Repairing a Self-Tailing Winch
We live about 60 miles east of the SF Bay Area. One day Rich went to a marine consignment shop in Alameda to consign some old boat stuff he had in his shop. While he was there he found a Barient self-tailing winch. While that shouldn’t seem surprising, it was. We rarely see self-tailing winches […]
Manual Foot Pumps
When we were first boat shopping we saw many boats with manual foot pumps in the galley and head. Our boat also had manual foot pump in the galley and head, but when we gutted those areas we took them out. Until recently we sort of forgot about them. As time went by, I started […]
New Balmar Alternator
Our boat came with an internally regulated, Leece-Neville 105 amp alternator. It couldn’t keep up with the high charge acceptance rate of our new 500 Ah LiFePo battery bank; it worked too hard and got too hot and finally quit on us. Plus, it looked like it had been sprayed with salt water at one time. […]
New Anchor Chain
If you read Chapman’s Piloting and Seamanship it will tell you that for a boat our size, you need about 8′ of anchor chain and 300′ of nylon rope. Our boat came with just a little more chain than that and a little less rope. The more common practice now is to have a lot […]
Cockpit Bilge Pump
A few years ago I read somewhere about why it’s a good idea to have a manual bilge pump in the cockpit. I haven’t thought about it in a while, but it’s been on our to-do list since I read about it. It makes sense really. First, redundancy is key on a sailboat. Since we […]
Cutting the Boom
Weather helm is the tendency of a boat to turn itself into the wind (weather). Too much weather helm and she’s not only hard to steer but slower than if balanced. How do you counteract the tendency for the boat to turn into the wind? You turn the rudder. So, the more weather helm the […]
Taking Out the Trash
There are a lot of things I never thought I’d get excited about until we moved on a boat, and the trash can is one of them. The trash can has been a problem since we “remodeled” the galley. The old trash can was a hole in the middle of the countertop. It wasted a lot […]
Which Cabin Fans Work Best?
We’ve had three Caframo Bora fans installed in the boat for about 4 years now. On the plus side, they work. On the minus side they’re noisy (they rattle) and they’re hard to clean. And when they get dirty they get noisier. It’s a vicious cycle. We have one Hella brand oscillating fan over the […]
Tank Tender, Dorade Guards and Mast Pulpits
Tank Tender One of the previous owners installed a Tank Tender for checking the level of the diesel tank and the single water tank that was original to this boat. The Tank Tender uses air pressure through a little tube that goes into the tank. The excess air pressure bleeds off until the air pressure […]
Power Management (Victron Multiplus)
Victron Multiplus We bought a new Victron Multiplus 3000 watt charger/inverter in November 2017 and finally finished installing it. Here’s a little video of what we did. CO Detectors Rich had a little time off work so he was able to finished up a few little projects as well. We have two carbon monoxide detectors […]