Author: richwest3

July 23, 2019

I post these pictures here as a reminder to ourselves. If we ever think we could again live in Los Angeles…

As bad as it looks, we still had a very nice, two week visit to our former home. We ate at all our favorites (which often meant having two or three lunches a day!). We visited family. And we remembered why we left. -Rich

June 28, 2019

Ah, Hawaii is truly paradise, and we’ve been enjoying both our surroundings and life on land tremendously. Weekly breakfasts overlooking the ocean at Huggo’s, near-daily walks to town for lunch, Uber trips to the grocery store, a couple of car-rental day trips to explore Hawaii’s west coast, and evenings spent at the pool and Jacuzzi enjoying the glorious sunsets have filled much of our time.

But it hasn’t been all play and no work, not by a long shot.

For anyone unfamiliar with this blog, Google quit supporting the program we used to create many of our older photo galleries. As a result, hundreds of those galleries pretty much vanished overnight last April. We knew this was coming and had retrieved the building blocks so we could restore the blog when we got a chance, but due to a failure on Picasa’s part, we weren’t as prepared as we hoped. In the end, rebuilding and placing those galleries was a massive job.

Since we were already planning to take the season off from cruising, this turned out to be fortuitous timing. When we’re cruising, the daily routine does not include hours a day for optional projects. The things that aren’t optional such as boat maintenance and repair, research, buying and preparing food, housekeeping, errands, and travel and exploration (the reason we’re doing this) all take precedence. Then there is the work we enjoy doing such as keeping up this blog–plus I keep a journal so I have memories to put in the blog–and things like socializing, helping friends with their boat and cruising issues, and taking time off for our own entertainment (TV shows, reading, and decompressing with computer solitaire breaks) that also take up time. There is no time left for a massive project with the level of work needed to fix our blog.

This is where Hawaii came to the rescue. Since we’ve spent a lot of time here in the past, we haven’t felt the need to do much sightseeing (although those two day trips were a lot of fun). And with it having been a hotter-than-usual June in Kona, we don’t feel guilty spending much of the day indoors with air conditioning. Rich has a work project he needs to do, but he’s set that aside to help fix our blog.

Thus, while it may seem like we’ve been taking a break from our blog, it’s just the opposite: we’ve been working on it almost daily, sometimes for hours a day, during the past three weeks. Finally, we’re pretty much done. The galleries are back, although the photos within them are more random, so I’ll start working to put them in better order. I’ll also check the blog for any holes, although I think we got everything. Also we’ve made some tweaks and improvements, such as Rich adding a Navigation segment to the Cruising Information Pages. Meanwhile, we’ve certainly earned our celebration Mai Tais!

I’ll continue to work adjusting the photo galleries, but I’ll also start putting in those posts I promised about places we kept our boat in South Island, New Zealand. Then I’ll pick up where I left off with my Fiji posts. In the words of Jack Lord: “Be there; aloha!”–Cyndi

June 28, 2019

I was looking through our blog today for a post we’d done about this gadget and I see that I never posted it. Well, sorry. Here it is now.

This just screws on your water faucet, leave the faucet on, and when you push the rod out of the way, water comes out. It’s magic. We save so much fresh water using this. It’s also really convenient. We just leave our water on all the time and in many years of use, we’ve have never had a problem.

Note that there’s a version with a plastic rod and one with a metal rod. We’ve had both. The plastic ones didn’t last more than about a year before they started to leak a little. We’ve had the metal one for about five years now and it’s never leaked a drop. The trade-off is that we’ve broken a wine glass with the metal rod. (Yea, we know better than to have delicate wine glasses aboard, but wine just tastes better from them.)

Here’s a link to a company that makes them. Here’s where I think we got our last one. Some marine stores used to sell them but I see that they are no longer on West Marine’s website.

-Rich

June 26, 2019

We received an email from our friend Susanne the other day. She’s at sea, heading from Hobart to South Africa with only a short stop in Noumea. (Yep, crazy, but she does that kind of thing all the time.) Her last adventure was to join the Longue Route rally/race to go almost one  and a half times around the world (36,985 miles) in 280 days, non-stop and single handed.

In her email, she talked about an island ahead on her current course between New Caledonia and Australia, Sandy Island, that she spotted, almost by accident on her paper chart of the entire Pacific Ocean. It wasn’t on any of her other paper charts. She checked openCPN and it wasn’t there until she zoomed way in. Same on CMAPS on her chartplotter.

I got curious. Here’s what Google Earth shows…

It’s kind of there, I guess. Here’s ESRI ArcGIS Imagery…

Almost the same as Google Earth but darker. (I put the pin and label there.)

And here’s what Navionics shows (on SAS Planet)…

Nothing there. Again, I placed the pin and label.

There’s the same kind of situation at South Minerva Reef. I’ve been unable to find it on any of my satellite image sources, but at least it’s on Navionics charts.

My takeaway is to use every available source of information and even then, I guess we need to keep our eyes open and our fingers crossed!

Well, I guess there’s one other thing we do to avoid trouble like this. We use our radar 24/7 while at sea with a guard zone turned on. We only set the range to about 4 miles so it shows smaller targets well, but even at that,  we’d have plenty of time to avoid Sandy Island. If it were a shoal, shallow enough to hit, chances are it’d have breaking waves on it that would show up on radar (at least, that’s my hope).

Yes, it does use power and even though the radar itself (Simrad 4G) only uses about an amp, the chartplotter it displays on uses more power. If it’s at all sunny, our solar panels keep up. If not, we have to run the engine a bit. It’s well worth it for us for the peace of mind this brings. -Rich

June 21, 2019

We had this little guy join us for lunch…

He just stared at us until the waitress told us what he was after.

He was waiting for the cherries from our Mai Tais! -Rich