“Just a minute,” I told Captain Jerry, when he popped by the boat to announce that the pile of Dungeness Crab was ready over on Baccara. “Sky is sewing chafing gear and I’m chasing cables.” “Those are forever jobs,” he replied with a twinkle. “The crab is ready now!” Yah, it’s high season… and our…

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There is something refreshing about a deadline that looms with implacable insistence. Instead of the casual plasticity of self-imposed schedules, there arises an urgency tied to the plane tickets of house sitters and the contractual inflexibility of marina move-out dates. Given all that, we have recently noticed an increase in the completion percentage of the…

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One of the big startup challenges in the transition to a Nomadness-centric lifestyle is amassing a useful on-board workshop. This is not at all easy, and involves a fairly extensive suite of tools as well as hundreds of little 3-mil zip bags of small parts. I quickly found that just skimming the good stuff from…

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With departure from the marina looming rapidly, certain things have been burbling to the top of the to-do list… one of which is having a legal and functional sewage system. The ship came equipped with both Type I and Type III marine sanitation devices; the former a treatment system that discharges sterilized waste, and the…

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We haven’t done the renaming ceremony yet, but the lettering is in progress and looking good! The starboard side is done; next warm day we’ll ease her across to the next dock and do the port… We ordered the letters online at Speedy Signs, and so far it has gone well (though it takes patience…

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The boat is now awash in tools, gray NMEA 2000 cables, little clusters of parts, removed panels, and the general unnameable clutter of any large project. A few days ago, I ran the backbone of the network using all Maretron hardware… centered both electrically and conceptually at the inside helm station: The yellow connector is…

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Quick update before I plunge back into N2K goodness this week… the 10′ Navigator dinghy is now securely hanging from the davits. It’s a simple procedure, now that it’s essentially done: attach bridles to the bulkhead fixtures in the dink, remove the starboard dinghy dog flotation collar, use the 3-part-purchase tackle assemblies to hoist the…

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I have mixed feelings about this, but there’s really no choice. The old marine “networking” standard (NMEA 0183) was little more than glorified 4800 baud serial datacomm, with various vendors producing their own variants to jockey for competitive advantage. That’s not very interoperable. NMEA 2000, the new stuff, is based on the well-established industrial CAN…

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The trouble with moving ahead on many fronts, despite actual progress that is sometimes considerable, is that life becomes so diffuse that one’s perception gets bogged down in context-switching overhead. A lot is going on, so this post is an attempt to bring it all up to date. Navigation Systems: The parts are arriving at…

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All those pithy aphorisms about boats and expenses really are true. I expect this with new nautical gizmology, of course – loading ‘er up with NavNet 3D, communication, and NMEA 2000 goodies involves enough money to buy another sailboat – but even the pedestrian stuff involves one gotcha after another. Take plumbing, for example. Not…

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