birdsong means bilges", or "fly buzzing means fuel", and so on.

Functional, but a little HAL 9000

It’s the distinctiveness of the alarm noise that is desirable. Buzzers tend to sound alike, because they all come from the same factory in China, I would imagine. Voices...now, the human mind zeroes in on those in terms of direction and content far more easily. Of course, if you find the idea of a verbal alarm a little creepy, there are some less buzzy options.


Picture combining the “talking alarm” with “The Clapper” for a shut-off, and you’ve got the basis for a marine products empire where the average customer’s age is already well past “I should’ve worn earplugs during that Alice Cooper tour in '72”.

Personally, I am not quite that age, myself, and due to plenty of deafness in my family, I have both nursed my hearing and had it regularly tested; it appears I'm in good nick. Spend time at an average boat club, however, and it's clear a large percentage of Boomers have listened to a few too many booms to hear their pants ringing in anything but a dead-quiet environment...which the sea is rarely.

Like my idea for dim, five-second red LEDs that would be triggered by movement across the sill of companionways at night, or a 9V battery-powered, reed switch-activated, under-lid LED locker light, I do not see a strong objection in cost or complexity of a “talking alarm” to easily distinguish what part of the boat’s systems is complaining.

It only sounds like Star Trek. The actual electronics involved would not be beyond the average electronics hobbyist, which most cruisers already are, because they can't afford not to be. I built kit shortwave radios and repaired my guitar amps as a teen and still do various electrical bench work (I'm trying to reboot an old Furuno radar I found, for instance); I don't think any of this at the level of "home-brewed" is very difficult to rig. If someone's already invented these sort of gadgets, I would enjoy hearing about it. Just not in the form of a buzzer.

"I'm sorry, Skipper, I can't unlock the rum cabinet."