Welcome to my blog!
Back at the end of 2013 I decided (apropos of nothing) that I wanted to live on a sailboat. Armed with only a copy of This Old Boat and my blissful ignorance of anything to do with boats, sailing or handiwork I bought the first boat I looked at, a mere 3 hours drive + 2 hours ferry ride away. What a great idea!
Luckily the boat (a Cherubini designed Hunter 36) turned out not to have anything too disastrously wrong with it, so with a lot of time, money and reading I managed to get it into a livable condition. And then I discovered I liked sailing and decided to sail around the world.
Well, I got as far as Mexico before firstly Brexit and then Covid scuttled my plans. So I sold Gudgeon, the Hunter 36, down in Mexico and am now back in BC with a second boat, a Rafiki 37 called Sooner.
Adding a dual racor system to the boat
Last year, on the free table at my marina I found the following 'But Matthew', I hear you say, 'That is literally a pile of dirty trash' And I would say - actually, that's the best find I have ever made. Take my hand and let me lead you through the exciting world of...
Wiring up Sooners DC: Part 4 – New breaker panels
Sooners old breaker panel for the DC was old and not actually wired up to anything (the fridge etc was all wired directly to the batteries) so after removing the old one the first thing to do was figure out what I was going to do for new ones. Using an combined AC/DC...
Wiring up Sooners DC: Part 3 – Replacing the BMS in the LifePO4 bank
After pricing out decent cells it turned out to be cheaper to get a premade battery from https://www.electriccarpartscompany.com I went with the BestGo battery pack as seen here https://www.electriccarpartscompany.com/12v-400ah-preferred-lifepo4-lithium-battery-packs...
Christmas Update
Been a few weeks since I last updated, due to it being winter I haven't really felt like doing anything boat or writing related, but here is a brief update. The marina where I'm at has a competition where they give out $100 gift cards to the best decorated boats and...
Sailing Sooner
So at this point I'd taken Sooner out for her first big trip, but still hadn't actually sailed her outside of the short test sail before purchase. One of the really nice things about being on a boat this time is I've met a lot of younger people doing the same thing I...
Thanksgiving raftup 2022
Last year some friends of mine all took our sailboats to an anchorage and rafted up together for Canadian Thanksgiving. I took Frawg (the Shark 24 I part-owned) up with my girlfriend at the time and it was really fun, despite getting intensely hailed on on the way up...
First (un)docking mishap
So at this point I still hadn't had Sooner out except for moving her from Pender to Victoria, and then once to Sidney to haul out. Neither would count as a pleasure trip, and with the summer rapidly ending I decided it was time to stop moping around and actually go...
Teak Wars: The Teakening Strikes Back
One of the things that made me pretty leery about buying Sooner was the amount of exterior teak on her. Not only were there the dreaded teak decks, there were also teak cap rails, cockpit trim, cockpit seats, dorade boxes, boom gallows... the list goes on. A lot of...
A new dinghy
Sooner came with a hard shell dinghy, which I think was fiberglass over a wooden frame. You can see it on the front of the boat in this pic: It was really cute, but was only 6' long and was extremely heavy for it's size - lugging it around on the foredeck was a chore...
Installing water filtration
I am horribly behind on posts, as I have done a lot of boat work in the last couple of months or so while at the same time failing to be motivated to write anything due to being dumped, turning 40 and then catching covid (or the ol’ triple threat as we call it in the...
