Recent content by Kelpie

Continue exploring the northern end of the Eastern Caribbean, spend March/April in the BVIs, then haul out in Carriacou for the summer and fly home for a long stretch of non sailing time. Season will resume in November but not sure what that will entail, nothing is off the table.

The ignore function is a wonderful thing.

Seeing as nothing works for long in the Caribbean, the water is warm, and the lifys are expensive, I just want the most scrubbable AF possible. Which I'm pretty sure is CC. I don't mind getting in every few weeks to clean the hull. Question- the previous owner had trouble getting the CC to...

My son got me a little puck-shaped LED light, with a sucker on the base. Our cockpit light died mid way through a Christmas Eve dinner party and he persuaded me to open it a few hours early, so that we could stick it to the underside of the bimini and carry on with our meal. Saved the day!

I'm struggling to think of a boat that actually has all of those features. Maybe a Rival 41AC? Westerlies had bolt on keels and spade rudders. Warriors have sail drives and aft cockpit. Moodies have bolt on keels. Etc... Maybe there's a third camp, in which I would put myself- people on a tight...

I'm sure this discussion will prove useful at 3am on a heaving deck as I try to cut through a shroud.

It's like Pokémon, you've got to collect them all 🤣 I carry the drill, grinder, multi, circular saw, and sander. I also have a hookah which uses Ryobi batteries, but thanks to an adapter I can run it off the Makita ones as well. I nearly didn't bother bringing the circular saw but it does a...

Should have hard wired them in to the battery 🤣

I carry three

I'm sure they have the power, but if yours are anything like mine, it's fairly fiddly to get the dies and the retaining pin in place. I can't imagine doing it over the side of a rolling boat without dropping at least one vital component. You could relatively easily make a pair of cutting dies...

In situations where we were using it frequently, I would just keep it on the transom, where it wedged between the Hydrovane's mounting brackets. Two good quality securing lines just in case, but it never moved. I found this a handy temporary location especially if I had allowed it to get any...

How far from the mast head is your inner forestay?

Our previous boat had a removable inner forestay. It was wire and had a normal bottlescrew for tensioning. I added a bolt through the bottlescrew body to make it a bit easier to use. It was far from the perfect setup but I do miss it. The way we inherited the boat was with a self tacking blade...

The main thing is to avoid chemical contamination, like oil or diesel. And that tends to be in a thin film at the surface. Most other stuff gets caught in the 20 and 5 micron filters. That's what they're for. People run watermakers in water that you wouldn't swim in. It's not that big a deal.

Where were they sailing? I've never even used the third reef...