Debby Downer

Debby was a downer indeed. The rain started five days ago on a Thursday, and with a vengeance. For four days it never let up, and well over a foot of precipitation fell. Noah was frantically trying to finish his ark, but like all boat projects he was way behind schedule, the site was flooded, and the alligators were hungry and cranky. The radar display was solid dark green with lots of yellows and reds. The alerts were spewing out nonstop on the TV and radio. Brappp, Brappp, Brappp, this is a.... tropical storm, flood, rip tide, thunder storm, tornado, high surf, marine, and four horsemen of the Apocalypse warning. But like all large rains with a name we occasionally get here, life goes on. Banks are open, there is soggy mail in the box, and restaurants are packed with grumpy tourists

Primordial soup

Nothing makes me more nervous than the typical boat's water system. Visions of explosive lumbo trickitis emanating from the lower blowhole, coupled with world class cramps or worse has generally discouraged even my most trivial usage of boat water. I would use it to wash dishes, or take a shower only if there was enough chlorine in it to bleach your hair Jean Harlow white, and sear your nasal cavities. In general, if you haven't make a serious investment in filters, disinfecting systems, and chemicals I think it should never be used for drinking. I know it's an audacious thing to say about your boat's expensive water system, but I think it's the truth. Just look at all the news stories about near death experiences, and severe illness boaters have had after drinking boat water. What? There really aren't any? Why I was sure I would find some. But I didn't, and I know why.

What the..... inverter installation made easy

The first step in doing a DIY inverter install on your boat is to find a 12 VDC source. This is usually a big red wire. A battery switch is a good place to find one. Don't worry at all about it shorting against the common leg of the switch. That thin plastic coating on the handles of the clip is there to insulate them. It looks fine, and is color coordinated. The clip has the appearance of permanence, requires no expensive special ;tools to install it, and has the panache I like to see in a marine electrical installation. You won't need any of those dangerous and unsightly restraints like tie wraps either.

What happened?

Ouch, it's dangling from its hip. A case of being drawn and quartered, gone awry, and it was all done by something, but what? I know most boaters are familiar with rocks, and a few have had some up close and personal experiences with them, me included. But in southwest Florida we don't often see rocks. In place of all those hard objects we just have fluffy white sand that collects on the shores, and a hard packed version that resides in the water. I'm going to apply some marginal journalistic standards here and disclose that my information is second hand from my mechanic friend who was the verbal cell phone based first responder. He dealt with the owner throughout the incident. To protect his identity, I'm going to change his name to Ron White, mostly because he kinda looks just like Ron White. I figure the real Ron White, who actually looks exactly like Ron White won't mind. As the real Ron White says, "I didn't get to where I am today by worryin' about how I would feel tomorrow." I feel the same way, most days anyway.

Suicide terrorist sturgeons threatening Florida.

Florida's governor, and cabinet convened this week in Tallahassee for an emergency closed door meeting to discuss the emerging sturgeon threat. A cabinet official, speaking off the record said, "It's apparent to us that Florida's sturgeons have been infiltrated by some branch of al-Qaeda. Not a single person was injured by a sturgeon in 2010, but we're smart enough to put two plus three together. Osama bin laden was killed in early 2011, and in that same year nearly a dozen sturgeon suicide attacks occurred. This now explains where the sturgeons were over the winter, terrorists training camps."

Entropy working towards disorder on your boat

It's an inexorable process. A new day starts with the rising of the sun. The heat starts to beat down on your boat. The air molecules in the radar dome start to get excited as the temperature increases inside the dome. The air increases in volume. Slowly the higher pressure air starts to escape the dome until the temperature peaks. The sun is now setting, and the temperature inside the dome starts to cool. The pressure inside the dome drops correspondingly. Moist air from the outside now gets pulled into the dome. As the temperature continues to cool, the moisture inside the dome starts to condense on everything inside the dome.

Installing the Spot Hug

This was my first adventure in playing with a Spot Hug. This is a clever system. It lets your friends and family see where you are. It tracks your progress, you can send an SOS message to the Spot monitoring center, and if the boat was stolen, Spot Hug will let you know, and tell you where it is.

I'm going to just deal with the installation of the system, and I will put some specific links to Panbo at the end of this missive where you can read what Ben Ellison has to say about the system.

The contents of the box are below with the exception of the user instructions, and the quick start guide. However what's missing from the box is instructions on how to install the Spot Hug. I have been informed they are working hard on this. So in the interim, you get me, and I will provide a link for a You Tube video by Spot talking a about this.

