Category Archives: Recipes

Going Synthetic

We’ve been experimenting with Dyneema line lately.  Technically known as ultra-high molecular weight polyethelene (UHMWPE), the stuff is stronger than steel, yet soft and light.  It’s been around for a while and is gradually replacing wire rope in industrial applications.  Relatively new for recreational use, it is becoming more prevalent for low-stretch halyards, lifelines, and is even growing in popularity for standing rigging (ie. holding up the mast) on performance-oriented boats.  

We already have Dyneema-cored halyards and jib sheets, and when we replaced our running backstays a couple years ago, we switched from wire to Dyneema there.  Eventually we’re going to change our lifelines over, and probably our lazy jacks, too.  In a couple years we’re going to need a full rig replacement, and I hope to be able to make a good decision between staying with wire or going all synthetic.

Softies

Another use for Dyneema is replacing steel shackles, and this has been the focus of our recent experimentation.  Soft shackles, as they’re called, are easy to make and there are many sites online that show you how.  Sarah can do one in about 30 minutes with $3 of materials, and yet they typically sell for $20-30.  She has already realized that the profit margin splicing rope beats the heck out of a lemonade stand.

What we want now is to break a few of them to confirm their theoretical strength.  But it’s not that easy to do.  I think that loop pictured above might take 12,000 pounds.

Ultimately, I want to use Dyneema shackles to attach our anchor bridle to the chain.  Currently we tie the bridle legs on with rolling hitches, but that takes time to do and undo, and is failure prone.  Chain hooks don’t do it for me either.  I like to sleep at night and a Dyneema shackle a couple times stronger than the chain will do nicely, especially when I can throw on a backup for a few bucks and some child labor.

Yard Work

We value hard work and it’s something we try to teach our kids.  But whenever we try to get them to buckle down to heavy duty schoolwork or chores, all we seem to get is bitching and moaning.  

We’ve long felt that what was needed was a lesson in good hard physical labor, so I mentioned our dilemma to a friend in the process of clearing his new property.  It happened that Ben had just cut back a Brazilian pepper hedge, had a huge pile of trimmings, and had rented a wood chipper for the weekend.  He was estimating about 8 hours of work for he and Paul, with one of them on the chipper and the other hauling branches.  We decided it would be a great opportunity for the kids to help out and get a taste of real work.

It took one hour.  I worked the pile, separating braches.  The four kids hauled branches from the pile to the chipper.  Ben fed the chipper non-stop, and Paul prepped the bigger branches with a chainsaw.  

The kids performed well beyond my expectations.  While I had planned for the work to last a little bit longer, they went at it with such dedication and teamwork that I couldn’t be anything but pleased.  There was no whining, no complaining, no ass-dragging.

I’d arranged for Tanya to pick us up after three hours, so we had a little time to kill.  While we were waiting, Ben taught the boys to operate the backhoe and let them use it to dig a big hole.  They were in boy-heaven.

Waterspout

The weather had been nasty all day, so it wasn’t a huge surprise yesterday to look up and see a waterspout.  

Waterspout

They’re not common, but we’ve seen a few of these before.  Eli is our official historian and he says four waterspouts in the last three years.  So our initial response was more of the “oh, cool” variety.  Usually they don’t last very long and don’t head our way.  But this one was doing both.

We were anchored off of New Plymouth at Green Turtle Cay and the waterspout appeared to be in Black Sound.  It would have to cross land to get to us and at that moment I was cherishing a belief that waterspouts can’t cross land.  But this one was doing an admirable job.

Waterspout Ashore

The swirling cloud of dirt and debris was quite mesmerizing.  We even saw it pick up what looked a whole lot like a roof.  It was about this time that we began to think “oh, crap”.

There are two kinds of waterspouts.  Most of them are non-tornadic.  They’re relatively weak, relatively stationary, and have a very small area of influence.  Not that you’d want to be in one, of course.  They’re just not as deadly as their land borne tornado cousins.  The second kind of waterspout is.

This turned out to be the first kind fortunately, but it was kind of dicey for a while.  It eventually dissipated over land, but the weather was really weird for the next 10 minutes.  A 30 knot wind came through the harbor and spun all the boats around 360 degrees.  

