Always sail on the bright side of life

Monitors readable in full tropical sunlight at my helm? It's more likely than you think.

ENGAGE!

As I begin to tackle the helm wiring and consider actually restoring the insulation to the pilothouse roof (thus burying the wiring under layers of pink insulation boards and masonite and cherry battens, oh, my), I must consider The Question of Instrumentation. I have, as long-time readers may already guess, mixed feelings on the topic. The irony of this is that I have, in general, the technical experience, the house bank, and the room in the pilothouse to have a flippin' arcade of displays to make me think our cutter's capable of space flight, and at a far sexier SOG than seven knots.

That little compass doesn't stand a chance. Might as well be a cup holder.

Today's well-heeled (pun implied) skipper gravitates toward the Multi-Function Display, which, in both touch-screen and button/knob-equipped forms, can rely not only the fab plotting functions that have become familiar in recent years, but other displays, either in tile form or semi-transparent overlay, such as AIS, speed, depth sounding displays, even engine revolutions and how much poop is in the holding tank.

Like really expensive Lego...wait, Lego is already expensive.

Thanks to the more-or-less adequate implementation of NMEA 2000 or Ethernet (with which I am more familiar) or wireless device networking standards and, in the case of NMEA 2000, a sort of snap-together cabling, one can plop little black boxes all over the boat and have, literally at one's fingertips, graphical representations of the vessel's various systemsm sensors and whirring bits.

This is just for the motors. You'd need a second one to replace looking out the window.

Now, a considerable cost and complexity put to one side here,  I question the premises on which MFDs are sold to recreational sailors to a certain degree. A 40-foot sailboat is not, after all, an aircraft carrier; it is not only not difficult to physically monitor (open the engine compartment, record bilge strokes, keep a paper log of oil pressure and weather info) one's immediate boaty enviroment, I think it's good procedure to let the AP or vane do the steering in appropriate conditions and actually for the crew to move about the boat, with, naturally, the occasional scan of the horizon or ear cocked for relevant radio comms.

Forty-footers generally sink faster than aircraft carriers: if your first hint of a failed pump or hose is that you note, thanks to the MFD data, that the speed is dropping because the boat's motor in a calm sea is labouring to shift extra tons of water in your bilges, I submit you have not been keeping a proper watch. You have been focused on a partial and incomplete representation of passagemaking, not actually the real, whole thing. This demands senses beyond viewing a screen, and yet we jumped-up saltwater simians just love looking at screens. They are a sort of shiny, after all, just as are the smartphones on which young folk are texting as they jaywalk in Cathari-like oblivion to my onrushing and still-hulking presence in the bicycle lane. Empirically, just as rock trumps boat, elbow trumps hipster. The teat always falls from the mouth, but if one is not careful, the teeth follow.

I also question the utility of MFDs in exposed spots, and the power demands of "sunlight displays".
Are they reallyneeded at the helm in the sunny daytime? Perhaps if one setst up guard rings on radar or AIS at the nav station, or even on a swing-out modest monitor in the companionway. If it's under 20 NM away... *BEEEEPPP!*: "Dear, go below and check the bearing of that cargo ship and its closest approach...thanks..." This, of course, leaves the helmsman where he or she should be, on deck and peering in the general bearing of anticipated traffic, not at the screen in front of the wheel.
 

Even if I reject the deluxe package as discouraging of proper watch-keeping, this little thing would be handy.

If you need an active and continuous radar/AIS overlay at night, and I would think that's the best time to have it, whatever monitor you have is going to be dialled right back to 1 so you can make out the kerosene lanterns the fishermen in the radar-absorbent wooden pangas may or may not have. I can't speak for other sailors, but at night I use my ears while sailing. Minute changes in wave trains or weird splashes can inform, if at first almost at the subconscious level, of objects, landforms or approaching weather or currents. The MFD tricked out with the usual depth, RADAR, AIS, and GPS is not really rigged to report on "distant sound of surf" or "smell of hauled in fish". That's the human's job, unless the human abrogates that task to the machine, which, after all, doesn't care about drowning.

