Gear Review

Something around 10,000 miles and 6 years after we purchased our boat, I thought it might be time to share some of the good, the bad and the ugly of our boating gear experiences.  Having worked in the marine retail market for many years, and then progressing to owning my own marine outfitting business, I probably have a more in-depth background of the almost countless choices of gear and gadgets for the cruising boat, but there is really no substitute for the real world experience of living with equipment every day and seeing how it holds up to our expectations.

Lavac Toilet
It may seem strange to start this post talking about a toilet, but to many boaters this may be the most despised piece of gear on the boat.  There really isn't much worse than having to repair or replace a toilet that has stopped working in mid-function.  As far as the Lavac goes, it's simple, foolproof, and works.  The Lavac is not very well publicized, otherwise I don't see why any of the other current choices would still exist.

Rocna/Manson Supreme Anchor
We have one of each on board, and they have both worked great.  Our slightly oversized Manson worked well for several years, and we switched to a Rocna only because we got a too good to pass up deal on a larger sizer.  Function and performance are about the same and we don't see enough difference to recommend one over the other, but more than enough difference to recommend either over most of the other choices.

Force 10 Stove/Oven
Ours has seen daily service, at least several times each day, with very little issue.  Our particular model has three stovetop burners and a thermostat controlled oven without the broiler option.  We've heard people having issues with the sparker to light the burners, and ours has been a bit stubborn at times, but that is the only issue we have.  On occasion the flame level will drop on a particular burner, so I carry a set of tip cleaners used in the welding industry, and a couple quick passes into the burner brings the flame back to full output.

Alternative Charging Sources
We have three 50 watt solar panels and a Rutland wind generator on our boat.  I would love to have more solar capacity, but that is what fits on our current stern arch and our electrical needs are pretty modest compared to most cruising boats.  Solar is a great "set it and forget it" piece of gear.  Initial purchase costs are high, but once they are installed there are no further costs or maintenance.  Wind generators are all a compromise, trading space requirements or noise for power output.  Our particular model is small and very quiet, but has relatively low output.  It doesn't provide enough power to satisfy our power demands, but works as a good supplement to our solar panels, making enough power between the two sources to keep up with our energy demands.

Sigmar Diesel Heater
Wintering in Alaska allows ample opportunity to appreciate a good heater.  Sigmar makes several different models (ours is the 170) which are also similar in looks and function to the Dickinson models of bulkhead mount diesel heaters.  Having a well insulated steel hull helps keep the heat in, but our heater has no problem keeping the inside temps in the 70's even when it's well below freezing outside.  We enjoy the added advantage of having the heater mounted low enough in the boat to gravity feed the fuel from our main tank, meaning we don't need an electric fuel pump.  We use a small Hella fan mounted on the overhead near the chimney to distribute heat throughout the boat, and this is the only electrical part of our heating system, so the power demands for heating are very small.

Garmin GPSmap 276C
If you would have asked during my first year of ownership, I would have had nothing but good things to say about this little chartplotter.  The screen is small at just 3"x2", but the image is sharp and the colors are vivid making it easy to use the optional Bluechart software for navigation.  Unfortunately my high opinion didn't last through a summer of cruising in Alaska, where the GPS receiver began randomly  losing it's signal.  This quirk had nothing to do with blocked signals or interference from other devices on-board, but looked to most likely be a software issue.  We have talked to several other owners of Garmin products from this time period that experienced similar issues.  Numerous calls and emails to Garmin were no help, and they finally stopped responding to my inquiries, leaving me bitter and resentful about all the good things I've said in the past about Garmin customer service.

Lifeline AGM Batteries
These came with the boat when we bought it, and were only months old so I know how they were treated throughout their life.  Unfortunately, their life was pretty short.  Our energy demands on the boat are small, and with two 8D sized batteries wired as one bank, they were never discharged more than ten percent and were recharged regularly at the dock with a good quality charger.  Thus it was surprising to find that one of the two batteries went dead and was un-revivable after less than two years.  Lifeline had no answers, except to imply that I either did something to kill the batteries or was lying about my treatment.  It's bad enough when a company won't stand behind their product, but to blame the customer is really bad form.  I have installed hundreds of batteries on customers boats since then, and have always been able to find better options for every installation so I don't have to give Lifeline any of my business.