And then it rained.

Remora

Take Two usually has a habitat of little fish living beneath her.  They like the shade and the edible tidbits that rain down at meal times.  We call them the cleanup crew.  

In Marathon, they’re little snappers.  In Bradenton and Ft Pierce they’re catfish.  In the Bahamas… nada.  No fish.  It’s been kind of sad and lonely not to have any little friends down there cleaning up after us.

So it was remarkable in Royal Island a few weeks ago when Tanya scraped a plate overboard and little fish came out from under us and snapped up the goodies.  Remarkable because he was an odd little black and white shark-looking fish, and because, hey, it was a fish!  We commented that he kind of looked like a remora, and then we thought nothing else about him.  The next day we sailed to the Abacos.

Fast forward almost a month and a couple hundred miles.  This afternoon as I scraped a plate at Green Turtle Cay, guess who popped out?  If it isn’t the same fish, it’s one EXACTLY like him.  It is definitely a remora.  I don’t have a great picture of him yet, but we can clearly see the sucker on the top of his head.

Remora

So what are the odds that it’s the same fish?  Well, when was the last time you saw a remora in real life?  Doesn’t exactly happen every day, does it?  And isn’t it a remora’s purpose in life to stick himself to a bigger fish and live off its scraps?  Where is his big fish?  I think it’s us.

So we have a little buddy.  This is so much better than the usual ragtag band of loafers we attract.  I wish we could keep him forever like a pet.  Unfortunately, we’re headed for a dock in Florida and I don’t think he’s going to like the locals very much.  But for now he’s got a pretty good thing going.

Iguana Hunt

Our kids are incorrigible lizard hunters.  Cubans, skinks, curly tails, green and brown anoles, even iguanas; a lizard seen is a lizard chased.  One of the things they really wanted to do on our trip to the Exumas was go back to Leaf Cay.  

Leaf Cay is known for its iguana population.  Go-fast boats full of pasty tourists make a daily run from Nassau to see them and, predictably, the iguanas have gotten used to being fed.  The kids were counting on this and came prepared with food — well… bait, actually.

The iguanas were unprepared for a coordinated assault from four boat kids.

Iguana Hunter

Island Fire

Our kids love a beach fire and are always on the lookout for a suitable place to make one.  Unfortunately, it isn’t that easy to find. 

First there are the physical requirements: sand and wood.  Much of the shoreline in the Bahamas is a rocky marl, or “ironshore”.  Not a place you want to land your dinghy.  The island must have trees from which to gather firewood.

It must be near a place we want to park Take Two for the night, and the way back home must be navigable by dinghy at night.  Finally it can’t be inside the Land & Sea Park, or on a private island, and I don’t really want it visible by anyone else at all.  So we’re not exactly overrun with opportunities.

At one point during our trip, we were anchored south of Compass Cay and thought we had found a good location for a beach fire on a neighboring island.  It had been a busy day, and we weren’t planning to move the next day, so we decided to defer the fire.

That night someone was shooting fireworks from the vicinity of the marina on Compass Cay, probably from one of the big fancy yachts in there.  After a long day of zooming around on jetskis, fireworks and loud music are the perfect way to unwind.  The show appeared to be over, but then Sam alerted us that now they were having a bonfire!

Compass Cay Fire

Clearly it was no bonfire, but a fireworks-induced brushfire somewhere between us and the marina.  We watched it rage for hours beyond the ridge of the island nearest to us.  The breeze was strong and it was helping the fire spread nicely.  We tried to determine exactly where it was in order to predict the extent of the potential damage, but in the dark it was difficult to tell.  Eventually the fire burned low and we went to bed, expecting evidence of it to be readily apparent the next morning. 

But it wasn’t.  Either by dinghy or by climbing Compass Peak, we could find no trace of the fire, though we could still occasionally get a whiff of it on the wind.  In any case, it seemed that it was no longer the time or the place for beach fires.

A few nights later, near Sampson Cay, the kids finally got their beach fire.

