Odda Sea - Life Aboard An Allied Princess Sailing Yacht - Maintenance / Repairs

Boat 2.0 - The Revolution Begins

nospam@example.com (Daniel) — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 21:07:24 +0000

I’ve been threatening for quite some time to discuss the repairs to Aletheia and the new rig she’s going to get after her dismasting. Well, I’m comfortable enough with the plan moving forward to finally share some of it with you, so hang on to your seats ladies and gents; this is about to get radically different from what you’re used to.

First, a sneak preview of the new rig design, courtesy the naval architecture expertise of Tad Roberts, my architect:

That’s right, folks, she’s going to be a schooner when this is all said and done! And not just any schooner, but a Chinese lug sail, also known as a “junk” rig. This rig is notable for its lack of stays, its simplicity, reliability, and ease of singlehanding - all important advantages for the type of sailing I’m planning to do.

The first and most significant bit of reconstruction necessary for this conversion was to relocate a hatch which is in the center of the cabintop. This isn’t a big deal, but it does involve a bit of fiberglass work and some nasty grinding.

First step was to cut the hatch out:

After that I ground the interior and exterior skins on the cored deck back about 3” in a bevel to provide for good bonding strength for the new fiberglass:

This required me to build a temporary “grinding booth” inside the boat using a drop cloth to contain the horrid fiberglass dust. I’m very glad that part is done now!

Next up I’ll be filling in the deck core and putting a fiberglass laminate on each side for strength. Once that’s done, I can do some final reinforcements to the deck structure in preparation for installing the mast partners.

An Intentional Dismasting, or How I Spent An Entire Month...

nospam@example.com (Daniel) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 05:40:25 +0000

No worries - the rig came down only on my terms! But yes, a huge part of the prep for this trip has been completed, and it took me nearly a month to finish, but finally I can stop spending time fretting over it and actually sit down to tell you about it! This will take a couple posts, and beware, this one is long and full of images, but hopefully you’ll find it somewhat fascinating as it’s not often a non-cruiser gets to see this side of boat work. So come along, let’s go head over to the shipyard where the masts are laying, and take a look…

My boat looks silly without her masts

For those of you who aren’t used to such intensive boat work, taking the masts down on a larger sailing vessel is typically done at the beginning of a term of ownership as a matter of proper course and prudence and thenceforth about every ten years or so as a precautionary maintenance item. Of course one would inspect the mast while it is standing on the boat much more frequently than that. Since I have been somewhat neglectful of my duties in this regard up until now, it was high time that, before I embark on a long voyage, I pay my proper dues. So down they came.

The mainmast masthead, just after I removed the VHF antenna.

Once they were down, it was a very significant amount of work to properly overhaul them - and try as I might, I still don’t think they are perfect. I did my best with the time, money, and resources I had available and I am definitely confident that they are MUCH stronger and in better shape now than when I took them down. Without going into excruciating detail, here are some of the highlights of what’s been done to them.

Basic Maintenance

Typically when dropping the masts, one would look them over thoroughly for signs of corrosion, weak or damaged fasteners, evidence of excessive stress like dimpled metal when it should be flat, and other obvious problems. All major fittings are removed such as the mast head (the portion which holds the sheaves for the halyards), the spreaders, and the tangs for all shrouds. These are the major structural components which keep the rig up and allow the sails to maintain their shape and efficiency, and so they are of critical importance. Most corrosion is caused by galvanic action between two dissimilar metals such as stainless steel and aluminum contacting each other in the presence of seawater. This is all too common on most masts, since bolts and smaller fasteners such as tang plates are typically stainless steel and the mast itself is, of course, extruded aluminum. The common fix is to insulate any large objects (the tang plates, for instance) with nylon washers or a durable sheet of plastic, and to apply a goop called Tef-Gel to the threads of any screws or bolts that go into or through the mast.

Typical corrosion spot behind the spreader tang.

In my case, there was some corrosion in a few places, though not enough to be worrisome, which I was able to address by insulating the problem fitting with some nylon washers, plastic sheeting, and Tef-Gel.

However, there was one area where the corrosion was a serious problem:

Yikes!

Yep, that’s the bottom end of the mast, where all the weight and compressive force meet. It’s pretty critical that this part be solid, and in my situation, well, solid was about as far from the case as possible.

This was caused by the mast sitting in a stainless steel step on deck, which was not drained properly nor was the mast insulated in any way from the stainless plate.

The only fix was to cut about an inch off the bottom of the mast and route out some new drain holes:

My buddy Alex doing the deed with his spiffy skilsaw.

I learned a neat trick from the rigger who helped me out with this: apparently you can use standard woodworking router bits on an aluminum mast to make gorgeous holes, cutouts, and other openings. Once I saw how nicely and quickly it worked, I’m sold on this trick. It makes using a Dremel look like the hard, long way.

Pre-drain-holes, but muuuuuch better.

After that, I cleaned up the mast and the step and gave both the bottom several inches of the mast and the inside of the step a heavy coat of etching primer and two heavy coats of corrosion protective paint.

Structural Upgrades

While the mast was being refitted, I took the time to strip off the old rigging which I was replacing, and to replace the stainless steel mast tangs with upgraded titanium parts to fit the new deadeyes for the upgraded rigging. This might sound straightforward but it represented a huge challenge: the bolts in my mast didn’t always match the holes for the tangs! I should note the tangs were what were properly drilled, my mast had sizing all over the place and it did not look like a thorough analysis of load weak points was given at the time of construction. One one shroud, the weak point was the clevis pin, on another it was the bolt holding the tang, on yet another it was the tang itself. Just no consistency at all. The new titanium tangs from Colligo Marine really kick ass and I am thrilled to get a chance to try them out.

Old rigging wire and spreader tang about to be removed.

This mismatch was solved in three major ways. First, where the mast was larger than the tang, but the tang could safely be drilled out to match the mast, the tang was sent to a machine shop and drilled. There was no way I could have drilled the titanium, so I had to send it to a local shop. Lazlo, the machinist, was absolutely amazing and did excellent work.

Next, where the tang was larger than the mast, I simply drilled the mast to match the tang and upgraded the mast bolt. While this typically means that I am adding an overbuilt part and taking a weight penalty by doing so, I am saving so much weight switching to the lightweight synthetic rigging that another few grams on a larger bolt doesn’t make much difference. Not that it matters much on a 6600 kg cruising sailboat anyway!