132 lbs times 8

Uff da, Oy vey, Ay caramba, OMG. They weigh 132 lbs each. There are eight of them, all stacked in in a sturdy, but Machiavellian designed miniature prison located under the main salon. Accessible only via a small hatch, I can't imagine the pain level the original installer must have endured to install them. I can for sure tell you about my pain in removing them. I felt like I had entered one of these "World's Strongest Human" contests. You've seen these shows. Immense men pulling locomotives with their teeth, hoisting huge boulders onto pillars, and carrying cars around. 

The animated Yarn of the Nancy Belle from the BBS

This sort of thing seems to happen every time there is a long weekend. It proves that idle hands are the devil's playground. A little fun with the BBC and the W. S. Gilbert poem "The Yarn of the Nancy Belle." I don't often get to deal with long pig.

Minimum standards

Not every boat is a Cinderella, but they all should be. This picture is from a smaller name brand boat, or at least a boat with a familiar name. The builder saved a couple of bucks by taking a minimalist approach to everything, especially the electrical system.

The minimal standard for any powered vessel is that it should have at least two batteries.....

and a battery switch....

in addition to a fuse block.

Then doing a simple task like installing a small GPS or a stereo would be easy, and when the boat's toys suck all of the juice from one battery, you have a second battery available to start your engine.

So the next time you are shopping for a new boat at a dealer, this is the minimum standard, don't settle for less!

TV surgery

Old glass tube TV's never die, they just get thrown away. The is a very well loved Searay 48' sedan bridge, and the bad news is that it has an old electron beam gun TV inside of it. The good news is there isn't a VCR built into it. It works okay, but the coax splitter behind all of the gear has crapped out resulting in poor pictures on the other sets in the boat, and the sound quality is less than stereophonic.

The real trick in replacing older entertainment stuff is in not making the new electronics look out of place, and giving it, as much as possible a "factory made" appearance. The devil is all in the details.

Mission critical, what if?

Toilets are flushing, VHF is assailing

Nav lights are bright, and wind is prevailing

Seas are all fine, and you're sailing on wings
These are a few of my favorite things

When heads won't flush
When frig isn't cold,

When I'm feeling sad

I simply remember my favorite things

And then I don't feel so bad

Endangered client species identification

Identifying client types can be a fun and enlightening pastime. Like "Birding" the tools are simple. A pair of binoculars, a camera, and a log book are all that is needed. To get you started I have provided a list of some endangered species to begin with. Care should be taken not to approach too closely to some of these species. For example the Florid Rightwinger may well be armed to the teeth, and should not be riled while in it's nest. So have fun, and fill your log book.

   

Technical garbage confusion

This is a common issue for me. Seventy five ponds of vintage, but still operable glass tube television riding around in the back of the Parmain Laboratory's Mobile High Tech Marine Crisis Facility. There are three options for disposing of these hulks. The first is the "Green Way." This involves driving out to the dump's processing center, waiting in a long line with others who have dangerous items, like left over latex paint, old microwaves, and then me with the TV. The idiot box gets weighed, the magic number is fed into a computer that advises me the disposal fee will be $15.00. Another approach is to leave it on the street on or near trash day. The garbage service won't take the TV, but often an enterprising entrepreneur will see some redeeming value in it, and will make it disappear in the dead of night. A good morning is when you look, and it's gone. A bad morning is when it's still there with a note on it saying "Just leave flat screens jerkface." Plan C is to go behind a shopping center, and dump it in the Italian restaurant's bin. I have only heard rumors that a TV makes a satisfying plopping noise when it hits all of the discarded spaghetti and lasagna. Boy do I miss living in Chicago. You could put on the curb a cast iron tub, a body rolled up in a rug with a twenty dollar bill and bottle of Jack, and it just magically disappeared.

Shallow water chirping

You hear the claims that chirp technology lets you see deep, and here is some real proof. A Garmin GSD26 with an Airmar 599LH transducer painting the bottom at an impressive 11,706 feet. That's over two miles deep. I think this is the current record for finding bottom with a marine chirp fish finder, or at least this is by far the deepest screen shot I have seen to date, and I have seen a lot of them. Look at the depth range scale. The bottom of it is at 13,200 feet, and I would bet given time we will see even deeper screen shots if anyone can find water deep enough. I'm sure the unit was using every bit of its 3000 watts on low chirp to do this. But this time, we are going to the opposite extreme to look at how well this technology operates in very shallow water.

Too much tech, but not enough lifetime.

I'm the oldest of three male urchins. Because I was the oldest, I got the more important jobs in the household. At about 12 years of age, I was promoted, and the next oldest sibling got my old job of taking the pipe wench outside, and using it to turn the antenna pole until the Chief, (spelled Dad) yelled that's good, no no back a bit, stop." It was 1964. There were three TV stations that operated until about midnight, and we watched it on a black and white TV. This was good because I had now graduated to the job of TV repairman PFC Bishop.