Five Years After

The daydream went something like this: we’ll pick up the hook and sail all night while the children sleep, and when they wake up in the morning and look out the window, they will see something completely new and amazing. We used to tickle ourselves with this idea, especially at the beginning, when we were so bogged down with repairs that it seemed that we would never go anywhere except to the West Marine for parts and the bank to withdraw more money. As with many things in life, what seems to take forever while you’re waiting gets compressed when looking back; it’s been five years this week since we bought Take Two, and although she’s spent a good bit of that time at a dock getting worked on, she’s also taken us to new and amazing places. The things we dreamed about with our young children have actually come to pass. This came home for me as we anchored in the dark a couple of weeks ago off the western side of Highborne Cay in the Central Bahamas. We had used the calm North-westerly breeze to make our way south and east over night from the Berry Islands to the Exumas. It was magical to wake up in the shadow of a new island surrounded by beautiful water.

Someone commented recently on how nice Take Two looked (especially for a twenty-two-year-old wooden boat), and asked me how much we had put into her. My response? “Everything.” Every ounce of energy, every spare penny, every drop of love, every moment of our time. When I related this conversation to Jay, he wondered if I regretted any of it. What could I possibly trade that would be worth as much to me as the last five years? We bought the boat in April of 2008, moved aboard August of 2009, sold our house in May of 2010 and never looked back. There is nothing I would rather be doing than living aboard, boat-schooling the children, and traveling whenever we can. Very little of it has been easy—just try cramming 7 people (at least one of whom is an actual toddler) into a tiny, constantly moving space for long periods of time and see what happens. It is a crucible of the character, I can tell you, and the things that rise to the top are none too pretty. But it has been rewarding. We have made countless happy memories that far surpass any of the difficulties or unpleasantness.

I don’t know what you dream of doing, or where it is you’d like to go in your life. But even if sailing away is the last thing you would think of, just know that it is possible to envision something and then make the thousand tiny choices that will turn your path slowly but inexorably toward that thing. I leave you with an excerpt from the introduction to Tom Neale’s book, All in the Same Boat. I framed this many years ago and hung it at Jay’s eye level in the bathroom. I like to think it helped motivate us to keep trying and never give up.

People often ask us why we gave up a comfortable home ashore, and successful careers…to move aboard and cruise. They also wonder why we did it with two babies. And then they wonder why we are still doing it, more than 17 years later, with around 5,000 miles per year passing under the keel. The answer doesn’t lend itself to cocktail party quips. We do it because it’s fun. We do it because it’s beautiful. We do it because we love nature and the sea and the winds and the sky. We do it because it allows us to raise a family the way a family should be raised—and to know our children. We do it because it gives us more control over the way our family lives and survives, over the education and nurturing of our children, over the air we breathe…

I frequently talk to people about our life on Chez Nous. They say,”Oh, I wish I could do that.”

“But you can,” I say.

“Oh, no, we don’t have the money.”

"But you probably do. It doesn’t take much money; it takes something else. It takes wanting to do it bad enough and making sacrifices; and you have to do things yourself, not pay someone else. You can do it, but you have to work hard and give up things you don’t need anyway.” Their eyes glaze, they smile wanly, and they change the subject.

But you can do it.

You can take control of your existence. You can start doing things for yourself instead of for a “system.” You can be a family instead of a splintered group. You can raise your children to understand responsibility, to know self-discipline, and to appreciate real values. And you can know the children you raise. You can breathe clean air. You can see the stars through clear skies. You can fill your days with adventure, and you can walk on white sands and share beautiful sunsets. You and your family can go cruising. But you’ve got to work at it.

Bahamas Again

We came with very few goals except to hang out in the Exumas and have some fun.  I had a long-standing promise to the kids I needed to make good on, and two of Tanya’s Top 10 favorite places on Earth are here.

So far it’s been a bit of a reunion tour since we’re unintentionally retreading old ground.  Weather avoidance is de rigueur in the northern Exumas and we’ve been calling on prior experience to find effective shelter.  Things are a little different this time since we have a full-blown SSB transceiver to get weather forecasts, which allows us to plan ahead instead of being entirely reactive.