Lastly, and most time consuming of all, were the tangs at the spreaders. On both masts the spreader fitting was welded or integrally made a part of the lower shroud tangs. I spent some quality time with a chop saw and a metal blade slicing the old spreader fittings apart and isolating the tang portion from the spreader support portion. After this bit of metal trickery, I was able to mount the new tangs on a larger bolt which just barely fit. Fortunately, no further fabrication was required… here.

You can see the new tangs just to the right (e.g. below) the spreader fittings here. You might have to click this image to see the full width.

The last major structural upgrade I made was to add a compression post between the spreaders. This is a typically critical modification made to prevent the inward force on the spreader from crushing the mast in severe conditions. My boat did not have this support and so I reamed out one of the spreader bolt holes just large enough to drop a thick-wall aluminum pipe in and have it come to rest on the other wall of the mast. By running the spreader bolt through this pipe, the compression load is taken up by the pipe and not the mast wall. I did this to both the main and the mizzen mast.

Fabrication

However, my fabrication efforts did not stop there. During my previous removal of all fittings and fasteners, I noticed a serious stress indicator on the forestay tang.

Note the oblong hole in the tang where a clevis pin went. Apparently the stress on this tang was so great that it exceeded the yield strength of the tang metal and permanently deformed the hole. This has weakened the tang, and it’s also evidence that the tang was not strong enough to begin with. So I went to source a new one.

Turns out nobody makes the part. Fabrication to the rescue!

Again sparing a lot of the details as to the why’s and wherefore’s, I had some chainplate stock left over from the chainplate replacement I’ll tell you about in another post, and using a combination of grinders, somewhat cantankerous old drill presses, and a copious amount of head-scratching, mathematical calculations, and consultation with the local rigger for sanity checks, I determined that the best route was to simply drill two chainplate bars and run the clevis pin between the two holes. So that’s what I did. Should be about two to three times the strength of the previous fitting at minimum.

Electrical Upgrades

My work with the masts wasn’t limited to just metalwork, fabrication, and preventative maintenance. I was also very interested in replacing the traditional bulbs on the mast lighting with LEDs for a huge power savings as well as greater visibility. The masthead lights are used for both navigation and to give notice when I am at anchor, so they are quite critical! In addition, there are other lights on the mast which are required when the engine is running and yet other lights which simply illuminate the foredeck so I can work in the dark.

New Bebi 2NM LED lights in the Aqua-Signal housing. Warm-white LEDs, so the green looks green and not blue.

In addition to the illumination, the masthead is where the VHF radio antenna goes, and that was in sore need of replacement.

On the mizzen mast there were no lights that needed work, but a bunch of wires indicating a forest of antennas had previously graced the top of this mast needed removal. My plan was to put a wind generator atop the mizzen in lieu of further radio communications, and so I removed the mizzen masthead and took it to a local welder who did a great job welding the requisite pipe onto it for a wind generator mount. The wiring for this was simple, or so I thought, and so I ran a twisted pair of wires up the mast and reassembled all of that.

New wind-gen mounted on it’s spiffy pole atop the mizzen.

I should note that running wires up a mast is not something one does haphazardly. In my case I needed to run 8 wires for power/lighting and 1 heavy cable for VHF up the mainmast and have various combinations of these wires exit the mast at no less than 4 separate points along the way up. In addition, I did not want the wires to hang loose inside the mast and clang around. Some folks prevent this by riveting a PVC pipe up one side of their mast as a conduit. I was wary of putting further holes in the mast, so I did the next best thing: tie three heavy-duty zip-ties around the cable bundle every half-meter or so, with each zip tie pointing in a different direction. When you shove this mess up inside the mast the wires end up suspended by the zip ties more or less in the middle of the mast and nicely cushioned by the spring of the ties. This prevents them from slapping all around inside the mast when the boat rolls around at anchor.

In order to get the cables to come out at the right exit points I used the existing wires as chases and pulled a separate chaser line of nylon cord to the foot of the mast from each point. I next laid out the entire bundle of wire alongside the mast, marking where each pair or set of pairs would exit. I zip tied the bundle together, and attaching each wire to the appropriate chase line I was able to iteratively snug up on each chase line and “slurp” the whole snaky assembly right into place. I would like to say it worked perfectly the first time, but it didn’t. I ended up having to remove the spreader bolt as somehow I got one conduit line on one side of it and the other opposite, forcing the entire bundle to get jammed right as the next set of zip ties hit the spreader bolt. After that it was pretty much a cinch. Another day of switching out the lighting, securing and corrosion-proofing the electrical connections, and generally ensuring it was a job meant to last, and I was done and onto the mizzen. Fortunately I only had to pull the old lines and run a single pair up the mizzen, so that was pretty simple after having done the crazy bits with the mainmast.

Thus endeth the prep work

So far, what I’ve described took about three weeks of at least half-time work and many of that was full-time days of fabricating, cleaning, measuring, prepping, etc.

I’ll come back shortly with more to this story, including a whole saga on chainplates and a nice interlude where I introduce the slickest rigging material you’ve never seen, before we get around to putting the masts back on the boat.

_______/)_________

Electric Re-power Progress Update 2

nospam@example.com (Daniel) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 14:44:15 +0000

The electric re-powering continues apace, with another major step completed this past weekend: the removal of the existing upper diesel tank to make room for the batteries. Incidentally, this tank used to be the primary water tank for the boat - and I wish it still was, since I wouldn’t remove it if so!

The tank was ensconced under the cabin sole, so the first step was to drill out the bungs, remove the screws, and pry up the center of the cabin sole to access the tankage:

As you can see, the tank is pretty firmly held in place by several significant fiberglass straps and is trapped further by the floor stringers. Fortunately in my case, the fiberglass straps were all on the top of the tank, and the floor stringers are not integral to the hull structure, so I can cut and replace the straps and stringers without much problem.

Cutting the fiberglass straps and the end cap loose was probably the hardest and most annoying part of the process. It took nearly 3 hours of various contortions, hand saws, power tools, and other devices to get through the tough fiberglass in a safe manner without damaging the hull. With no welded on lifting tabs or other help, we threaded a soft shackle through the eyes on the access/inspection port and lifted the tank in that manner. Fortunately the access port was strong enough - I was not concerned about the shackle as it has close to 3000 lb breaking strength!