This gives you the full "Space Commander" feel of a typical high-end, small boat MFD. Note the utter absence of actual ocean in the video. I'm just saying...

A daylight-visible monitor at the helm is a nice thing to have. I can't debate it. A touch screen is convenient, even if I have doubts about its ability to take a pooping sea. I like MFDs. I like gadgets. I just don't think of them as essential, and I find the integration they require to be fully utilized a touch suspicious. One thing I've thought of in the MFD realm that I have yet to see (or hear) is an "audio navigator" of the type that shouts "PULL UP" on passenger jets if you're too close to the unscheduled ground. I wrote about audio alarms in a previous post, and I still think it's a nice adjunct for watch-standers. Sure, have a plotter to relay lat/lon, distance to waypoint, bearing/heading, cross-track...hell, this is old hat now, but a plotter that has a little triangle of boat in a 25 x 25 NM square of blue empty ocean is a waste of amps in my book. Not, you'll notice, e-book. I have netbooks with virtual reams of PDFs documenting my boat's systems, layouts, manuals and various technical articles I want to keep. But I still keep a paper log. The physicality of it appeals to me, and keeps me thinking by doing. It's less like watching a particularly dull reality TV episode.

How would you do with a fully integrated MFD in the following situation? Imagine you set a waypoint you need to reach, but you are in an opposing tidal set of unknown strength. There is no buoy to see, or it is night or it's foggy. The waypoint gives you a clear offing from a reef or shelf or pointy rock or whatever. Why not set that waypoint, and the desired heading, and have "instructions" actually spoken on deck? Like "5 degrees to port...on course". Your eyes are on the sea, as is proper, but you are getting a running plot, so to speak, and if you have to steer 15 to port by compass to get on course, you have useful current or tidal information. Now, clearly, this is dependent on the waypoint as per the GPS being accurately charted and not 200 metres downrange from the real, hard obstacle, but that's when the RADAR overlay, or even a standalone RADAR with accurate ranging, comes into play.


The spell of the numbers on the MFD is broken, because having a voice read off closing ranges would, I suspect, lead to more than average, or even necessary, prudence and a proper offing. Being free of the spell of the pixels, the prudent mariner would err on the side of caution, and would be a little suspicious of the electronic chart, particularly if it was in dispute with the RADAR or the eyeball or even the FLIR or the laser ranger. One would not have all the info on one screen, and the effect would become that of a slightly dissonant chorus, rather than a single sycophant saying "Proceed, all is well!".

At this point in our hypothetical "approach to Flinders Island" scenario, the MFD's friendly (and probably British and female, for some reason) voice gargles and dies. The screen goes blank. The radar's OK, but its display is below, out of sight. Have you noted the last "good" bearing to avoid danger? Do you still have a goddamn compass?

We design devices like MFDs to extend our senses and to help us integrate data that aids our decisions as sailors. We do not always grasp that by such means we ourselves are redesigned, a process by which some useful and time-tested habits of seamanship may be neglected or forgotten.

Brain surgery on the nerve centre

The last remnants of Ye Olde Diesel are departing to make way for the Maximal Control Panel of the Beta 60. I say "maximal" because not only does the more dial and warning light-laden Beta Marine control panel convey more information than the old Westerbeke panel,, but it also occupies just about the entirety of the helm's top. Embiggening was required.

How a motorsailer ran its engine only 1,313 hours in 20 years will remain an unknown. We put on 200 hours in two seasons.

Fitting it requires some carpentry, some metal cutting, sawing and deburring, and of course vacuuming of the inevitable deconstruction debris. The old one wasn't exactly tiny...

Good on dials, less so on lights or things that go aa-ooo-gah...and soon to be seen on Craigslist.

