Out of the closet

Mothra vs the Installer, the BFTV

I clamber onto the boat, and nearly trip over a large box containing a new TV. Alright, this must be the new replacement for the cockpit, and I push it off to the side. I go down into the salon, and upon seeing the box there, I can feel my very soul being sucked into the ether. It's huge, it's heavy, it's the television equivalent of Mothra. My instructions had been clearly stated, we measured, it will fit, make it work. Like most of us that aren't effete intellectual snobs, I watch TV, and to keep marital bliss, I don't alway get to watch exactly want I want. But come on now, do you really need to sit in the dark, and pretend you're in an Imax theater on your boat? Oh well, it's not my role in life to tell people what I think, unless asked, and then it is a rare occasion I don't have an opinion.

Carefree learning for kids, and some adults

And now for the numbers. Carefree Learner is 41' LOA, was built out of plywood and epoxy in 1978 by 96 students from Sarasota high school at no taxpayer expense, and with a lot of help from the community. She has carried over a whopping 174,000 passengers consisting of 6th grade students, Sarasota high school marine science students, and local community organizations over the past 32 years.

My excursion starts with watching the arrival at the dock of Carefree Learner loaded down with a 6th grade class. I was surprised at how orderly the disembarking was, despite the obvious enthusiasm, and energy of the passengers. Life jackets are collected, water bottles found, thanks given to the captains, and the little urchins are herded off by their teachers to a yellow bus to continue their ongoing incarceration in a state mandated institution. Carefree Learner also sports a very unique marine feature, a not oft used 'Time Out" bench back at the helm.

Blivet: 6" of chart plotter in a 4" space

This was a true greenfield project. This is Mike and Sandy's McAdaragh's shiny new Cruisers 415 MY. Mike wants a Garmin 7215 to go into the left panel, and there isn't quite enough space either in depth, or width to make it fit, or is there?  

We had a left side panel location that was both not quite wide enough, and on the right side not quite deep enough, so what's a body to do? The answer is the Garmin 7215 unit has to be lifted two inches, and some accommodation made for the small amount of extra width we need. Departing from the usual sequence of events, we will jump to show you the solution first, and then we will use Mister Peabody's "Wayback" machine to show you how it was done.

"Holy Boat" Batman

There is a season, Turn Turn Turn. And a time for every boat under heaven.....

I blink my eyes, and look again. At the end of the dock is a church docking, and it's a real church that is docking. I have done a lot of checking, and this one of three powered floating ship churches in the world. There are a lot of floating church chapels, and some power boats that hold services, but only three real boat churches.

A new wind is a blowing

Google's Blogger suffered an outage for about a day, much to my distress. I had posted the little non sequitur piece about the subliminal images I spotted, and the following day, it was gone. After a few brief paranoid thoughts about Nazi frogmen hacking into my blog, and seeing I could not access the editor, I realized that it wasn't FOX's minions who were responsible, but Google's cloudy system. I did suffer some minor P in the A losses because of the outage, and it has resulted in my doing a long overdue full back up of the blog and templates.

It's not about boats, but I found this interesting, and a bit creepy

The oven buzzer went off, and Kate froze the DVR, and this is what was on the screen. This image was inserted several times in an American Idol commercial that was aired in the middle of a Glee episode that played on May 10 at 8:00 pm. I stepped through the commercial with the DVR in slow motion and took some pics of the many images. The funny thing about the images was they had already appeared twice at that time, and we hadn't consciously seen them. But when you know it is there, you can see it very briefly flash. 

The three hour tour and the forces of nature

F5 tornado's, tsunami's, and earthquakes, just for starters are words I would uses to describe Dani, along with her friends Katelyn, Carla, Staci, and Ann. Dani is a bartender at my local watering hole Gecko's. She is a Ringling School of Art graduate, and a true force of nature to say the least. As a developing side job, she has started "Brutus Bites", and manufactures tasty (our two greyhounds love them) natural dog treats.


To promote "Brutus Bites" at my suggestion she has a newly created blog titled The adventures of Brutus. As her blog will tell you, she is a self proclaimed "Thirty-some single white female seeking refuge from an alpha male English bulldog". Dani has a very funny stream of consciousness style of writing, and doesn't pay much attention to formal grammar, but it is fun to read, and the arty part of the site is clever. By the way I have met Brutus many times, and he is a lovely dog, but every encounter is a Turner and Hooch moment resulting in substantial quantities of drool, and a visit to the washing machine.

Classifieds

Grey Goose, a 50' Nordhavn Pilothouse makeover

For starters, I love this boat. It's a stunning Nordhavn 50' pilot house trawler, and it's substantially built to say the very least. The short summary of the work done was to update aging electronics at the helm, provide better integration of the systems, and to end up with hopefully a factory new appearance. This little story as much about the process, as the technology.


Welcome to "Grey Goose", she is beautiful, close to perfect in all respects, and has been meticulously maintained by her owner Don Payzant.