Category: Safety

Spadefoot Returns – 23 Days Adrift

July 4, 2017

There are bits and pieces of this saga on Facebook and sailing forums, but I thought it would be good to put all of this in one place for easy reference.  I’m not aware of many/any other boats that had been abandoned, drifted for so long, and were brought back to shore in good condition

Read More

Rudderdundancy…

April 12, 2016

First, the backstory… Ordered emergency rudder from Competition Composites in Canada.  It shipped UPS and we redirected it to the UPS warehouse in north Austin because it required a signature and we wouldn’t be home to sign.  Rudder arrived at the warehouse Monday morning.  Monday evening we spend an hour poking along in rush hour

Read More

Orange is the New White

February 21, 2016

Some things are arriving in the mail and others we are making.  This weekend we can share a little of both.  Our storm jib arrived from Voyager Sails.  I like orange, but in this case, it is a requirement that storm jibs are safety orange, so we didn’t even have a choice.  It is a svelte

Read More

Memorial Day is Inspection Day

May 30, 2014

Straight off a flight back from 12 days in Europe for work we spent the long weekend on Shearwater getting ready for Pac Cup.  One of the big activities was going up the mast to fix a wonky deck light, tape up the spreader tips better, tape over the steaming light a little to make

Read More

Safety at Sea – Lessons Learned

November 10, 2013

Last weekend Chris & I attended a two-day Safety at Sea Seminar hosted by the San Francisco Yacht Club in beautiful Tiburon, CA. The course is accredited by US Sailing and is a requirement for Double-Handed crews entered in Pacific Cup next year (or 30% of the members of a fully-crewed boat).  Even though it

Read More

Stormy Weather

June 3, 2012

One of the things we get asked constantly by non-sailors and even some sailors is “what about storms?” or more specifically “what about hurricanes?” It hasn’t helped matters that for the first time in recorded history both the Eastern Pacific and the Atlantic had their first named storms of the year before June 1st. While

Read More

Welcome to the 21st Century

May 22, 2012

Times, they are a changing, and perhaps nowhere is this more evident then onboard a sailboat far, far from land.  Access to “data” has changed so much in the last 15 years, that basically nothing I knew when we cruised on Earendil is relevant today.  So, I’ve had to get up to speed on all

Read More

There’s a hole in the boat, dear Liza, dear Liza, a hole!

February 29, 2012

There’s a hole in boat (bucket), dear Liza, dear Liza.  There’s a hole in the boat, dear Liza, a hole.  Then fix it dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry.  Then fix it, dear Henry, the hole…   You know the song, but seriously what do you do if there is a hole in the boat

Read More

Contingencies and doomsday scenarios

February 26, 2012

Like anything in life, things can go wrong.  Since we have more time to think (and less time to do projects) being approximately 3,278 nautical miles away from the boat right now, one of the projects on our plate is to do thought exercises on 1) what could go wrong on a boat, and 2)

Read More

Battery conundrums

February 18, 2012
WikiCommons, picture by http://stujophoto.com/

In April, I will be heading to the boat two weeks ahead of Justin, as he’ll join me for the final week of the trip to move the boat to RI.  We have decided that instead of paying a professional to install our expensive instruments, do some critical maintenance and install some of the other

Read More
1 2