Below is the new control panel. After extensive cutting, grinding and reaming out, it should fit in both dimensions. If there may be, as I fear, a chance that the wiring harness may brush against the shifter assembly (currenty a rope hook) on the left side of the helm, I can put together some sort of collar or ring from HDPE or even teak or the black cherry I have in abundance in the backyard and raise the control panel a centimetre or three. The existing trim throughout the boat is black cherry, and a visit from the arborist yields plenty from the vast, about 120-year-old black cherry tree in our back yard.

A well-made panel, on close observation. And it goes bzzt, etc.

This is what the above panel looks like from the front. 

The rather extensive cabling leading to the control panel necessitated opening up the DC panel mountings and carefully snipping away the black ribbed conduit cover from a bunch of power leads.

The general tidiness of this area, plus the very helpful labelling, are habits I've acquired. Mostly.

It's clear that some items were purchased with an aft cockpit in mind. I may, for the sake of easy access, remove these excess leads (I think they are for the KVH AC103 fluxgate compass)

After the EPIRB, the Dymo label maker lets me sleep at night.

The old aperature for the old panel was not only insufficiently wide, but supporting metal bar stock underneath the plywood and plasticized top layer was in the way of some of the new panels gauges and buzzers.

Modification was instrumental to my plans.

That small blue device is a "thumb rachet"; merely the head of a typical 1/4" rachet driver (I have a 3/8" version as well), it allowed the blind unbolting from below of the fluxgate compass display and control panels needed to chop away the excess helm top.

Dry fitting Number 1: Not quite there.

 A tentative dry fitting of the new panel revealed the need to trim back a bit of the supporting steel "box".

Hydraulic steering rules! Grinders rule! Vacuums rule! Sandals...not so much.

 This was done via 4-inch angle grinder followed by sacrificial Dremel cutting wheels.

Yeah, probably not prudent throwing sparks down into the engine bay, but hey.

 The end result was a tight but functional fit. Connections, trim regluing and lighting up to follow.

The key shown is the real key...just add volts. Also seen: the blogger's toes.

Salty sculpture and a reason to learn how to dive

Most sailors have a touch of the poet in them, unless they are the mad mariners of Melville or Conrad, perhaps. I like to think that a keen eye for a navigational star on a cloud-torn night might lead to an appreciation of art on land. But since when does art have to be on land?

http://www.underwatersculpture.com/

It's stuff like this that makes me think half the fun of sailing is getting to be at home under the sea.

Just a little diversion as I contemplate tomorrow's swapping out of engine control panels.

Cleaning the fleet

Astute readers will notice a new photo on the "title box" of this blog. Instead of the rather dated photo of Alchemy's blotchy bottom paint hovering over the parking lot that was her home for too many seasons, a more positive view of a hosed-down and very nearly sparkling vessel tied to her dock has replaced it. This is a more positive and representative (and recent) shot that makes a nice change.

Rail, rail against the dying of the light-coloured Cetol.

Now, I am clearly not obsessed with appearances; I am more function over form. Nonetheless, this spring has revealed the necessity to apply spit and polish in the form of Cetol, sealant and power washing to the fleet.

Very little external teak...just the way I like to varnish, which is to say "not much and not often"

The interior of Valiente got a lot of teak oiling and general tidying, plus the varnishing of what external teak exists. I appreciate teak in boats, but I actually prefer little or none on the outside. Steel and plastic are frankly better to keep the elements on the outside than is wood, and teak has become problematic from the point of view of sustainability and black marketeering.

Clearly, I'm not willing to do more than a cursory job. I just don't care enough to do more than make it more weather- and UV-proof

Nonetheless, the boat owner faces a stark choice: Either get used to masking tape and foam brushes (on perhaps an annual basis in the brutally sunny tropics), or "let it go gray" with the application of precisely nothing. The trouble is in the transition: External teak, unless stripped, oiled and left alone, looks pretty crappy even to an indifferent skipper such as myself during the time of transition to "attractively weathered".

Err...grubby.

