The previous post was supposed to have more pictures than it ended up with. Some bug in WordPress or my ability to use WordPress. Anyway, if you didn’t see some of the pictures, you’re not imagining it.

I sort of doubt you really wanted to see those x-rated sailing pictures anyway.

Generally when I do a blog entry, I find a unifying theme that ties all the elements I want to talk about together. Occasionally those theme are a bit stretched, but still, there’s a common element. This time, I’ve accumulated a bunch of completely disjoint items that need posting. So it’s the “stuff and such” edition.

Bashing up from San Diego

We sailed the boat north from San Diego to San Francisco, stopping briefly in Santa Barbara and Monterey, familiar marinas from our trip south last year. It says something about our level of experience as cruisers (or our level of hubris) that a journey usually referred to as a bash, wasn’t even worth a blog entry of its own. We waited for good weather windows as usual, but still saw a few days of high wind and seas. Not always pleasant, but no longer so scary.

The @%#$ed diesel hydronic heater

We had a diesel hydronic heater installed on the boat a couple years ago. A diesel heater heats up water (they call it coolant, like in an engine, even if the point is for it to be hot, not cool), which circulates through the boat to radiators with fans that blow heated air into the cabins. The @%#$ thing has never really worked.

It has a high or “power” mode that it uses to quickly get things up to temperature to start with. During that phase, it would flame out and spew out billows of smoke — we always expect people to run over thinking the boat was on fire. The original installer couldn’t figure it out, basically throwing his hands up. (Ask us if you want to know what diesel hydronic installer in the Bay Area to avoid. I won’t name names here because I’d get carried away and may be sued for defamation…)

This has been a source of dissatisfaction and existential angst for years. It wasn’t so important in Mexico, but up here it gets colder and a good heater can make the difference between a warm, cozy home and an ordeal.

I finally decided to take things into my own hands and debug the @%#$er. After some pretty hairy testing and jury-rigging, I found four things that were not installed according to the specs in the manual (wrong size fuel line, wrong mounting angle for the fuel pump, wrong exhaust length, no exhaust water drainage), and one thing that was actually the problem (too many 90 degree bends in the exhaust).

So it’s now finally working! Well, there are still a couple small things, but I’ll get those done RSN (real soon now). It’s absolutely toasty on the boat, even with sub-50 temperatures and 20 knot winds.

Radiation therapy

As of this writing, I’ve just finished the seven weeks of radiation treatments, getting zapped five times a week. So far, it been going extremely smoothly, with very few side effects. I’m tireder, more tense, and perhaps a bit harder to live with. But it’s going far better than I had worried that it might.

The side effects are cumulative, so the two weeks after the end of the radiation (now) are the worst, but, hey, it’s only two weeks — like a Summer vacation. Well, a vacation where you spent way too much time in the sun, didn’t drink enough water, and ate something, or several things that didn’t at all agree with you…

For a variety of complex medical reasons, we won’t know anything definite about the results for six months to a year.

We moved the boat to Oyster Point Marina for the duration, which is only a mile from Kaiser’s Radiation Oncology department. Very convenient.

New life lines

Life lines run along the sides of the boat, helping to keep you from falling overboard. Ours were original equipment, made of plastic-coated wire. These days, they recommend against plastic coated ones, since you can’t inspect the wires to see if they’re about to rust through. And eighteen years is about as long as you want to let them go without replacement. So we decided to get new ones.

But even more fun, there’s a new technology that’s being used a lot for lines on boats, including life lines: Dyneema. Dyneema is “ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene”, which is made of plastic fibers like before, but is stronger (for the same size) than steel. Best of all, it’s fairly easy to do your own life lines using Dyneema. You don’t need to cut or crimp wire, just do some splicing.

Freezer insulation

The insulation of our refrigerator is not great. Even worse, there’s one lid that opens both the refrigerator and freezer, letting cold out and moisture in every time you get something out of the refrigerator. Which leads to frequent defrosting.

So we decided to try building an insulated, zippered cover for the freezer section. It’s been a partial success. It’s not nearly as easy to get in and out of as the old scheme was, but the MTBD (mean time between defrosting) has been cut in half, and it’s hopefully more efficient as well.

The future

We’ve made the decision to stay in the Bay Area for the Winter and Spring, and then head south again in the Summer. We haven’t decided which marina(s) to stay in, or just when to leave. But this means there’s still time to see us if you’re a Bay Area local and haven’t already — or even if you have, we’ll let you have a second round at no extra charge.