Work to be done this Easter weekend...

Top photo shows the huge gouge on the bow, to be repaired Friday or Saturday. The second photo shows our wet/dry vacuum hose in the hole where a thru-hull blank was fitted. The fitting was leaking a touch so the wife and I decided to glass over the whole hole. The white is the tapered fiberglass ready to be epoxied. The third photo shows the hole before being prepped. Notice the water stain running down? We figured if water can run out when on the hard, then water can ingress when afloat. More pictures after the weekends work is done.

Money!

Had a very rough day at work and seriously thought about quitting and sailing away! Not going to happen today. I need the second pension available to me when I'm 55. Plus I need a larger boat.

I'll have about $1,500 after taxes then, not much when on land but I figure slowly moving around the globe, living off the hook as much as possible, wearing very little clothing to save on laundry soap:), we should be able to swing it.

What will be a huge help is just getting away from our consumer driven society! Cruising by its very nature is a frugal lifestyle, I mean, you only have so much room on board to hoard (Hee, hee, board and hoard rhyme) your purchases.

One flaw in that is that both the wife and I are voracious readers. We love our books. Maybe Kindle or some other electronic reader will help us out, we'll see.

We have two major expenditures coming up. First and foremost is our daughters university tuition. We will pay for her first degree, and only her first degree, any further edumafacation will be at her expense. The second expense will be upgrading our boat to a larger one.

We have a friend, well actually he is my sailing guru, who insists that we need a 40' boat at least. he's probably correct, as he is on most things. This leads back to the money thing....the bigger the boat, the more expensive the equipment becomes. Prices remain reasonable below 38'. So as frugal sailors he will have to swallow his shame when we raft up beside him in our toy boat. His palace is 46' long. But as I tell my wife, size isn't everything:)

Yup, I see a lot of canned stew and Kraft dinner in my future, and cheap Caribbean rum:)

Auxillery power Scotty!!

More about our emergency generator purchase.


It is NOT a Honda 2000. A common misconception is that the '2000' refers to Hondas maximum watt output, noooo, it refers to its cost!....lol No, it actually refers to its maximum output, not to be confused with its continuous running output..


The '2000' represents its maximum output in watts. Don't confuse this with its actual running output, which is considerably less.
Now my 'cheapo' gen set is listed at 2900 watts, but its continuous output is 2300 watts

You would think that's a lot of power, but it isn't. let me put it in context, remembering that I am not an electrical engineer.

We have a simple household toaster rated at 950 watts. That is a given as I just turned the damned thing over and got a lap full of toast crumbs. So, we flash the generator up and plug in the toaster.....yes that is bread toasting, just like at home. Then Darth Vader, er, I mean my 17 year old daughter wakes up. Needs to blow dry her hair straight right this moment! She plugs her Conaire 1200 in. Yes, the 1200 is its wattage.

That is a total of 2159 watts of demand. Theoretically the gen set should handle it. Who knows. That doesn't leave much wiggle room for extra demand, just a spare 150 watts.

Of course when we flashed it up, (started it, in Navy jargon), in the backyard, The wife vacuumed the living room with it. It worked OK.

The only drawback with the beast is that it is awkward and heavy. It will take up a lot of room on a 25' sailboat but that sailboat is only a temporary learning boat.

Can't wait to have a real blackout like the 4-5 day one a few years back.Even in the winter we will be able to run our furnace with some careful wire splicing. We'll be the envy of our frozen neighbours.

We just made this purchas for $299 Canadian. Haven't fired it up yet, it is too cold to be mucking about outside. No snow yet but it is cold. Thats all ffffolks.

A winter project!

I am going to make lazy jacks. I bought the blocks, the lines all I'm waiting for is the chandlery to get in some small cleats...

We might get a roller furling set up for $250, sail included. The father of a good friend might be getting a new set, he said he will install it too!! Can't beat that!

Toronto International Boat Show

W finally got to the boat show on its last day. Now the cheapness in me comes out:

Parking) $12
Admission) $15 x 2 = $30
Binoculars:) $89
Captains hat) $10
Crew hat (pink) ) $10
Pleasure Craft Operating Card) $60
Water & soda pop) $8
Smoked meat sandwich) $10

So for $229 we had a good day. I love my hat, it looks like the Skippers on Gilligans Island...lol The guys at the marina are going to get a kick out of it. My new binoculars are phenomenal too. What a difference in optics from a really, really cheap pair (Which we got at a yard sale years ago) and these.

My wife bought herself a bright pink crew hat. She looks adorable and sexy in any hat.

The black listings are acceptable expenses. The place has to make money. period.

The yellow listing is good in theory, but man oh man, make it challenging. Make an applicant study for it at the very least! What it amounts to is a boating tax, pure and simple. The hardest part about the exam was trying to make out the hand drawn pictures that you had to choose from.

For example, in one question there was 6 drawings and you had to choose the 4 that would require assistance. Drawing 1 was a boat with wavy gunnel's, #2 was, I don't know, a picture of a divers down flag, # 3 was a person in an inflatable life raft, another was of a person holding on a flare. There were more but you get the point. Most were straight forward but the boat and flare pictures were a bloody mess, I truly did not have a notion of what they were representing. I guessed and got it right though. What I didn't get right was a question on gross weight allowed on the boat, I put the entire boat its equipment and the passengers and their gear, while I believe the correct answer was just the passengers and their gear! I am guessing as they don't tell you what you got wrong nor the correct answer.

The red lists just disgusted me. We will picnic next year.

We saw a good friend, Martin, who is an assistant manager at our favorite chandler's, (That is a boat store Kat). We learned on face book later on from his lovely wife,Sue, that his assistant locked the keys in the stores van...

We looked at new boats and were amazed.

We looked at Zodiacs and were astounded at the prices. There was one zodiac about 30' long with two (2) 300 HP Yamahas on the back. Now get this, it had a smaller Zodiac on davits (a small crane) on its bow (front end). The wife was amazed, she didn't know they could breed....lol But for a mere $130,000.oo they could keep it.

What is a baby zodiac called? A calf? Pup? Cub? Any zoologists out there?

Good time, though I woke up this morning with a scratchy throat and a severely runny nose...