Once the tank was cut free as best as we could determine, my friend Ed and I hauled on a 4:1 tackle slung to the main boom and our combined weight easily popped the tank free after a few tugs. After that, the tank could be lifted with a firm grip and one hand. We cut the first few stringers as well in the hope that we could get enough angle on the tank to avoid cutting the rest:

Sadly, we needed to remove all of the stringers thanks to dimensional constraints. Ed shows off his “fierce” look here, as we prepare the hoisting strap:

After freeing the tank from the stringers and fiberglass, she lifted neatly out of the companionway.

We used the main boom as a crane and swung the tank over to the finger dock.

A quick cleaning made a big difference in the sludge and dust left behind (pardon the blurriness):

But then I went and ground down the hull so I could mount the battery tray, and made an even bigger mess:

After cleaning again, I was able to glass the mounting blocks to the hull:

I used 404 high density adhesive filler to help bond the mahogany blocks to the hull. There’s a nice 1/4” fillet on the top edge and a finger fillet along each side and the bottom. Having ground the hull side down to bare glass, there should be plenty of mechanical “keying” between the two surfaces for a good solid grip, and I’ll further distribute the load and reinforce the bond by tabbing the blocks to the hull with several layers of glass. After sanding/filing them down to a nice level surface, I”ll seal their surface with thickened epoxy, and then bolt down a plywood plate to form a base for the batteries. The batteries will be strapped to the plate, and will then be effectively an integral part of the hull, allowing them to remain stable and secure in the event of a knockdown or worse.

The reason I’m bolting the plate down rather than further glassing the plate in place is that I want to be able to remove the plate in the future for access to the diesel tank stored below it. I’m keeping that smaller (40 gal) tank in place in the event that I wish to add a genset, diesel heater or galley stove at some point in the future. 5/16” lag screws into an epoxied matrix in the wood should hold the batteries in place just fine, even upside down.

In the future I may also get a poly tank for water storage (probably about 40 gallons or so) to fit up forwards of the batteries.

Stay tuned…

_______ /) ____________

Big News - Repowering with an Electric Motor

nospam@example.com (Daniel) — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 15:15:43 +0000

Wow friends, have the weeks flown by! Now that I’ve put a huge amount of effort into the boat recently, I have something to announce: I’m repowering Aletheia with an electric motor instead of another diesel! Yes, we’re “going green” with our propulsion. I could write a diatribe on why (and, probably, will do at some point in the future). But this post is mostly to introduce the idea, talk about the how, and give you a little bit of an update on what kind of progress has been made and what will be about to happen.

First, the idea in general: after the incident with the “Perkebeke” (my old Westerbeke 40 / Perkins 4-108 engine) I mentioned a few weeks ago, I did a cost analysis of both repowering as well as repairing and maintaining the existing engine a few years into the future. Since I’ve always sworn that if I ever were to repower, I would go with an electric motor, I took a good hard look at those options as well. It turned out that repowering with an electric motor would be about break even with the immediate cost of repair and a huge gain on forward maintenance. Add to that my inherent unhappiness with the diesel (leaky, smelly, noisy, and generally a huge pain in my ass) and the choice became dead clear. So I called up Scott at Electric Yacht, who was exceptionally helpful and knowledgeable. I’ll talk more about why I chose EY in the future, but let’s just say that its my belief that they have both the currently most practical solutions for boaters as well as a very fair price and superb support.

After placing the order for their 180ibl motor, I listed the Perkebeke on Craigslist, where a number of individuals contacted me within a day or two - who knew these engines were so desired? I was able to sell the old engine and my offshore spares kit as a set - saving me the hassle of individually parting them out and saving the buyer a nice chunk of change for my convenience. All in all, it was roughly an even swap for the electric motor setup. When you factor what I’d already budgeted for more spares for offshore, even the batteries were a break even. And that puts me ahead of the unanticipated repair cost already. Triple win.

Pulling the old engine was dead simple: we towed the boat over to the hoist that the smaller J/24’s use for getting in and out of the water, lowered the hook down the companionway hatch, a few bolts later and a little swearing, and out she popped.

The old engine, recently freed from the boat. She should have a long and prosperous life as the prime mover for a water taxi company in New Orleans!

Once the boat was emancipated from the engine, I took it upon myself to rid the bilge of 33 years of slime, grease, and nasty seaborne organisms that had populated its depths.

The old, nasty bilge - AFTER a couple hard scrubs with TSP!

The process took 3 entire days of cleaning, rinsing, vacuuming, sanding and stripping, acetone washes, and more, in a seemingly never-ending procession of getting the majority of the bilge down to bare, prepped fiberglass. Finally I felt it would hold a new coating, so I put 5 coats of epoxy in the lower half, and coated the upper half with a one-part polyurethane topsides coating for durability and easy cleaning. I should note that before you intend to recoat oily, dirty, slimy fiberglass, not only should you wash the oily slime off (which will take quite a lot of effort and some serious cleaners) but you should still dewax, sand, wash, rinse, dewax, and solvent clean the surface again - preferably a few times, just in case the oil and nasty junk has penetrated surface cracks. Without the benefit of bilge pumps to keep the bilge dry (since they kind of have to be gone and out of the way to clean and paint anyways) I used an ordinary shop wet/dry vac to slurp up the soapy rinsewater. Naturally I did NOT dump it overboard!!

There’s a bit of a color difference between the tinted epoxy and the shiny topsides paint, but the extra immersion resistance of the epoxy is worth a slight cosmetic difference - and besides, its a bilge!

The end result is really satisfying, especially after such hard work:

Finally! A clean, shiny, and most importantly, visible bilge - makes it so much easier to both find things you drop, and know when its time to clean again!

I’m now just waiting for the motor to arrive to begin the next phase: electrical prep and mounting the engine to the prop shaft. Stay tuned for more in this exciting transition!

______/)_______

Quick update...

nospam@example.com (Daniel) — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 21:42:51 +0000

I know. Another couple weeks without an update! Tragic!

Fortunately, I am not in any way slacking on the productivity end of things here, just the writing about the productivity. And of course interspersed with all the productivity has been a great deal of sailing - racing, anchoring out, dock parties, you name it. I have some very very big news coming up (which if you’ve been reading my Twitter feed, over there on the right, you already have a hint of). Also, I have been twiddling with some geek-tastic microcontrollers and, thanks to the great folks at Blue Sky Energy, created a fantastic little datalogger for the IPN network that they use on their MPPT solar charge controllers, such as the SB3024iL. I’ll spare you the geeky details, but lets just say that the device reads the digital data from the controller directly and logs it to a standard Micro SD card, the contents of which I can then generate pretty charts like the one right above. Yep, that’s an actual “day in the life” of my boat’s electrical draw. Well, one “Solar Day”, I’ve left off the pretty consistent and boring nighttime slow drop of the battery voltage, but you get the point. I plan to turn this gizmo into an even more useful tool for boat power tracking and analysis: stay tuned!

