Learning
West Coast Vancouver Island
How Inaccurate Weather Forecasts Plagued My Week. Scream traveled the west coast of Vancouver Island this week. We were careful to study the weather and picked a window of opportunity with favourable winds: Northwest winds from 20 to 35 knots were predicted for the entire duration of our trip. Thirty-five knots is a lot of […]
Fixing our Profurl Roller Furling
Scream is a cutter rigged sloop, which means that we have two foresails. Both foresails are on ancient, tough-as-nails profurl roller furlers. These devices store the sails for us when we aren't using them and allow us to "raise" and "lower" the foresails from the cockpit. We've been having some trouble with the furlers for […]
Solar Power
We are pleased to report that we recently added a pair of solar panels to Scream. Scream has a pair of Sanyo HIP-195BA3 solar panels. Each panel is warrantied to create 195 watts of electricity under ideal conditions ten years from now. Conditions are of course always less than ideal, but the panels weaken with […]
Nanaimo (Shipyard)
We arrived in Nanaimo on May 25. We anchored in the very nice harbour and enjoyed a hot shower and meal at the Dinghy Dock Pub. The showers were a little tough to find, since they are actually in the restaurant. But for a toonie, we got a long, private shower, and then a very […]
If the women don't find you handsome...
... they should at least find you handy. (Red Green) There's an old saw that cruising is just fixing your boat in exotic locations. I don't know about the exotic part, but there seems to be no end of boat jobs. And most of those jobs are done by us, because a) we need to […]
Refrigeration Upgrade
We spent the last three days replacing our two previous refrigeration systems with a new one. We used to have an AC compressor and an engine-driven compressor, both of which still ran on Freon. We now have a Keel cooled Frigoboat system (K50-SSC) that runs off the 12V house batteries and uses R134a. We bought […]
Liferaft servicing
We were in Vancouver this week to get our liferaft serviced. Scream carries an inflatable liferaft for the crew. Inflatable rafts are industry standard, and they are tested and repaired by authorized dealers every year. The raft is in a large duffel bag that weighs almost 100 pounds. In the bag there are a half […]
Darusha's "Waves" Talk
Steven & I have been participating in a seminar about weather through the Bluewater Cruising Association, and on March 12, I gave a presentation on waves. You can check out my slides below, or download the pdf here. | View | Upload your own
San Juan Island
Scream spent this past week on a trip to San Juan Island. There was essentially no wind on the day we left Victoria for the 27 nm trip to Friday Harbour. So despite a good attempt at sailing, we motored most of the way. We were running late and decided that we wouldn't get to […]
Marine Computing
I've been doing a lot of work on board lately to get the computer stuff all up and running. I'm still maybe only halfway there, but it occurred to me that it might be time to lay out the basics so far. We moved on board with an iBook G4 and a PPC Mac Mini […]