We checked in at Chubb Cay, which was new for us.  I think a lot of people eschew Chubb because of their $100 landing fee.  They offered to let us put it against fuel, but I declined.  I understand they’ll also put it against dockage, but we wanted to keep moving.  So with the $100 landing fee, the $10 bus ride to the airstrip, and $380 at customs, we were legal.  It was a convenient place to stop and we’d do it again, but otherwise I didn’t see anything to write home about.

We have more avid and capable snorkelers this time.  During our weather-bound stay at Highborne Cay, we did another family snorkel at the Octopus’ Garden.  It’s much less stressful not having to worry about little kids, and it’s really convenient having four spotters wanting to show me all the best parts, but anybody who has taken a nature walk with a bunch of kids knows they’re not going to sneak up on anything.

Some local lobster pros were at work on the bar between Highborne and Leaf Cays while we were there.  Lobster season here ends 3/31, so we figured we’d try our hand.  Eli and Aaron haven’t developed much taste for lobster yet, but they love the thrill of the hunt.  Based on our results so far, if we want lobster we’ll have to buy it.  They’re just too deep.  The pros are using air, which we’re not allowed to do.

I find myself looking for conch.  Not to take it, mind you, because foreign vessels are not allowed to do that either, and frankly because I don’t care for conch that much, but really just to assure myself that they’re still there.  Ten out of ten conch shells we see have already been harvested.  The live ones we do find are all juvenile.  Sam brought me a big conch shell today that he said was alive.  It sure was, but it wasn’t a conch inside.  Poor kid doesn’t know what the real animal looks like.  Living in that shell was the biggest hermit crab any of us had ever seen.

Mondo Hermit Crab

Now we’re at Warderick Wells in the Land and Sea Park.  So whatever might be underwater is off limits.  Internet access is via satellite and costs $10 a day with a 100MB limit for boats that are on their moorings.  We have no use for a mooring but hunger to check email.

Our plan is to be fully back online the second week of April, but our plans are always subject to change.  It looks like we may have let the magic smoke out of our main generator, so we’re trying to adjust to a leaner power budget, and balance our fuel supply with our other means of power generation.

Otherwise we’ve had few failures.  A v-belt broke on one of the engines, but we had a spare.  Plenty of food and beer left, though we’ve shut down one of the refrigerators to save power.

So far we have failed to try out the new 4G network.  If we make it as far south as Staniel Cay, which I think is the closest BTC office where we can get SIM cards, we’ll try to get that remedied.  A decent Internet connection could make a world of difference.

Octopus’s Garden in the Shade

We must be back in the Bahamas. The water is such a bright turquoise blue that it hurts our eyes to look at it. We had to pinch ourselves a few times before we could believe that we had actually made it here. After a calm Gulf Stream crossing on the 19th and a glassy day across the banks, we had a good sail to Chubb Cay on the 21st, where we checked in with customs and immigration, and then to New Providence across the Tongue of the Ocean. We motored all night across the Exuma Bank and anchored just before dawn on the 22nd to the west of Highborne Cay.

Today we returned to a favorite spot from our trip two years ago, the “Octopus’s Garden” near the north end of Highborne. It is a great place to start: a coral reef in shallow water (6-8 ft) filled with interesting coral shapes and colorful reef fish, a short dinghy ride from where we are anchored in the protected cove. All the kids are experienced snorkelers now, so that makes it much more fun and relaxing for Jay and me, too. Rachel has a float and a tiny wetsuit, and I simply tow her behind me and hum through my snorkel to keep her happy. “I’d like to be…under the sea…in an octopus’s garden…in the shade…”

I’m always amazed by the water here, and I’m not just talking about the color. It’s so clear that you can count pebbles at 15 feet—depth itself is hard to judge because the bottom always looks close enough to touch. The banks are like a giant swimming pool, clean, clear, and empty. It’s actually a huge underwater desert, with a few oases of coral reef. The most you’ll see coming across the banks are starfish, jellyfish, sponges and the occasional sea cucumber. If you’re lucky, the Dolphins of Happiness will come to greet you, but more likely than not, you’ll see nothing but blue for miles and miles and miles.