I’ve also installed perhaps one of the coolest tools a boat data geek could like: a Brookhouse iMux Wi-Fi enabled NMEA multiplexer. Let me just say: this thing is the best NMEA multiplexer I’ve ever seen, and that’s even before I get to the WiFi part. If you have NMEA data on your boat, you should absolutely get one of these. More details later, but ‘nuff said.

BTW: Major hat tip to Bob Wise and Steve Roberts for the idea and initial encouragement on this project, and a special thanks also to Rick Cullen at Blue Sky for the superb help with interfacing to their gear - they have a fantastic datalogger of their own for those of you who want a pre-made solution. Of course, I have to do things the DIY way more often than not…

I have some news forthcoming on the engine situation: while this will certainly be some extra work and expense, I have a strong feeling that it will be one of those “for the better” type situations in the end, and speaking of work, I have a lot of it to get to before I get to tell you about the more exciting aspects of this new project. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned!

_______ /) ________

3 successes and a low blow...

nospam@example.com (Daniel) — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 02:02:46 +0000

I woke up Sunday morning with the vague feeling of unease that one typically associates with a night of hard partying the evening before. The kind of feeling you get when you know you drank a bit too much, and you think you did something you regret, but can’t quite remember all the details.

However, no such evening had recently happened, so as I rumbled around the cabin making my morning coffee and scrounging breakfast together I consulted the wrinkles of my brain to try and determine why I felt so unusually bummed out. Up to now I’ve had some really fantastic weeks: I’ve completed several projects on the to-do list, crossed another milestone off my list, and felt pretty decent about the financial plan moving forward. In fact, as of this holiday weekend alone, I’ve made major improvements to my navigation station, created a laptop mount out of plexiglass, and tweaked my newly installed Dyneema lifelines. I’ve even dug into my engine for some serious preventative maintenance and a bit of troubleshooting.

The engine! That was it — the source of my unease. While I had been working on it, I’d found a very serious problem, one that casts a shadow on my entire suite of plans for travel in the next year. And naturally, the significance of these issues has me very worried.

But let me back up for a second. There are a lot of neat accomplishments, lessons learned, and DIY solutions that I’ve put together over the past few weeks, and they deserve a bit of attention as well.

Lifelines

First up, after putting Aletheia back in the water after her bottom job, I got to work on her lifelines. I have no idea when they were last replaced, but the swages were showing all the classic signs of aging: rust trails, small cracks, and general evidence of fatigue. Making matters worse, I’d approached a fuel dock a wee bit too fast in a stiff crosswind when I was in New Orleans, and not only bent a stanchion but also raised a host of meathooks from the fine threads of the 7x19 lifeline wire which was overstressed in the immediate area of the bent stanchion. The fittings on both ends of that line were also cracked and bent. I’d crossed the lines to dock the boat a few weeks later and one of the meathooks sliced a neat cut in my foul weather gear as though it were a hot knife. In short: the lifelines were no longer a safety net - they were a liability.

Typical stanchions, prefabricated, often run about $60 new. I felt this was a ridiculous price to pay for a 24” piece of stainless tubing with a couple of holes drilled in it, so I went to the local boat parts wholesaler and purchased some stock stainless tubing, heavy walled, and a stanchion cap. Total cost: $20. A bit of careful drilling and some dremel work to polish up the edges of the holes, and I had a new stanchion.

My homebrew stanchion!

The lifelines themselves were only slightly more complicated. Instead of replacing the existing wire with more wire, I opted for the simple, extraordinarily strong, and exceptionally durable Dyneema fiber, a synthetic rope material (just as polyester and nylon are synthetic) which is, size for size, nearly twice as strong as steel and one sixth the weight. The really nice thing about Dyneema is that you don’t need to use fancy end fittings with it like you do with wire - a simple eye splice will do quite well. For the lifeline application, I used an eye splice with a ring hitch on one end, and an eye splice around a thimble for the other end. The thimbles I used are designed to be a part of a multi-purchase lashing and have a few extra nice features over a typical teardrop thimble. There are several rope companies that make line out of Dyneema, among them Samson’s Amsteel Blue (which I used for my soft shackles) and New England’s SKS-12/75, which is what I used for my lifelines (although I would use Amsteel Blue as well). John Franta at Colligo Marine was exceptionally helpful and supportive of my sailing plans and not only really helped me out with my project but he has also been extremely generous with his time and knowledge - I absolutely will work with Colligo Marine again in the future: in fact I have them earmarked for the supplies for my standing rigging, a project that is forthcoming. John designed the terminators I used for my lifelines and has pioneered the use of Dyneema fiber as a replacement for both stainless steel and PBO rigging - he does his work methodically, uses real data from destruction testing to back it up, and stands behind everything he sells.

The raw materials for my new lifelines.

Putting an eye in the Dyneema fiber is actually a very simple splice once you get the hang of it. I used a trick called a “mobius brummel” to double-lock the splice in place, this removes the need to stitch the throat of the splice and ensures an exceptionally secure tuck and bury. After performing the first splice, I would pull the entire lifeline to 2000 lbs for about 10 minutes using a rig I set up between two stout trees. I had a load cell and a vehicle recovery “come along” hand winch to put the tension on the lines. Once I had pulled out the constructional stretch and let the splice settle in, I could accurately measure the rest of the line and make my marks for the finishing splice.

A finished eye splice.

To a line they came out within 1 cm finished length of my target size, so I was exceptionally happy with my consistency in both splicing and tension. I lashed the ends with a Dyneema-cored lashing line called “Spyderline”, also by New England Ropes. Its also exceptionally strong and has a nice polyester cover so it doesn’t need splices, but can be tied in normal knots. I used a soft shackle and a pelican hook to make my lifeline gates and they work as absolutely conveniently as any normal lifeline gate does. Another clever use for a soft shackle, and another win for marlinspike seamanship.

Detail of the pelican hook and soft shackle gate closure.

The best part: I did it all by myself in a single afternoon, with a little bit of the splicing done the evening before. I paid no swaging costs, no end fittings beyond a handful of terminators and the two pelican hooks, and the lines are so strong that just two of them could lift my entire boat and still have a few thousand pounds of rated strength left.

Detail of a typical lifeline lashing - this is how you tension the lines.

