If you have spent any time at all reading cruising magazines or looking at other boating family blogs, you by now realize that Lego bricks are the ultimate toy for children on boats. They are among the best toys for any child anywhere, but because of their compact size and endless creative possibilities, they provide hours of entertainment and exercise for small brains in the confining space of a boat. For rainy days and weekends they are indispensible. Our kids, if they had to pick one thing to take with them to a desert island, probably even before food, would pack the Lego bin.

My brother loved his Lego toys as a kid, too. Actually, he still loves his Lego collection, which is much improved and expanded. He sometimes even shares it with his four boys. Our boys’ collection, seen below, is quite small compared to the cousins,’ and it exists in a state of chaos. With a collection the size of my brother’s, a bin and a pile would be preposterous. Plus, they have two smaller kids that would be forever eating or choking on them. So they came up with this ingenious solution for organizing Lego and making playtime more productive and less frustrating. It worked so well, my brother decided to build and sell his sorting cabinet/building tables through a terrific website, BrikCrate.com.

He generously offered to build our boys a crate to mount in their cabin, but upon further reflection our boys looked at the trade-offs and decided against it. The two options are: find all your pieces easily and build quickly, then re-sort to clean up, which can be slow and laborious; or build slowly, searching for pieces in a pile, and clean up quickly with a dustpan for a shovel. Because our boys’ play space is also their sleeping space (they inflate/deflate their air bed depending on how they want to use the space), they opted for quick cleanup. This choice is not without cost. They are forever losing pieces; sometimes they fall out of the bed and roll into the bilge. And it can take all day to plan a project, search for the right pieces and build something. At least the collection is out of the way, either locked in the bin or up in their berth out of the reach of small children. But for other boat families, a BrikCrate might make a Lego collection easier to manage.

For families with a large or sprawling collection, a BrikCrate is an ideal solution. Each cabinet is hand-made of solid wood in my brother’s workshop and comes with drawers and customized labels. The cabinet has a hinged cover that folds down to become a table top with a locking support leg. The stools for sitting at the table also serve as storage for road plates or large pieces that don’t fit in the cabinet. While the crate may seem expensive, considering the price of electronic toys that turn kids’ brains to oatmeal, and how much more valuable an organized Lego collection is made, the price is well worth it. And for families with small siblings, the crate protects pieces and projects from grabby toddlers as well as protecting crawling infants from choking hazards.

This may seem a shameless bit of nepotism, but it’s actually a fantastic product, and considering how long Lego has been around, I can’t believe no one has thought of it before. In any case, you might like the website. In his “links” link he’s got a great stop-action film he made with Lego bricks and a web cam. Check it out at www.brikcrate.com.

I've discovered a product to help keep my head clean. 

That would be the toilet on the boat, of course.  We flush with salt water and there are some unpleasant downsides to that.  We get scale buildup in the bowl and the hoses, and there is an odor which isn't directly attributable to the use of the device.  The scale problem we address periodically with couple good doses of muriatic acid.  That's my type of cleaning, but one must always be aware that what he's flushing is not actually leaving the boat right away.  Pete used to joke that I was going to turn my 50 gallon holding tank into a 50 foot holding tank.  The rest of the problem fell on the housekeeper, which wasn't fair.  It wasn't a clean problem, it was a water problem.

The solution came to me on the magic box during a business trip.  Scrubbing Bubbles Toilet Cleaner Gel.  It is a little gel turd that sticks to the side of the bowl.  The rinse water runs over the gel and carries the scrubby guys all over the inside.  I haven't seen the scrubby guys myself, but they were on the magic box so it must be true.  The gel lasts for about a week and then you put in another one.  We've been using it for about three weeks and the results so far are good.  Toilet looks cleaner, and smells MUCH cleaner.  In actuality it probably isn't, but who cares?  I'm willing to pretend.

Two things have to be considered when using chemicals like these.  First is how they'll react with our plumbing, and our plumbing isn't just pumps and hoses.  We have a septic tank after all, and there are little critters that live in there.  Those critters work on breaking down all the stuff we send them.  If they're alive and well and have lots of air (ironically) there shouldn't be much odor from the tank.  But if we kill them with the wrong chemicals, then its like living with a septic tank in the house.  Having used the Scrubbing Bubbles for three weeks with no apparent change to the tank, we're considering it a success. 

