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.
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...
Wiring up Sooners DC: Part 2 – The New Schematic
So I actually got off my arse and made a (very) high level schematic which should save me at least 3 hours of typing. Here is Sooners new DC system! (this is definitely gonna break this post for everyone trying to look at it on the toilet on their phone but thems the...
Wiring up Sooners DC: Part 1 – The old wiring
So this has actually been an ongoing project over the last (checks calendar* seven?! wow) months and I've been putting off writing about it because I wanted the first post to be the overview and I was CONSTANTLY changing my mind and blah blah blah. Anyway, it's...
Rewiring Sooners AC Part 4
Sorry about the gaps between posts - dealing with some personal stuff and it's really hard to get motivated to write. Anyway, onto the post... So on my last post I had confidently declared 'The last part of the AC rewiring project...' which turned out to be as untrue...
Summer updates
It's been a while since I did a new post - most of the reason for that is that I've been really busy finishing off the redo of the entire DC system, which is going to be a multi-post series - but I wanted to make the first post the design. Which is a great idea,...
I got an article published!
A very quick (and braggy) post - I got my first sailing article published! It's in Good Old Boat magazine, May/June issue. There was also a nice little sketch of Sooner plus an embarrassing quote from me. And yeah, that's all I have for this post.
Refurbishing the Head: Part Two
So after part one, I'd removed the old toilet, glassed up the two thruhulls, and removed all the old hose. Now to put stuff back together again! As mentioned in a couple of previous posts, I'd decided to go with another composting toilet. I've covered my reasons...