Stern Chain Pipe

The new chain pipe and chain - cleverly tucked away under the shore power. You don’t need to use the anchor when you have shore power hooked up!

Having an anchor ready to deploy from the stern can be extremely handy, so I’ve been collecting a new anchor setup for a while. Aletheia already has a stern anchor roller and pin, so all that was left was to install a chain pipe to the stern lazarette where I will be storing the rode. I scored a nice deal on a stainless chain pipe, and got to work.

Locating the chain pipe was the tricky part - the geometry of the stern storage was such that I needed to locate the pipe as near the intended compartment as possible, but the shore power plug, the anchor roller location, and the curvature of the stern required some adjustment to that location. In addition I did not want to put the chain pipe somewhere I would be likely to want to relax in the cockpit. Fortunately, comfort, convenience, and structural integrity all found a happy compromise, and with a bit of hand-sawing to cut the last bits that a power saw wouldn’t fit, I made the necessary incursion in the deck. There was a substantial 1/2” balsa core in this area, which I am happy to report was dry as a bone, and I chucked a bent nail in the drill and reamed it back about a 1/2” from the cutaway, filling the void with thickened epoxy. After that cured overnight I trimmed and sanded the hole again, drilled out the bolt holes, and through-bolted the chain pipe in place, sealing it and the bolts with a thick layer of 4000UV sealant to further ensure water integrity. With such a nice large chain pipe in place, the nylon rode is easy to stow below quickly and the chain can come out quickly as well. Plus, it has a spring-loaded lid which helps keep the majority of water out, and I can always cap it off with a heavy bung or other seal when heavy weather hits.

I can also easily and quickly redeploy the secondary rode forwards if necessary. I’ve put an FX-23 fortress anchor paired with 50 feet of 5/16” G4 chain and 150 feet of 5/8” six-plait nylon rode. I have another 300 feet of 3/4” double braid with a short length of chain ready as a tertiary anchor rode if necessary, also stored in an aft locker.

Navigation Station Mods

Despite the “age” on this photo it was taken yesterday of my latest navigation station mod - the laptop mount.

Another area of major TLC for the boat was the on-deck navigation suite. Having a ketch rig with the wheel in the after part of the cockpit, there isn’t a convenient pedestal to mount the navigation electronics upon. The cabin is too far away for convenience, the area around the wheel is both too low and also used for sitting and moving around, and the mizzen mast holds both the sensitive navigation compass as well as being directly in the way of going belowdecks, not a convenient spot to mount a host of bulky objects. I’d briefly considered mounting the suite of gear on one or the other coaming, but that proved both annoyingly inconvenient on one or the other tack, as well as blocking a substantial and desirable part of the cockpit seating and relaxing space. No good either. What to do?

It dawned on me that mounting the electronics hanging down from the solar panel arch might make good sense, so with a jigsaw, some scrap starboard, and a few stainless U-bolts, I’d soon fabricated a nice platform from which to begin the experiment.

Lo and behold, not only was it convenient, but it made running the cables a simple matter.

Inside, I made some changes as well. I installed a second VHF (this one integrates better with the AIS and DSC equipment I will be purchasing shortly, as well as offering a hailer function for fog signals) alongside my primary VHF. I’m still waiting on the antenna, but I’ll put it on the stern, on the opposite side from the AIS VHF whip.

Fabricating a laptop mount rounded out the navigation modifications. I needed a secure way to mount the laptop while underway, both for casual use and for navigation purposes. I’d seen a very clever idea at Anything Sailing and decided to make a few modifications to adapt it to my purposes. I didn’t want the “tray” to wrap up around the laptop edges for two reasons: I have a very thin laptop and any wrap would become annoying and block access to ports, plus I wanted to be able to use a variety of equipment on the tray and not just one specific laptop. So I opted to use Velcro to hold the laptop in place, and make the tray flat. I found some industrial velcro with heavy duty adhesive and applied the “rough” side to the tray and the “soft” side to the laptop. It holds the laptop on so securely that it takes considerable effort to lift the computer off the tray. I also did not want the screws to protrude in such a way as to scratch or dent the bottom of my computer, so I layered the acrylic. One layer, which was smaller, bolted directly to the mount. The other layer was the size of the laptop’s base dimensions and I drilled oversize holes to allow the heads of the screws to be completely inset. By gluing the upper layer to the lower one with acrylic cement, I was able to effectively countersink the bolts without running the risk of cracking the acrylic over time.

The unadorned laptop mount - extremely solid and yet lightweight and corrosion proof.

I’m so far very happy with the tray, but I ended up going up a size on the RAM mount - I’d originally used the “B” size ball mounts and the “C” size were much more suitable to holding the laptop steady while typing. Once I made that change, it was a perfect solution.

Engine Trouble

As I alluded to earlier, however, not all has been peachy on the progress front. The skeleton in the closet for this boat has been the engine and drivetrain, whose condition I was never very sure of and have always been a little suspicious about. Since I bought her, I’ve been somewhat constantly performing a variety of maintenance tasks, including replacing the exhaust system, cleaning out the heat exchanger, and generally doing all the preventative maintenance that one typically does. But this weekend, having a little extra time on my hands, I decided to start tackling some of the unknowns and uncluttering some of the horrific mess of fuel lines and rusted valves and ancient pumps that the previous owner had left in a nearly undecipherable tangle of razor sharp hose clamps and frozen fittings.

Before diving into the engine, I knew a few things that needed work already. The oil cooler was corroding visibly, the heat exchanger had a lot of buildup in the tubes that two previous acid cleanings failed to remove, so a new exchanger was also on the agenda, and the freshwater pump was visibly leaking - a clear indication that it was past due for a rebuild. No big deal - except rebuild kits for this model pump are nearly impossible to come by these days and apparently all the shops try to sell you a new one. I have one spare, but what happens when, inevitably, it also begins to leak, when I am on some island in the middle of nowhere? Its a big chunk of change, let me tell you…

The corroding top on the oil cooler can be clearly seen here. The high pressure hoses to its left also failed.

As I started removing parts to access the oil cooler and water pump, I began seeing signs that problems were not restricted to “normal” maintenance items. The first indication was the oil cooler high pressure hoses, which literally disintegrated when I gently twisted them away from the cooler. The second clue was the utter lack of an installed zinc in the oil cooler - a cooler I was told specifically did not have a zinc. Well, the PO was right… there was no zinc in the oil cooler. But there sure should have been. With serious corrosion around the exterior and a missing zinc inside, a new cooler was quickly added to the list of stuff to get.