Blue

But once you find a reef, there is more life than you can take in at one glance. In and amongst the heads of brain coral, star coral, finger coral, purple sea fans and tubular sponges swim nurse sharks, spotted eagle rays, damselfish, angelfish, parrotfish, squirrelfish, barracuda, snapper, fairy basslet, blue chromis, seargent majors, goatfish, butterflyfish, tang and triggerfish—you just have to hear their names to know that something amazing is swimming your way. We’re planning on spending as much time as possible over the coming weeks under, on and around these beautiful waters.

B&G SailSteer

I just read an article on Panbo that grabbed my interest.  It’s about how Navico is aligning its three(!) chartplotter brands (Lowrance, Simrad, and B&G) around small boat fishing, big boat fishing/cruising, and sailing respectively.  The B&G stuff looked very promising last year, but was very high-end and therefore mucho dinero.  Instead I bought a fishing-oriented Lowrance HDS-7m Gen2 because it was a brand new model, had satellite weather, and was cheaper.  The article goes on to wonder how Navico will adjust their B&G brand lineup to address the lower-end of the sailing market.

I was losing interest and beginning to skim, but then I got to the bottom and saw this screenshot.

Wow!  Now that got my attention.  The layline stuff on the left is old, I’ve seen that before.  But the graphic on the right is entirely new to me.  Although now that I look, I see the press releases for it are almost 5 months, so I'm a little bit behind.  Anyway, it looks strikingly similar to a prototype I made in August 2011 and wrote about here.  The key aspect being the compass dial with indicators around it.

They call it SailSteer and its available on their Zeus Touch plotters.  From what I can tell, they’ve done everything I wanted and more.  I see the waypoint, true wind, laylines for the current and opposite tack, rudder angle indicator, and even direction and velocity of the calculated tidal current all in one place.  I’m feeling quite compelled to buy it.

I like Navico for their innovation, and am very excited about what they’re doing with B&G.  My Lowrance plotter is okay, but not great.  It isn’t any worse than I expected.  They made it for fishing boats after all.  But it can interface with their 4G radars, which are spectacular and on my wish list.  If I get a B&G for the helm, the Lowrance will come inside.  It will continue to be our source for satellite weather and radio, as well as an inside plotter and eventual radar display.

From my perspective, the big downside to Navico (and Raymarine) plotters is their use of Navionics charts and Navionics’ sub-par data in the Bahamas.  Navionics is great in the US because they (like everyone else) get the data from NOAA.  Where do they get their Bahamas data?  I don’t know, but it isn’t from Explorer Charts, which is the gold standard for the Bahamas.  Garmin licenses the Explorer data for its products.  So when we’re in the Bahamas next I may be using fancy B&G instrumentation for sailing, but I’ll be using our little handheld Garmin to reduce the chances of running into stuff.

Just last month a relatively new Lagoon 450 was wrecked on a reef in the Exumas when the skipper put too much faith in his Navionics charts.  The chart in question even has a nice magenta dotted line that looks an awful lot like a recommended route.  One look at an Explorer chart and he would have steered clear.  All the gory details including an account from the skipper and a response from the owner of Navionics can be found here.


Update 4/21/13:

I’ve learned a few things that warrant an update to this post:

First, we’ve been cruising the Bahamas with Garmin’s data (licensed from Explorer) and Navionics’ side-by-side and I’ve seen firsthand how stark the difference is.

Second, a friend pointed out that users of MaxSea/Furuno/Nobeltec products can get data through MapMedia that is from “Datacore by Navionics”.  This data for the Bahamas looks very similar to Explorer data.  Perhaps it is Explorer data, or perhaps there is a common lineage.  I’m sure Explorer must have originated from another source.

Third, Jeppesen has a new product line in its “C-Map by Jeppesen” family called C-Map MAX-N.  The “-N” is for Navico and will be available for current chartplotters from Navico brands Lowrance, Simrad, and B&G.  C-Map uses Explorer data exclusively in the Bahamas.

Explorer's own explanation of where their data is available can be found here