Alchemy has very little wood on the outside, and I would like to see none at all in time.  What it had was several types of grime of the sort that collects in the corners when you are on the hard next to a busy airport. Again, mea culpa on the exterior junk and grime on deck: my interests are in movement and electrons and plumbing, oh, my. Being 12 feet above the earth, I have simply pushed off the snow and hoped it took the filth with it. This not being an option on a dock, out came ye olde pressure washer, soap, brushes and allied tools and products of sailorly virtue.

After: The dirt and goo sluiced gratifyingly from the scuppers, revealing a couple of rust spots not associated with grinder waste. IGNORE THE BADLY COILED HOSE

The inside of the pilothouse roof has a couple of leaks, and all its insulation and stylish cherrywood battens are currently out for wire run routing and because having the roof rapidly removable facilitates getting engines, tankage and batteries down in the boat. So tarps kept the water out, the light lower and some of the heat off. But I heard through official channels that the sight of my tarps gave offence, so we did some fixes along with the vajazzling of the deck and topsides.

Before: Apparently, the sight of tarps annoys the crackers-and-white-wine subset of boat club members. 

 At some point, I will renew the anti-skid (see some spilled paint) and will paint out some rust flecks left from various grinding jobs. There are some actual areas of rust on the deck that need attention, and suggest that the otherwise durable paintjob on deck is reaching the end of its life. So the "function" side of my nature may yet make Alchemy prettier than I require before we leave.

Still to come: a new "dome shaped" cover for the fluxgate compass currently under a bucket. The rubber snake keeps the duck poop down. Note the resealed top hatches. I still need to get some new rubber gasketing.

A reasonably thorough clean-up took Mrs. Alchemy and myself only a couple of hours of labour to make a visible difference. I guess this periodic activity will be the case going forward, as I no longer find myself in the splendid isolation of being at the far end of the parking lot and must consider my hermit-like labours at an end. At least the hermit part, certainly not the labour part. The upside is that little failures of the coatings are far more visible, and while a mirror finish ain't gonna happen, I accept that the care of a steel boat means a regular process of touching up to avoid that which never sleeps.

Yep, that's a brace of top-end Polyform fenders scored on sale over the winter. Much more "expedition-boaty" than the usual recycled Taylors.

Yikes...the saloon hatches are sitting on teak frames! NOOOOOOO!!!!

Looks great, less filling

Part of my income is made from writing and editing and another part is made from graphic design. Just as sail tactics books from the '70s and '80s (when our boats were made) are of interest to me, so are magazines from the mid-'90s, when I began to learn computer-based graphic design as a side effect of being a partner in a now-extinct music magazine. I didn't know at the time that such skills would pay mortgages and buy boat gear. But then I didn't know in 1995 I would ever own a boat, either.

The past is always low-res, alas, but I was proud of this one because when it ran in 1995, it made largely accurate predictions of how the internet and computer-aided music production and distribution would transform the music industry. And so it has come to pass.

But there you go: the butterfly effect of small decisions leading to large change strikes again. Another side effect of being a newbie sailor at the end of the '90s was being an avid consumer of the monthly glossy sailing magazines of the day. In 2013, I subscribe to Practical Sailor and Ocean Navigator only, but both are at the point where the return on investment in time and subscription fees is nearly zero: between doing my own sailing and working at a so-called career, at parenting or at boat restoration, and given the value I place on more interactive contact with better sailors online, perusing even the decent sailing magazines is for me getting less attractive. I have a small stack awaiting me at the breakfast table, but there's never enough time, or so it seems, to read their shiny pages.

Looking good and weighing less

Not that they aren't well-produced: Graphically, both PS and ON look fantastic, particularly ON's writer-supplied shots of distant anchorages in ridiculously high-numbered latitudes. My knowledge of print production means I know that they are produced at a lower cost and with fewer staff than in the past. Content-wise, however, there is simply less text and more ads for underbuilt, too beamy dock queens. These days, I find my remaining sailing magazines subscriptions indifferently edited, either because they let Microsoft Word do it, or because even the editor in charge can't recognize errors in English composition any more. I used to be a copy editor, too; think "designated grammar/spelling Nazi". It's the publishing equivalent of a buggy-whip maker: not a job worth paying for, whether you require it or not.