The second concern is what impact the chemicals will have if flushed overboard.  Considering all the other cleaners and detergents we routinely send overboard in our graywater, there probably isn't much additional impact, but it is still a good thing to think about.

We finally bought a Kindle.  Tanya is a book snob a traditionalist, so it was an uphill battle for sure.  She could admit the merits, but refused to believe she could survive reading on a screen instead of paper.

But I'd been watching Eli read Lord of the Rings, his first big book, and boy is it a big one.  Being a young reader, he does better with larger type, but the print in this book was necessarily small.  And partially due to its size and age, the book was not surviving being handled by a 9-year-old — the pages were falling out about as fast as he was reading them.

I saw the Kindle as a solution to this problem and ordered one.  Because you're buying books in a proprietary format it feels like a bigger commitment than just the cost of the device, which is relatively inexpensive.  We also don't have room for stuff we don't use, so every purchase carries the potential repsponsibility of having to store or dispose of the thing.  I'm also an inveterate shopper, especially for gadgets, and try to make double sure that I need a thing before I buy it.  Double again if it's shiny.

We had friends over the day it arrived.  Everyone had heard of the Kindle, but nobody had actaully seen one.  All were amazed by the screen.

Eli took to it like duck on a junebug.  That big paper book went in the trash the next day.  The boat was already lighter.

A few days later, Tanya requested that book she is reading to the kids be acquired in Kindle format.  Another one in the trash.  Kindle wins!

When I converted our music from CDs to MP3s there was no additional cost, so I'm not looking forward to re-buying all of our books on the Kindle.  But if it means getting them off the boat, it will be worth it.  Unfortunately, we have lots of books that aren't available on the Kindle, so it isn't a 100% solution at this point.  But there are a lot of old classics that we don't have and are FREE (as in beer) on the Kindle.

There may yet be another benefit in the works.  Aaron is our techno kid, but doesn't read for pleasure yet, and it is driving him insane that he doesn't get to play with the new toy.

Right now we have seperate books being read by three people on the same device without conflict, but I'm sure eventually we'll be ready for one or two more.

Spending the summer at anchor in Florida is only possible with good ventilation.  When the boat is free to swing, it usually orients itself to any available breeze, but that breeze still needs to be captured and forced down into the boat.  This is the role of the ubiquitous windscoop, which is essentially a little spinnaker positioned over a hatch and held up by a halyard.

Some are chambered to capture the breeze from any direction.  This would be ideal if you were tied to a dock or the current were influencing the boat’s heading more than the breeze, which sometimes happens.  My objection to this type is how to close the hatch for rain.  This type has to extend down inside the hatch, or otherwise obstruct the hatch opening, making it impossible to close up without taking down the scoop.    Taking down a windscoop is normally not a big deal.  But doing it in the middle of the night, bleary-eyed and naked, on a wet deck in a strong breeze and cold rain is no fun at all.  And that’s the way it happens.  Every.  Damn.  Time.

So we don’t use that kind.  Instead, we’ve been using the more common single sided variety.  Our hatches face backwards, and these scoops still recommend attachment inside the front edge of the hatch, but we quickly abandoned that for the above reasons.  Instead, we broke down and installed attachment points on the deck outside the hatch so we could simply close the hatch from inside, leaving the scoop in place.  With aft-facing hatches, we can often stay dry with the hatch cracked.  

Our complaints about these type of scoop are that they still require a halyard, the material is quickly destroyed by UV, and they’re too big.  The breezes we frequently get at night are too strong for these big scoops.  And I’m not sure the bigger scoop results in more ventilation anyway.  So I sewed reef points into a pair of them so to make them smaller, and that worked better, but was too much effort.  We considered designing our own out of more durable material, but don’t have that kind of skill or energy.

We chewed through a few Davis brand scoops before trying the West Marine brand, which we like better.  It has sewn loops instead of grommets and feels like sturdier material.  The West scoop hasn’t died yet, but it is still too big, and still needs a halyard.  Poor Sarah doesn’t have a halyard over her hatch.

Then we saw another boat with a small self-supporting scoop over its hatch.  Upon investigation we learned it was called a Breeze Booster.  We ordered one and like it very much.  A little more expensive, but it came with a note recommending 303 Aerospace Protectant to reduce UV damage, so hopefully it will last a little longer.  It still wants to go inside the front edge of the hatch, but it will work fine with our existing deck attachments.  We’ve now ordered a few more and hope this will be a good solution.