West Marine Foul Weather Gear
Both Nicole and I have been using West Marine foulies for the past few years, me a jacket and Nicole a jacket and bibs.  All these products are their mid-level "coastal" models, which are waterproof and breathable with many of the features found in higher priced gear.  The first few seasons they got occasional use and seemed to work as advertised.  During our four month trip to Alaska in 2009 we both started to experience failures in the waterproof coating.  These failures increased to the point where both of Nicoles items are unusable and my jacket is only wearable in light rain and for short periods.  I might have shrugged off the failures to exceeding the lifespan of the gear, but my bibs are a different brand, have seen the same use as our other gear, and show very little wear and no failure in the waterproofing.

I realized after starting this post that we have things to say about much of the gear on our boat, too much to put in a single post.  I'm going to start another section on our blog, similar to the "cruising guide" section, where I can organize all the gear review posts as they appear.

Happy Holidays

Presents, coffee, and absolutely 

no reason to get out of pajamas

For me the holiday season is all about spending time with family.  Unfortunately our current life decisions have made it financially unreasonable to travel and see family, and we have to settle for being there in spirit and knowing that they are in our thoughts and in our hearts.  Thankfully some of the boaters in our marina reached out to those of us staying here for the holidays, and we got the chance to make some new friends and socialize a bit.
Nicole got a surprise knock on the hull Friday, inviting us to go wassailing on Saturday evening.  If you are not sure what that means, don't worry, we had to look it up too.

wassailingpresent participle of was·sail (Verb)

Verb:

Drink plentiful amounts of alcohol and enjoy oneself with others in a noisy, lively way. Go from house to house at Christmas singing carols: "here we go a-wassailing".

Turns out our night consisted of a bit of both, although the singing was limited to one person and seemed a bit halfhearted.  With five boats involved, we moved around the docks from boat to boat, socializing and sampling a variety of drinks and foodstuffs.  The first boat, and the organizers of the night, went one step further serving wassail as their shared drink.

Definition of WASSAIL: a hot drink that is made with wine, beer, or cider, spices, sugar, and usually baked apples and is traditionally served in a large bowl especially at Christmastime

There was also a generous sampling of homemade eggnog, mincemeat pie, and a variety of other treats as we went from boat to boat.  Nicole and I decided to offer a mix of traditional holiday foods, so out came the deviled eggs and shrimp dip, topped off with my mom's homemade nut-goodie bars and a bottle of merlot from our wine stash.  Traditional Christmas eve dinner in my family usually consisted of an overwhelming variety of appetizer favorites so we already had a lot of options on hand and just had to decide what to share, and luckily we received several care packages from mom in MN to supplement what we prepared.

Traditional holiday food,
sugar cookies and meat pie

Xmas morning for us centers around Nicoles' French-Canadian tradition of tourtiere (pork pie), usually served with pickles, beets and black olives.  This is another of many examples of strange sounding holiday food that are worth the risk to try.  After breakfast we opened the gifts my mom sent in her care packages, mittens and slippers for Nicole, mittens and a shirt for me, and a book to share.  Our cat Hope was the big winner here, being as close as we get to a kid, with my mom sending cat treats and catnip mice, and us getting her a new scratch box complete with play toys and catnip.

Hope trying to figure out 

how to unwrap her present

A bit of lounging and some quality time in front of the TV got us through a short lull and on to the next round of eating.  Late afternoon dinner consisted of baked ham, rolls, mashed potatoes, yam, green bean casserole, and a french silk pie for desert.  The motto of "anything worth doing is worth doing to excess" really came into play here.  After dinner we dove into another Filipek tradition and started in on the puzzle Nicole bought.  Three deer in a fall woods scene means 1000 puzzle pieces in various shades of brown, so we may be at this well into next week.  More lounging, more TV, and the very slow construct of a puzzle rounded out of evening.

Thankfully I have Monday off work so we will have a chance to make a further dent in the huge amount of leftover food and continue the slow, steady progress on the puzzle.

An exhausted kitty after a long day

 playing with her new scratchy box

Wishing everyone a happy holiday season from the crew of S/V Baraka.