Then I got the rudest shock of them all: while removing the freshwater radiator hose from the exhaust manifold, the entire hose nipple came off with the hose. This is a solid block of cast iron with integral nipples, and the corrosion left the iron weak, crumbly, and a light gray color. The nipple on the front of the manifold was not as weak, but showed the same signs of corrosion damage and impending problems. In short, the manifold was a ticking bomb on the whole engine.

When I tallied up the replacement, repair, and rebuild costs for the various components that I now knew needed work, I realized that the cost was approaching the “Very High Number At Which I Previously Decided to Reevaluate the Engine’s Existence”, and I still did not know what surprises the rest of the engine might have in store. Some serious thought was required as to how I was going to approach this situation.

Regardless of the decision, though, one thing is sure: this has definitely blown my November 11 “ready-by” date, and my current budget, completely out of the water. Bummer.

Stay tuned for more updates on the engine saga, and a plot twist which is currently in the works…

P.S. If any of you have Twitter, I post various thoughts, mutterings, and updates too trivial or undeveloped to blog about on my twitter feed: @OddaSeaBlog. Click here to

____ /) _____

Just [non]skidding

nospam@example.com (Daniel) — Mon, 09 May 2011 15:50:09 +0000

Finally! A post with lots of images for you all to enjoy (or for those of you on slow internet, to curse at me, heh).

I typically choose one major boat project per month to try and knock out. It lines up nicely with my departure schedule and also helps keep me from getting overwhelmed by trying to do it all at once. April’s big project was to repaint the deck non-skid with KiwiGrip.

I chose KiwiGrip for a number of reasons, foremost being significant positive reviews and the ease of application and future touch-up. Cost was a nice second, but first and foremost I wanted a grippy product that would last quite a while, be easy to re-coat when the time came, and give me a very positive amount of traction on the foredeck and cabin top while allowing other areas of the boat to be kinder to bare feet. KiwiGrip allows you to “dial in” the tradeoff between aggressive grip and skin-friendly texture when you apply it, so different areas of the boat can be tailored appropriately.

I’d decided to paint the deck gray instead of the “florida coral pink” it had been - the coralish color not only faded badly but just always looked dirty. The boats I’ve seen with light gray decks always look sharp, even when they are actually somewhat dirty. To give you an example of how bad the deck was getting, here’s a before shot of the bow (click the picture to get the full width, my blog software cuts them off for some reason I haven’t had time to troubleshoot yet):

The trick was finding the right shade of gray that would be light enough to avoid burning my feet in tropical sun and still dark enough to not be a mirror reflecting the bright sunlight back into my eyes. Fortunately, KiwiGrip can be tinted with standard household enamel tint, such as what you can find at Home Despot or other big-box paint sellers. And most of them will tint your paint for free, albeit with the proviso that if it doesn’t color match exactly, you’re SOL. Since an exact color match wasn’t a priority for me, I availed myself of this opportunity, and having bought two gallons of KiwiGrip in pure white, promptly took them to the local orange-coloured home improvement warehouse and had them tinted the merest hint of a dusky blue-gray. Now, KiwiGrip is a yogurt-thick paint, about 10 times thicker than normal paints, so having the heavy-duty mixer/shakers at the store do the heavy work of getting them initially mixed was a very nice help. It only took another couple minutes of hand stirring to get a perfectly mixed even consistency throughout the can, rather than what I could only assume might be ten or more tiring minutes of hand effort.

I’ll spare you the boring details of prepping, but the only real effort involved was to scrub the deck thoroughly with a scotch-brite green abrasive sponge and some Soft-Scrub cleaner, followed by a very thorough rinse and a follow-up wash with a degreasing detergent soap (I used Joy). Because I wasn’t planning on repainting the rest of the gelcoat on the deck just yet, there was no need to remove all of the hardware - I simply left a nice inch-wide border around all of the hardware I planned to re-bed, which nicely matched the existing non-skid lines in most places. As a result, masking the deck off took the longest. I had decided early on that I would do the foredeck first, as any mistakes I made would be most forgivable there since it would receive a heavy amount of wear and the least amount of visitors. I then broke the rest of the deck up into sections: the two side decks, the coachroof, and the cockpit. Each could be painted independently of the others, and would be one contiguous section of nonskid.

Once the deck was masked, I went over it again quickly with an alcohol wipe to remove any last bits of oil residue that might remain, and slathered the KiwiGrip on per instructions, rolling it out after covering about a 2-foot-square area at a time. This stuff dries VERY quickly, so I had to work FAST. After about 30 minutes I’d completed the entire foredeck and decided to take a break and let that cure up to see how well it went on before finishing the rest of the boat the next weekend. Here’s how that came out (again, click for full size):

As you can see, I’m quite the artiste when it comes to painting things - abstract, that is. In fact, I think my cautious and deliberate painting style is highly reminiscent of Jackson Pollack, were he to equip himself with a brush, a spongy roller, and thicken his paint to yogurt-like consistency before emblazoning his signature style upon the deck of a boat. Ah well, its my first time trying to paint anything remotely like a boat. I believe I got equal amounts of paint on myself, the deck areas I’d intended NOT to paint, any item I thought I had sufficiently masked off, and of course the handles of all my painting tools. Ah well, Michelangelo I am not.

Overall, despite the mess I made, I was very pleased with the results, and decided to continue painting, much like a young child with finger paints is pleased with their results, and having painted the fine furniture in the dining room decides to continue with the damask chairs in the den. Over the next couple weekends I finished up the rest of the deck and coachroof, and then realized I had only about a quart left of paint. Since I’d wanted some spare paint left, I ordered two additional single-quart cans of KiwiGrip. I had one tinted the exact same color as the rest of the deck, and set it aside for future repairs. I had another tinted several shades darker, and painted the entire cockpit with the darker color. The contrast looks fantastic and the darker gray will hide dirt better. Since the cockpit is largely shaded, I figured the additional heat absorption of the darker paint would be somewhat offset by the shade and so far its been just fine. Now that the entire boat is done, here are some shots of the various areas (all of them are clickable):

Note that I painted the shoulders of the cockpit / gunwales to allow me to service the solar panels or otherwise traverse those areas with greater safety. I’m also going to use the additional quart left in the gallon can to “beef up” the thickness of the nonskid on a few high traffic areas of the deck and to add a little extra grip in a few areas where my texturing was not as consistent as it should have been. Overall I am very pleased with the coverage and performance of the KiwiGrip. I’ll let you know in a year how its turned out!

