Appliances
It's been raining almost all day and for the first week of our "Summer" holiday it looks like it will rain every other day. At the moment we are using dry days to work on the stanchions and guard lines which will lead to tackling the
Progress
We have been working with the assumption that our stanchions should be removable. Thinking about it that's probably because nearly all the stainless steel ones we see are in two parts. The base with a socket for the stanchion to drop into. As we have been fitting ours
Dinghy
As we get closer to living on Vida and our first winter living aboard will be at anchor during a UK winter. The reality of the limitations of solar power generation during a UK winter continues to be a concern. It was always obvious, that without an electric shore power
Environmental
A very long time ago I wrote Sustainable Sailing and Human Power with a simple conclusion: By far the most cost effective and transformative use of human power in Sustainable Sailing is a bike with a trailer. A good rowing dinghy (probably in addition to a RIB) comes second. For
Cooking
Check out our new video We get our first stanchion base ready to fit. Making more progress towards carbon-fibre stanchions with fully sealed decks. Also progress on the galley painting, insulation, worktops, fiddles and more. A complete replacement of the original 47 year old galley. Oh, and we fixed some
Cooking
We can really see how the galley will look and work. The cooker box is ready for painting. It even has a sliding bolt to hold it steady when we don't need it gimbled. We have stainless steel tubes coming to fit as sleeves to protect the wood
Electric
We are really excited with the progress on our stanchions and what we have learnt means we have redesigned our aft solar "arch" yet again (I've lost count, this might be the 10,000th version). Stanchions and Gates This was our first stanchion base. The carbon
Cooking
We have made lots of good progress on the galley this weekend. First Jane has painted the insulated hull plus the bulkhead. B&Q kitchen and bathroom paint (Whistler for the main areas and Monaco for the highlights). We then dry fitted the sink worktop. As we did so
Sailing
We managed to get two old Lewmar 30 self-tailing winches from ebay to use for our staysail. Four options for where we might position them. At present we favour the first option (very close to the primary winch).
Environmental
From the BBC today BBC News - Coral bleaching: Fourth global mass stress episode underway - US scientists It's increasingly obvious that by the time we get to the tropics there isn't going to be much coral life left to see.
Safety
This video from the lovely Sailing UMA is scary. It does end on a cliffhanger. We see that the test model they built failed catastrophically. They built a small section of GRP intended to replicate the original hull. They added a foam core rib, covered it with GRP and then
Environmental
In Our Compost Toilet deadline we said we that our current plan is to create a place for composting the septage (the dry solids from our Nature's Head compost toilet). To achieve the temperatures to rapidly kill all pathogens three things are needed: * Insulation (in a large outdoor