Sail Alaska (in winter)

We had grand plans to continue sailing throughout the winter here in Alaska.  The weather is somewhat daunting, but with numerous great all-weather anchorages it is a reasonable possibility.  The first difficulty to this plan came when we ran out of money and decided we needed to work for a while to build back our bank account.  It seems a shame that people expect you to be certain places and do certain things in order for them to give you money, but we have found no other alternative.  Instead, we are at least hoping to be able to get out on occasion for short sailing trips around Sitka.  The two factors making even this a difficult prospect are the hours of daylight this time of year and the weather.  With only about 8 hours of daylight on a clear day, it limits our options of where we can get to, and back, in a weekend on a slow moving boat.  Thankfully there are options, and we hope to be able to explore at least some of them over the winter.  The other factor, the weather, is harder to get around.  Finding a two day (or longer) forecast that is benign enough to get us back to the dock without issue is hard enough, but having that forecast coincide with the weekend is even harder.  Add to that the possibility of the harbor looking like the included picture and you add ice breaking to the issues you have to overcome for a weekend sail.  We had good intentions of getting out over the Thanksgiving weekend, possibly anchoring up at the nearby hot springs for a couple good soaks and some relaxation.  A forecast for 55 mph winds and another 6 inches of snow the night before Thanksgiving made us reassess plans and stick to the marina instead.  We will continue to watch the forecasts and hopefully get away on occasion this winter, but we are also enjoying small town life and are meeting some interesting people as well.

Roughing it

Contrary to my Minnesota-ness, I will take a short break from my postings on our current weather snowpocalypse for a quick holiday update.  (For any MN people reading this, we have received several more feet of snow since my last post.)
We spend quite a bit of time explaining to people that living and traveling on a sailboat is not one small step away from homelessness as many seem to believe.  Thanksgiving is a good example of our fairly normal life in a less than normal setting.  My new employer was kind enough to give out turkeys to all the employees for Thanksgiving this year, so we started our meal planning around our free turkey.  The only real issue was that most of the turkeys they bought were in the 15-16 pound range, and there is no way we can fit something that big in our oven.  I dug through the pile of 50 frozen birds until I found the smallest one they had, about 12.5 pounds, and crossed my fingers we could cram it in the oven to cook it.  I considered using one of the band saws in the shop to cut it in half, but a blade covered in aluminum shavings didn't seem like the best tool for the job, so I kept my hopes up until I got back to the boat and confirmed that the turkey would, just barely, fit in our oven.  With the addition of stuffing, mashed potatoes and corn we had the makings for a good old traditional dinner.  The pumpkin I never got around to carving for Halloween was sacrificed for pumpkin pie, which baked while we ate once the turkey had vacated the oven.

The final food item of the meal gave Nicole the hardest time, not because it was difficult to prepare, but because it was difficult for her to understand why this would be a holiday tradition in MN.  I felt the meal would not be complete unless we included Jello with fruit in it, so after looking through our selection of canned fruit it was decided that orange Jello with mandarin oranges would be a good choice.  A nice bottle of dry riesling from our ample wine selection rounded out the meal.
The holiday meal aftermath is another area where we break from the crowd.  Leftovers are always a good thing, but with a freezer the size of a half gallon carton of milk and a refrigerator already packed with food, we have to find some way to store half a bird carcass and all the various containers of food from the meal.  I can, at this point, laugh in the face of all our sailing friends that made the ridiculous decision to sail south to tropical climates, since all we have to do is set our food outside and it is back to a frozen state within minutes.  Try that with your white-sand beaches and drinks with little umbrellas.
Happy Thanksgiving from Greg, Nicole, and boat-cat Hope, and don't worry, I'm sure the weather will remain crappy enough for me to post about it again sometime soon.

Chick Magnet

For the most part, when we are traveling, most of our stops are at small communities that are reasonably easy to explore by foot.  Almost every town we visited had groceries, laundry, restaurant(s), and a marine parts store within easy walking distance of the docks.  The one exception to this is Juneau, which is a fairly large town by area standards, but also boasts a very good bus system providing access to all it's various amenities.  Sitka also fits the bill as a "boater friendly" town, with groceries, laundry, restaurants and a marine store all within a few blocks of the marina.  However, this becomes complicated when you add an employment factor to your needs, as I have, and suddenly there is somewhere you need to be at a certain time.  Although Sitka is a fairly compact community, with only about 14 miles of road, commuting to work can be troublesome.  My place of employment is only a few miles from the marina, and I thought I might be able to just walk back and forth to work, but this time of year the hours of daylight are exceeded by my hours of employment, meaning I travel to and from work in the dark each day.  The weather is also an issue, with heavy rain, high winds, and snow, all at the same time recently, making walking a depressing option.  Lastly, this is still wilderness, with the possibility (although thankfully not a probability) of encountering a nice big brown bear along the way.  My solution so far has been to borrow a vehicle from a friend here in town (thanks Bob), but an early 70's Ford Courier in this condition can hardly be called reliable transportation.  At least I carry with me the option to row to work if the truck dies somewhere close to the water.

Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Make it Stop

Since my post last weekend, our stormy winds have abated, but as I mentioned at the end of that post, by Sunday morning it had started to snow.  It kept snowing throughout the day on Sunday, and continued on Monday...... and Tuesday, and Wednesday, and Thursday.  The temperature stayed in the 30's so the snow would build, then melt, and continued in that predictable cycle until Thursday when the temp dropped into the teens.  Friday arrived with clear skies and cold temperatures, never getting out of the mid-twenties, but with blue skies and beautiful snow-covered vistas in all directions.  Going to bed Friday night we had a couple inches of snow on the ground (or dock, as the case may be) and temperatures still in the twenties.  We awoke this morning to about 6 inches of new snow, and near white-out conditions.  The forecast calls for continuing snow on and off throughout the next week, although the temperatures are suppose to get back up in the thirties in the next few days.  That could be good or bad news for the seagulls standing on the ice alongside our boat, depending on how much they enjoy the harbor being frozen in.  I'm told by many people in town that this is unusually early for this kind of weather, but I was also told the weather here would be similar to Seattle, so I guess only time will tell for sure.
The upper picture shows our view from the "back deck", as of earlier this morning.  It's been snowing for a few more hours since then, with no break on the horizon, so I'm guessing it should be fun getting around town today.  That brings us to the lower picture, which shows our grocery store earlier this week.  It was still warm enough at that point that we were losing most of our accumulations each day.  Something to point out about that picture, there probably aren't too many grocery stores with a better view.  With the ocean right outside the front door of the store, it's a beautiful setting, but also close enough that I got a bit worried I was going to put the truck in the water a few days ago when the parking lot was iced over.  With true frontier mentality, there is no need for guard rails here, or just about anywhere else in town for that matter.
I wanted to include a picture of the mountains surrounding town, with the stunning snow covered pines, but right now I can't even see shore from our marina slip.

Storm!

The title for this post is a tribute to Clive Cussler.  Nicole and I have been working our way through a collection of his books, given to us by a friend, (thanks Dave) and think it is hilarious that he thought it necessary to use exclamation marks in his book titles.  Anyway, we had a bit of weather blow in over the weekend and it was our first taste of Alaska in the winter.  Nothing extreme, I guess we still have that to look forward to, but it caused some excitement here at the marina.

Wind Speed (WSPD): 35.0 kts
Wind Gust (GST): 42.7 kts
Wave Height (WVHT): 31.8 ft

The conditions listed above were off  Cape Edgecumbe, just west of us.  At our slip in the marina we saw 43 gusting 56 knots, that's 50 mph with gusts of 65mph.  The waves in the marina are smaller but still significant enough to do damage.  It's humbling to think of the waves off the cape, 38.4 feet at their maximum height, as being considerably higher than most houses.

At least two boats sunk at the dock in our harbor from extreme wind and waves in the channel, and one more broke lose from the dock and washed ashore. Lots of other boats saw significant damage. We were safe and sound but got bounced around pretty good.  I happened to be working on another boat in the harbor when the worst of it hit on Saturday, and I have to give Nicole mucho credit for making sure our boat was secure and then checking on our neighbors to help out where needed.  There were lots of snapped dock lines and crushed fenders, and one sailboat across the dock from us surged up on to the dock hard enough to smash it's bobstay and break off the end of the bowsprit.

The weather continued into Saturday night with heavy winds mixed with rain and hail.  By Sunday morning it looked like things might be calming down, the wind eased and the sky cleared, but it was just a temporary lull.  By Sunday afternoon the high winds were back, this time mixed with heavy snow, and by Sunday night Sitka looked like a winter wonderland.

Welcome to fall in Alaska.