This job consisted of quietly watching the activities when the TV was not feeling well. The scenario was always the same. The TV lived in a custom built niche, and much like the Virgin Mary, the set was metaphorically worshiped nightly. When the TV broke, the Chief would extract it, and set it on the dining room table. Screws were removed, the back came off, and the plug was detached from the back, and plugged back into the set. The lights would be turned down, and the set was turned on. All available eyes would look at the tubes to see who would be the first to spot the tube that was not glowing. "Aha", would declare the Chief, that's the problem. The set would be unplugged, the tube extracted and put into my hands.

The Fusion 40 catamaran kit

I'm still kicking myself. I saw this starting last week. It looked like someone was building two 40' war canoes, or the ilk on a couple of jigs. I almost stopped to see what was going on, but a look at my watch made me give up the idea. Late as usual, am I. A visit to the yard on Thursday startled me. Where there was two canoe looking structures, there is now about one third of a boat sitting there.  

The SRQ boat show

Every boat show has a character that reflects the community that it's being held in. Miami's show is large, and brash, with tons of phallic boats and bikinis. The Wooden Boat Show at Mystic Seaport offer the prestigious Concours d'Elegance awards, and bone button blue blazers abound. In Sarasota, a city renowned for the arts, the boat show ambiance can best be described with the words "Haute Couture."

The up skirt danger

The statue "Unconditional Surrender" on the Sarasota bay front has been mired in controversy since it's erection in Sarasota in 2005 as part of a public art program. Scuffles over copyright issues, and as always with public art here the question "Is it really art?", roils through the community. I personally don't think it is any more art, than an injection molded 6" Stature of Liberty" is art, but that's me. I think for many it provides a whiff of nostalgia of times, that in their minds were good, and anyone could grab a stranger on the street and give them a sloppy wet kiss. Do this today, and you will end up in the hoosegow, and get your picture in the paper.

Minor labor

I had heard about this legal loophole in child labor laws some time ago. One day a year you can take children to work, and get some useful effort out of them. I was excited about the concept of having free labor, so when the "Take our daughters and sons to work" day came around, I wanted in on having a free worker for the day. Since Dylan Wood's parents weren't able to do this, I offered Dylan a chance to escape the educational gulag for the day, and he accepted.

EdgeWater 318CC innards perfection

I have been looking for a very long time for a boat that has all of the design features that I feel are lacking in so many other boats from my perspective. WTF maintenance, and installation moments are common in the production boat world, so it's truely refreshing I finally found one that is WTF moment free, the 2012 EdgeWater 318CC. I'm not reviewing the number of rod holders it has, whether it has a barbecue grill, how fast it can go, or how colorful the Naugahydes are. Instead I'm reviewing, as they say on Iron Chef, the bitter innards of the boat, and in this case they are very tasty.

Engine NMEA 2000 crap

"Really, that's all I need, just the gateway kit, how much is it? Ouch $250 bucks? Well it is what it is, I guess, and the owner wants to see his engine instruments on his chart plotter." Fast forwarding a week UPS delivers me a box, and I go to the boat. Avidly ripping open the box, I behold the kit before me. There it is in all its glory, a small black box with an LED, and two cables coming out of it. Yep, one of them has a standard NMEA connector, and the other one has a what? It's a nine pin female connector, where the heck does this thing plug into? Wait a minute, it's a kit remember, and in the bottom of the box is another cable, with a nine pin male connector. I plug it in, and then look closely at the other end. Hmmm, it's a male 4 pin connector. Whats this plug into? I can see the entire engine harness, the engine gauges, the control computer, and the device bus, and nowhere is there someplace this four pin connector can go. Rats!

The imposter

"Hey, get that light out of my face." "Shut up and stay in that chair, or we'll cuff you to it. We have gotten complaints that you are impersonating mineral spirits." Can't you read detective? I am mineral spirits, look at my label." "I see your label buddy, but you could have printed that up with any computer. I know for a fact that real mineral spirits are clear. What's up with your milky color, and why do you have to be shaken before use?" "Hey do I look like some sort of a rocket scientist? I don't know, that's the way I was made. I'm special, greener, and better for the environment." "Whatcha mean you're green, does that mean you could be drunk, or poured into the bay?" "Whoa there, you can't drink me, or pour me into the bay. I can kill fish you know." "'Yeah? So what make you green then?" "Well for starters there are actually less solvents in me, maybe as low as 15% by volume and there might be as much as 40%, they don't tell me exactly how much. That makes me safer, and I want my lawyer, now! I ain't saying anything else copper."