Back in the day, however, my favourites were Cruising World and Sail, both still extant. In one sense, I grew out of them as I had my own sailing experiences and made (and, it is hoped, learned from) my own bone-headed decisions at the tiller. In another sense, they grew away from me. Recently, I picked up in my boat club lobby the May 1994 issue of Cruising World, which came out exactly five years before I began sailing in earnest (or in Lake Ontario).

Large format and chock-full of content. Even the ads seemed educational.

I was struck by several things: the length of the articles, the depth and breadth of the seamanship discussed (this was at the dawn of affordable GPS rigs and therefore pilotage techniques and celestial navigation were still used and respected), and the pretty much equal focus on new boat reviews and the care and repair of the older boats it was clearly assumed most of the readership of that time would own.

These days, would the article read "New app for locating a sail-furling repair tech using your iPhone 5"?

There was apparently, to judge by the tone of many of the articles, also the assumption running through many of these articles that not only should the aspiring boater (whether coastal or offshore) know a wide range of seamanlike techniques and repair skills, they would want to know such things: Calling in a consultant or repair person would be, if not an outright moral failing, a case of last resort. The option of hitting a big red "HELP" button was in the future, although realistically, even today, more than a couple of hundred NMs offshore is beyond the range of most countries rescue services, where such services even exist.

But this...this could be manual labour! Where's the A/C remote control?

Regarding repair and fabrication, I've reached the point (and purchased the right router and jig) that constructing, for instance, my own dorade boxes isn't out of the question. But there aren't many who wouldn't just outsource that to China these days (it's where the best stolen Burmese teak is, after all), due to the time investment in skills acquisition. And yet the sail magazines used to be premised on the idea that people in small sailboats would possess quite a few skills beyond that of sail handling/avoiding dock scraping, because "jack of all trades" wasn't just a catch-phrase, it was a way to save yourself from a damp fate. There is also a sense in this vintage of magazine that it is a Good Thing to save your wallet from indifferent/expensive/hurry up and wait repair or installation folk who themselves might be learning on the job. See "why I bought a welding machine".

So long ago, Beth and Evans were newbies.

To the right in the "Helpful, Strange or Irrelevant" portion of the blog is the website address of Beth Leonard and Evans Starzinger, who have been sailing for ages, and have been profitably (one assumes) writing about it. Beth wrote The Voyager's Handbook, which is a methodical and clear exploration of nearly every aspect of offshore planning, preparation and costing out, while Evans is also a writer, lecturer and a regular contributor to various sailing forums. I like their ideas and have had a bit of email/forum back and forth with Evans, who is pretty humble and still questioning even after two very accomplished circs.

In this May, 1994, article, however, he and Beth are relatively new offshore sailors in a tight spot with bad weather. They clearly list where and why things start going wrong...at a length inconceivable in a current magazine as attention spans have grown gnat-like...and their article's points are then critiqued at the end by a more experienced sailor.

Holy crap. The best article I've read on sailing to Bermuda in bad weather is 19 years old. It's one of the better things I've ever read outside of the first-wave cruising narratives of the Smeetons and Hiscockses. Boats change and sailors change. Our technology changes. The ocean, less so. Perhaps we may reconsider from time to time as we go forward that which we have left behind.

In which the blogger again advocates salvage as the key to cheaper cruising.

Speaking of which, I have long noted that people chuck things out at boat clubs all the time. From a locker at our club one step removed from the dumpster, I have retrieved perhaps too much stuff from the boats of others, including all of the mandatory foam-vest PFDs (some clearly never worn) I require for Valiente to be legal; lengths of tinned wire; new SS nuts and bolts...unopened in their packages (!); vast lengths of line (wash once in net bag, use as needed); light bulbs and cabin fixtures of every description; safety gear in new shape; boat hooks; winch handles; several fenders requiring only a power-wash; all manner of serviceable clips, shackles, brackets and small blocks; and truly impressive amounts of superannuated navigational gear. Don't get me started on the books!