I should mention one more thing: after letting it cure the recommended 72 hours, the first time you get the deck wet you should wash it down with a detergent soap! In fact, I recommend you wash it, let it dry for a few days, then wash it all over again! The reason, as I found out the hard way, is that as the coating cures, it releases a surfactant which accumulates on the surface. Surfactants are the slippery component in soap! So rather than being non-skid, until you wash away that surfactant layer, you have decks that make a sheet of ice look grippy! So scrub the heck out of it until you can’t stand it anymore. Then you know you have a solid, durable non-skid surface. It should have a rubbery “grip” to the paint, in addition to the peaks formed by the texture roller.

Now that the deck and cockpit have been repainted, I get a LOT of comments from dock passers-by about how good the boat looks and how interested they are in trying KiwiGrip. Its quite gratifying to have the hard work pay off both in boat appeal as well as functionality.

And, just for maximum impact, I’ll leave you with one direct before/after comparison:

___ /) ____

Wiring the Solar Panels

nospam@example.com (Daniel) — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 19:05:11 +0000

Installing a cockpit arch and pair of solar panels onto an Allied Princess 36’ Ketch - How I saved over $5,000 and had a great time doing it myself.

This is the fifth post in a 5 part series on how I literally saved somewhere between $5,000 and $9,000 installing a cockpit arch and a pair of solar panels onto Aletheia, my Allied Princess ketch rigged sailboat. I’ll be posting this series over the next few weeks, so keep checking in for updates. Here is the previous post.

The electrical connection to the panel really took a lot of thinking before acting, though. Particularly how I was going to get the four heavily-insulated 10-gauge cables through the deck and down below to the Blue Sky MPPT solar charge controller. I decided to take a break and knock out of a few of the pet peeves that I had with the current cockpit arrangement.

As I was cursing the P.O’s choice of sealant on a particularly troublesome and leaky deck fitting, I had a flash of brilliance (this happens roughly 1x10^-20 times a year) and decided to borrow PART of his idea - the part that didn’t involve silicone to seal anything, mind. I’ll give you the challenge and see what you come up with before I give you my version of the solution.

The challenge: To get 5 cables of approximately 4mm diameter each through the deck in a clean and orderly fashion, unbroken, but easily removed for maintenance or replacement as the case dictates. The method of traversing the deck itself must be watertight, inexpensive, and involve the least number and smallest size of holes in the deck to accommodate the cables. The cables are bare at one end, and so may be fed through the deck without the need to accommodate fittings as well, just the cable diameter. And while 4 of the cables are uniform in size, one of them is a flat 2-pair DC cable with a nearly oval cross section rather than round. Naturally, higher points are given for cleanliness of solution and least amount of redneck engineering (e.g. no utilizing deck vents or locker lids). Chafe must be eliminated at any possible points of contact. Got all that? Ready? Go!

<theme from Jeopardy plays>

Ding! Time’s up! What have you come up with? Sound off in the comments or drop me a note.

My solution was to drill a hole in the deck just large enough to fit a 1” threaded PVC pipe fitting, and to screw the two halves of the fitting together, sandwiching the deck in between. This left a nice 1” diameter, clean looking opening in the deck, sealed with 3M 4200. After slipping all of the cables through, I had enough space left to run 2-3 additional cables should I desire to do so. The opening is very small now, and when I wish to seal it further, a simple application of butyl rubber will keep the water out and allow me to remove the cables for maintenance in the future.

The cable routing was a problem that, after some pondering, worked itself out nicely. A single hole through the quarter-berth aft bulkhead lead the cable along the quarter-berth, forward to where I had mounted the Blue Sky. Another small hole below the controller lead to the battery compartment. Application of some clear water hose serves as chafe protection along the cable path, along with double layers of extra-thick heavy duty heatshrink and cable clamps. A 50A circuit breaker, easily accessible, provides protection for both the battery bank and serves as the controller’s power switch. The run to the battery compartment from there is less than 7 inches in length, within the ABYC standards, and well protected from chafe with heavy-wall water tubing. Forgive the excessive quantity of photos here, some of you asked for more detail on the cabling, so here it is:

Mounting the control module for the charge controller was very straightforward as well: I cut a new hole in my electronics panel, screwed the charge controller in place, and ran the digital cable to the SB3024. Another, twisted pair shielded cable ran from the shunt in the battery compartment (master negative cable) to the control module as well.

Overall, the circuit diagram is very simple:

And that pretty much concludes the solar installation. Thanks for reading through and I hope this was helpful information to anyone else trying to do it themselves.

Here is the finished electrical installation on the interior and control panel:

Interior

Control Panel

Installing Solar Panels

nospam@example.com (Daniel) — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 03:46:23 +0000

Installing a cockpit arch and pair of solar panels onto an Allied Princess 36’ Ketch - How I saved over $5,000 and had a great time doing it myself.

This is the fourth post in a 5 part series on how I literally saved somewhere between $5,000 and $9,000 installing a cockpit arch and a pair of solar panels onto Aletheia, my Allied Princess ketch rigged sailboat. I’ll be posting this series over the next few weeks, so keep checking in for updates. Here is the previous post.

I find that there are 2 major kinds of people in the world: those willing to sweat the small details on a project, and those who’d rather just ‘get it done’ and slap a cover over the mess. The previous boat owner seems to be (in the electrical department, at least) one of the latter - though many other things on the boat are quite well done. I don’t know about you, but I’m generally one of the former, to a point.

However, I think there’s one thing most boat owners who have done a thing a time or two agree on, and that’s the simple rule that silicone sealant has no real place on a boat - at least as far as trusting it to seal anything! Naturally, I’ve found silicone in about every place imaginable on this vessel, 100% of them places it should never have been. Grumble, grumble… But I digress. Back to boring you to death with details of my solar installation.

I’ll spare you the drama, fitting the panels to the top of the newly installed arch was pretty straightforward, and involved simply drilling appropriately sized and spaced holes in the bottom of the panel frames, installing stainless u-bolts and backing plates, insulating the whole mess from the aluminum with tef-gel and plastic spacers, and cranking down on the u-bolts, the panels were firmly mechanically fixed in place.

To prevent nasty accidents, I riveted neoprene bumpers cut from sheets of 1/8” neoprene to the corners and fore and aft edges of the panels, as those areas were exactly where my head might smack the panel when entering the newly enclosed cockpit from the deck or companionway.