Free to me: Unlike an eBook, may be read by oil lamp.

Now, I understand the impulse to upgrade: Life is short, boats are small, and old crap you never touch should be recycled. I myself have left old displays, bits of plumbing and VHFs I have no longer a use for (and yet which work) in said Locker of Free Stuff, but I think necessity and the expressed Scottish gene means I run a leaner operation aboard than many, if not most. Having a GPS on one's iPhone does not preclude owning a paper chart, so why have I scored three-armed protractors, dividers, parallel rulers and compasses and a perfectly good celestial navigation calculator for free?

Built like a tank, like the teak box it came in.

Don't get me wrong: I haven't stowed a bunch of dumped LORAN-C receivers in the garage...just a Furuno radar I plan to revive as a spare...and I remain pretty selective. Still, it never fails to amaze me what people will chuck out.

A small sampling of recent acquisitions bears this out.

Suunto hand-bearing compass: More portable and more accurate than my Davis "pistol grip" type, and I use these for pilotage.

This hand-bearing compass works, of course, on the plastic boat, but will work on Alchemy, too, if it is held as is its wont at eye level, about 165 cm (in my case) off the steel deck. My Suunto compass watch will, too, but this is easier and less fiddly. Chucked for having a peely label? No clue.

Quite illuminating, I thought.

This is an Aquasignal 40 masthead fixture. It's a well-made, not-cheap bit of gear, and this is slightly scratched on the Fresnel-type enclosure, but with the 25 W lightbulb clearly intact. Ten minutes of stripping and crimping with some old marine wire (also free to me) and it was restored to service. This is the same model of masthead light I carry on Alchemy's mast, with similarly oversized port and starboard fixtures on the pilothouse sides, so this can be a spare, or it can replace the one atop Valiente, which is just about shot. On Valiente, I could step down to either a weaker bulb or an equivalent LED as I'm not required to carry 25 W of dazzle on a 10 meter sailboat.

Used extensively this season to test conduits, and now fit for house "blackout" lanterns

This is a simple 12-volt battery I've used as a "tester" for all sorts of things, particularly as Alchemy's battery capacity is a mere Group 24 to power a single bilge pump until I bring aboard its half-ton of electron buckets. Also seen is the new Ancor double crimper, which along with the lightly used Klein wire shears I picked up recently for nine bucks and the Ideal wire stripper acquired last month, are making my electrical work considerably tidier, and, one hopes, longer lasting.

I neglected to get a picture of the tossed pump, but it resembles this.

I found on the same day a clean-looking Shurflo freshwater pump that resembles this photo. It's sized similarly to my existing FloJet pump, and might make a good spare, as might this cheap alternative, of course. The Shurflo, particularly if I can rebuild it, could also be part of an as-yet deckwash setup. It gurgled and spun up immediately upon hook-up to the battery pack, however; there may be nothing particularly wrong with it other than being No Longer New. A few cycles of disinfectant, and a close inspection of its innards could be worthwhile as I was thinking of building in a "cross-transfer" capacity to my planned new water tankage, wherein I pump water to whichever tanks will stiffen the boat on a particular tack. In the Trades, days can pass on a particular tack. Regardless, another nice little score for the maritime "freecycler" I seem to be.

The mother of all spreader lights, or something that would work in the engine compartment?

Here's a very solid deck or spreader light found in the chuck bin. I think everyone's going LED these days, and rightly so, in most cases, but the housing is top-notch, and if I need a strong, rarely-run light in the engine bay or to illuminate some seldom-seen area (like the steering hydraulics "locker"), I would want something this freakin' bright. With thicker wiring, naturally, and a fused switch.

Awww...it's the Cabin Boy's First Sextant.

Also found languishing and unloved was this boxed Davis 15 sextant, complete with instructions. I bought one without its box for $25 a couple of years back for my kid to learn celestial (the utility of which I will argue with any readers, if only for the mental exercise while on passage of doing sight reductions and running fixes).

The bit I can use is to the right

For me, the Artificial Horizon is the real catch. I have a couple of metal sextants, an Astra IIIB and a Freiberger, already, but an artificial horizon means I can do CN in the park, without having to haul boxes of optical gear down to the lake. While I have a very new handheld GPS, I don't care to lose more venerable means of navigation. No wonder I enjoyed that 1994 Cruising World issue.
 

Apparently, sharks have been known to eat the trailing parts.

Speaking of venerable, former commodore Henry Piersig very kindly gave me the device pictured above just before this year's launch; it had been passed onto him by another sailor who didn't have a use for it anymore. It is, like the label says, a Walker Knotmaster Mk. III A. This part with the dial is lashed to the stern rail and works by trailing a spinner in the boat's wake. A length of line is twisted and the twist turns gears and before you know it, you've done a nautical mile or two hundred. Besides making one's reckoning less dead, like the sextant, my Patay Ocean Master manual bilge pump, my Whale foot pumps, the Tank Tender and a decent spring starter, it does its job without electricity. I do not (clearly) wish to run without electricity...but I think, like possessing the skills and experience the sailing magazines write about less these days, it's a prudent option to retain.

Even if it involves a spot of garbage picking, or as I prefer to think of it, liberation from the dustbin of history.

Cry me a river...of krugerrands

I think our vessel would qualify as the bum boat to this.

Privilege is relative. I am well aware, coming from a familial background of distinct financial humility, that to own a boat in which one may swan about locally, never mind one in which the crew proposes to bugger off around the planet for a few years, is a relative privilege, when compared to the lot of the "what garbage shall we scavenge for unrotted protein" lot of untold millions of humans.

The author's ancestors prior to the decision to emigrate.

Nonetheless, over this past weekend, I installed a wine fridge in the kitchen (a gift from my appliance-potty sister) and disposed of a (broken) elderly dishwasher (also a gift, but alas, an unneeded and now long-deceased one used basically as a countertop). The wine fridge looks nice: it eats a mere 1.5 amps, and yes, we drink two or three bottles of reasonably priced red per week. It's part of the more-or-less Mediterranean diet I wish to cultivate on land and sea, after all. And Neptune knows I've been cultivating a diet of late...I may need to downsize the foulies.

Very nice in the kitchen, but not wanted on the voyage.

But the undeniably bourgeois activity of not only unpacking a wine cooler cabinet, but selecting which wines shall be cooled from the wine cellar (an elderly IKEA rack in the laundry room I've had since I started collecting cheap wine in my 20s) made me consider how the relative privileges of drinking nice wines and sailing nice if non-mega sailboats are relative indeed to the problems of, say, mega-yacht owners who have run out of 100 metre docks to which they can tie their floating heli-pads/fun sub ejectors.

Mega-yacht Octopus: I'm surprised it's not called "The Blue Screen of Death", really. Nice waterline, however.

We don't own a car and so, unlike mega-yacht owners, our "parking problems" usually start and finish with finding a post to which to lock our bicycles. The problem of parking is apparent even to us, however: should I wish to take advantage of it, we could earn $100-$200/month by renting out half our garage, but I prefer to keep it as my bike barn, sail loft and man cave, thanks. Clearly, however, owning stuff comes with it the need to put it somewhere, no less for a Russian plutocrat as for the owner of a J/24. One of the keys to "privilege", therefore, is to simply refuse to purchase classes of items that require knock-on expenses: no car, cable TV, use libraries, don't carry a credit card balance, barter goods and services, walk/bike a lot, etc. It is not hard to do these things, but it does require a sort of determination to avoid falling into the "trap of stuff" and to try to maximize value in most of life's little transactions. Because the whole basis of our economic system is that others are trying to maximize value from you:  to buy access to channels you don't watch because you have memberships to gyms you don't attend because you are working harder and longer than ever because you have a mortgage (French for "death contract or gamble") and car payments and grass treatments and bikini waxing and...well, I found it all too much personally even before I had the money to spend on it. Note: I have never spent money on bikini waxing.