Honestly, this is not an optimum installation. The panels don’t currently adjust to the sun’s angle, and there’s not a lot of room for them to do so if I wanted, due to the low clearance between the panels and the mizzen boom - although the clearance is quite sufficient for the boom’s range of operation in even very heavy weather. It was a conscious trade-off I had to make between headroom in the cockpit (important given my height) and panel clearance to the mizzen boom. Compounding this, my slip’s orientation and the extreme southern declination of the sun at this time of year are completely at odds with each other and so I’m seeing about the worst of all conditions at present. But even given the non-optimal angle of the panels, they put out a quite decent couple amps into my system for several hours a day. I’m working on ways that - when I’m in dock, at least - I can tune their angle more appropriately. Until then, the panels are 100% flat to the sky and I’ll just suck it up.

One of the main options I’m considering will allow me to mount the panels off the side of the frame at steep angles. Another option is to give them a pivot on the outboard mounting edge, so that the inboard side can be lifted to angle the panels. That would put them in the way of the mizzen boom but would work quite well at anchor.

The next and final article to this series will summarize the electrical connections and wrap up the solar panel and arch installation. Thanks for sticking with me this far!

Exhausting Work...

nospam@example.com (Daniel) — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 16:26:27 +0000

Over the past week, as many of you may be aware, I’ve been refitting the exhaust system on Aletheia. Her old system was rusting through, leaking, and was generally a big mess. So I installed a new water-lift muffler setup. Its not quite finished, but I hope to be bolting it all together today. Its been a LOT of work.

To recap: I’ve removed the old, rusted exhaust system off the back of the engine. Had a custom exhaust riser fabricated out of galvanized pipe. Found a special metal fitting for water injection from another engine that fits mine, and added that in. Fiberglassed a new mount for a much larger muffler into the bilge, and had to make it removable for access to the propeller shaft. That last bit was a big trick. I also had to thoroughly clean out the heat exchanger on the engine and put in a new thermostat. Finally, I moved a lot of wiring from the new heat zone (the old exhaust pipe has a different path than the new one, so I have to relocate some cables) and shielded them with reflective foil insulation to provide better protection than they had previously been getting.

Now that its all ready to bolt up, I’m stoked. Maybe I can fire up the engine this weekend!

Electrical Brouhahahahahahahahaa.....

nospam@example.com (Daniel) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:33:57 +0000

So, I have some pictures to share with you shortly (I’m not QUITE done yet, but they’re coming, I assure you). Let’s just say that the electrical system (if you can call it that) on this vessel was slightly… askew, yes, askew.

To illustrate my point, the engine wiring alone, which ordinarily consists of a total of approximately 10 wires, consisted of 5 separate “harnesses” (read, spaghetti tangles) each containing at LEAST 5 wires. Yes, you did the math right, there were 25 wires where 10 would have sufficed. And on top of that, the wires were not run in neat, accessible bundles of related circuitry. No, it was a haphazard crisscross with zero regard for color coding. That had to go.

I looked in the sail locker and found a horrid rats nest of wire hidden BEHIND a wooden panel. There were controls not wired to anything, and 110V AC wiring right next to 12V DC.

So far I’ve spent about a week solid rewiring things, and I’m only about a third of the way done. The AC is still routed next to the DC, but its much more separated now. The rats nest is entirely gone, replaced by a single, cleanly routed harness going to the main buss and circuit breaker panel. The engine has all 10 wires in two clean harnesses which route entirely out of the way and are easy to get to for troubleshooting. The connection between the engine and the switch panel is a high quality waterproof automotive connector instead of an exposed terminal strip. Things are starting to shape up.

I’d love to be able to just rip EVERYTHING out and do it all from scratch, as it would be far, far cleaner than it is now. Unfortunately I don’t have that luxury at this time, I am cleaning everything up “in place” as it were, since I still use and need the electrical system on this ship to work for me as I live on her. I’ve done a pretty good job, and the improvement over what was there is tremendous.

There are still gremlins, though. The entire main harness running forwards is nearly entirely inaccessible in many places, which makes running new cables or troubleshooting existing ones very difficult. And I just found a whole new rat’s nest in, of all places, the head/shower area (yes, there is a mass of cable tangle and exposed circuitry in one of the wettest parts of the entire interior of the ship save the bilge itself). And the cables running up the mast desperately need replacing, but that will be a much more serious job to be done with a few buddies for safety. I could use a new windex, so I might put one of those up at the same time as I run the new cables.

Last but not least, I need a cockpit arch made to hold new solar panels.

I’ll get to those pictures for you, and we’ll talk about leaky portlights soon!

Catch you next time…

The Hatch, the Orbital Sander, and Her New Name

nospam@example.com (Lauren) — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 04:58:51 +0000

Daniel and I had a very productive 5-day stay in Panama City. Daniel spent most of his waking hours, when it wasn’t pouring rain, working on our forward hatch. It was an intensive process with a lot of diligence on his part. He entirely removed the hatch, stripped and cleaned off all of the residual caulking, and then got his first lesson in working with epoxy to seal the screw holes. He did a great job sealing and refitting it, and we already appreciate having a dry bed when it rains!

Meanwhile, I worked on removing old lettering, sanding down the gelcoat, and re-gelcoating the transom and sides. I used a hairdryer to lift the previous lettering and found that there were several layers of old lettering beneath (evident by the discoloration from the oxidized gelcoat). I sanded away as best I could to remove the discolored areas with an orbita and then applied gelcoat on top. Gelcoat is quite a tricky coating because of its thickness and 10 minute dry time. I had to work fast and efficiently, mind you, while I was hanging upside-down over the boat. I have not entirely completed this process and will need to apply an additional coat on our next visit.

Finally, the revealing of our boat’s name! After official de-naming and re-naming ceremonies, complete with libations for everyone (especially our boat) we proudly announce her new name: “ALETHEIA.” This name has several layers of meaning for both Daniel and me. First, “Aletheia” is the greek goddess of truth. Secondly, “Aletheia” represents the classical concept of truth versus falsehood. Thirdly, and most importantly, “Aletheia” is the greek word for truth, but more specifically, it is the kind of truth that is revealed and is no longer hidden. We feel that “Aletheia” revealed herself to us, and in doing so that she proved to us a certain truth about ourselves and the lifestyle that we are pursuing together. “Aletheia” represents the process that Daniel and I have undergone to realize the truth that is in our dreams and aspirations.

Love, love, love…