We don't take vacations, or at least haven't in the last dozen years, except for camping weekends on a friend's land, yacht deliveries (not really super-relaxing...), and, of course, selected weekends on the (smaller) boat a couple of times a summer in a 100-NM radius. It's a modest outlay, our leisure, geared not only to saving money, but in the rather Protestant anticipation that the "reward" of the actual pushing-off from the dock will constitute the start of a lifetime's worth of vacations, only run continuously.

Realistically, we do not have the income to pull this off. That's what the "cruiser budget" information says. We do, however, have the habit of modest living, and the anticipation that rental income (from the house we are not required to sell up in order to sail) and our own rather portable skills will create enough cash flow to pay for food, sundries, boat consumables and repairs.

Of course, a certain level of wealth allows you to ship your ship and avoid the nasty bits altogether.

That's the hope, anyway. Ours is not a retirement dream so much as a working sabbatical, if that makes sense. I fully anticipate that both myself and Mrs. Alchemy will have to work until the Topsiders are skyward...after we do our trip.

But we will have done the trip...that I can live with. And a privilege I hope to earn, Krugerrands optional, as is insurance.

Boogie on the water?

Sealant trimmer and auxiliary caulking iron...oh, and pizza slicer.

It's not unusual when one is in "boat mode" to look at lubberly or commonplace objects with a squinty, sailorly gaze. A serrated breadknife could be handy to cut a line on deck, a pizza slicing wheel could make a nice clean-up tool for overflowing bedding sealant. It's very common to see the sort of "picker-uppers" found beside the recliners of the elderly, for instance, aboard boats with deep bilges.

Used several times a day during the engine installation.

Slocum had a crippled alarm clock to aid his navigation, after all. It doesn't all have to be "marine gear", although if it isn't, you'd better have anti-rust treatments handy.

A man who knew how to tack.

Cheap LED headlamps...seriously cheap, not the nice xenon ones cave explorers and rock climbers have, are great "hands-free" illumination for the sailor. I haven't done a delivery without one. They usually last that long without corroding.

Add a red scrim for nighttime chart work...why not?

Also, I have never bought sailing gloves. Gardening gloves of the "rubber dot" type or a variety of half-fingered cycling gloves (which I almost always wear to bike to the boats) are a reasonable substitute at a fraction of the price.

Endorsed by "Wheelie" Harken himself.

It was in that spirit that I looked recently at a sort of toy my son, who needs penmanship practice fairly badly, received a couple of birthdays back.

Hmm. Might need a shot of conformal spray.

It's called a "Boogie Board". It works like an LCD version of what I once knew as a Magic Slate.

Magic Slate? It's a sort of basal Etch-a-Sketch, the sort of thing parents bought for kids to keep them occupied on long car trips prior to the invention of the portable gaming console.

Magic not shown.

Something like this is superior to a notepad or a Post-It on a boat, I feel, because it can stand the humidity and is not likely to end up crumpled and soaked in the bilges. Nor will it adorn the ocean as blown-aft trash. It's necessary on a number of occasions to take short notes (lat/lon, weather observations, radio contacts) or to leave short notes for crew coming on watch (bilge required X pumps, remember to set radar guide alarm, etc.). Sometimes you just need to walk a few figures from a gauge to a logbook. Something erasable and cheap that isn't paper and ink makes sense to me.

Familiar, and yet unsuitable.

Whether deck-top note-taking needs to be done on a Boogie Board remains to be seen. I could get a dozen Magic Slates instead for the price and not be particularly bothered if a few fell off. And no, I am not interested in an iPad with a handwriting app. I actually reviewed the first generation of OCR/PDA devices like the Newton years back and was not impressed with the overthinking when compared to a steno pad. I simply want to record ephemeral information ephemerally. And then erase it.