Latest Posts
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Portland
With over 80 breweries in the metropolitan area, Portland, Oregon has a wonderful craft beer ...
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Snoqualmie
Snoqualmie, Washington is a small town with much to offer. Best known for its proximity to ...
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Westport
Westport is a small Washington coastal town whose observation tower, perched at the Pacific ...
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Orlando
The annual MARS conference, hosted by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is a cross-domain event aimed ...
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Washington, DC
We’d both been to Washington D.C. before, but had never spent much time the National Mall ...
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Lotusland
Santa Barbara’s spectacular botanical garden Ganna Walska Lotusland was the former estate ...
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Israel
Tel Aviv’s historic Old Jaffa neighborhood was founded more than 4,000 years ago, and is ...
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Granville Island
We’ve spent many nights at Granville Island in Vancouver over the years, all of them in ...
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The Falklands, South Georgia, and Antarctica Part III
After three busy days in South Georgia, the Silver Endeavour sailed for Elephant Island in the ...
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The Falklands, South Georgia, and Antarctica Part II
Departing the Falklands, we traveled 900nm over three nights to reach our first stop in South ...
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The Falklands, South Georgia, and Antarctica
The island of South Georgia lies about 870 miles off the Antarctic Peninsula and supports the ...
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Spring Across the Country
We crisscrossed the country this spring on business trips for James, spending time in ...
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Mugged in Santiago
“Someone stole my necklace!” Jennifer exclaimed, as she felt her small gold chain ...
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Santiago
Santiago, founded in 1541 by Spanish conquistador Pedro de Valdivia, lies in a fertile valley ...
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Darlington Nuclear Generating Station
The Darlington Nuclear Generating Station just outside Toronto has a capacity of 3,512 MW and ...
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re:Invent
At the most recent AWS re:Invent conference, held annually in Las Vegas, Jennifer took her ...
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Caribbean Cruise Aboard the Norwegian Joy
In 2022, we took our first mega-ship cruise, aboard the Norwegian Encore to the Caribbean. We ...
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Fort Nisqually
More than a century before the smoke-spewing copper smelter at Point Ruston influenced ...
Happy Birthday Jennifer
Tanti Auguri !
Thanks Raffaele!
Jennifer
In reference to Prof. David Parnas, I completely agree: if you’re lucky enough to meet a true mentor during school or university — regardless of the subject they teach — you’re blessed for life. Their way of reasoning stays with you forever.
I had a similar experience with my Linear Algebra professor in the first year of Engineering. Of course, I remember almost nothing about the subject itself now, but I still carry his way of thinking with me.
I’ll never forget what he told us when we, as “kids,” asked what Linear Algebra was actually useful for. He said:
“we don’t study this for the rules of algebra, we study this to learn how to think.”
Couldn’t agree with you more. These early influences can be very powerful and long lasting.
Hello from Belgium, if you go back to boating, what kind of boat and brand will you choose ? Back to a trawler, steel like bering or polyster ? Will you go back to nordhavn or try maybe a krogen, a fleming, or a converted explorer yacht ? Will you go back to 8 knots cruising or plane at 20 hnots ? You had a bayliner or meridian i dont remember but will you go back to this kind of boat and brand ?
Smaller than 52 or bigger ?
Thanks a lot and take care
Hello! As you outlined, there are a wide variety of possible boat choices out there. The direction we take would be related to the kind of exploring we ended up deciding to do. If we were back to crossing oceans or doing the North West Passage or other high latitude work we would go with a Nordhavn or something similar. Probably would go a bit larger than 52′ for that mission. If we decided to cruise European canals we would probably go with a 40 to 50 footer. Speed isn’t an asset for this mission since canal speed limits are typically quite low. If we decided to do the US Great Loop, we would likely go a bit bigger — perhaps 60′ — and would like to have a boat that can cover the distances at a bit higher speed when called on. Say 20 knots when we we have distance to cover but we would want it to still be efficient at displacement speeds.
If it were possible to build a ice breaker down in the 60 to 70 foot range, it would be super interesting but it’s difficult to get capable ice breakers at sub-100 foot lengths.
For many missions that interest us a slightly larger Nordhavn would fit us very well.
If you dont cross oceans anymore and do great loop or europe inland waters will you stay with a main and a wing ? I dont really understand why cross oceans trawler run mainly on a main and a wing and coastals or inlands run on 2… i think it should be the opposite… coastal youre close to an harbour to get safe and repair instead in the middle of the ocean with your small wing with 2 meters swell in the nose..
Have you ever tryed your wing in uncomfortable sea ? Thanks for share
Ocean crossers need redundancy. You can go with a wing or twin engines. A single is always more efficient but the differences aren’t massive. I personally would prefer twins as a redundancy solution on larger boats but, on small boats, the space required for twins negatively impacts the fuel load that can be carried and make a wing a better choice.
I have run the wing in rough conditions. It can make way but it’s slow at around 3 1/2 kts.
Hope for you, youre gonna be again on sea for new adventures. For us next season is the last one, we sell the boat, my father will be 82 and its time for him to move on… he bought his 3988 in 1997 new.. times fly… take care and i ll follow your next adventures !
Thanks and all the best looking forward.
Hi James, would love to hear from you, your thoughts on Trac Network. A P2P, Blockless, AND ClOUDLESS network, for apps and services.
https://trac.network/
Would love to hear your insights.
The utility of communications networks is directly related to the number of entities using that network. In the case of Trac, usage is on the light site so I’m not that excited by it at this point. But for those not wanting to depend upon central authorities, using TAP on Trac for networking looks like an option.
Welcome to Australia – just caught up on your latest moves. Hope you get to Melbourne, finest food in Australia. Many wonderful restaurants.
Have you replaced Spitfire as yet? My new cat is almost a clone of my last who passed away with a stroke.
Have a wonderful stay in Australia and I hope Sydney does us proud.
Hey Tim. It was great to be back in Australia. This trip was a bit of an unusual one where we’re only going to be in the country for two days. It’s Jen’s birthday and she wanted to go back to Peats Bite for lunch/dinner. I couldn’t afford time off work right now so we did one of the longest trips ever for a restaurant visit :-). We’re already looking forward to a return visit!
Hi James! Thank you for all the great posts. I’m the current owner of 6229 and have built out my NMEA2000 network with great success and have used many of your posts to get great recommendations and N2KView layouts. One thing I haven’t figured out is how you have created “user” or “calculated fields” like NM/G which is showing volts. I was hoping to be able to store values in a VDR100, calculate new fields and present them in N2KView, but alas, no such luck. You have figured this out. Do you have the decoder ring? Many thanks!
Our system has evolved over the years and is specific to this boat electrical and electronics architectures but the good news is Kees Verruijt has written a wonderful interface to the NMEA2000 systems called CANboat. It is on Github (https://github.com/canboat/canboat) and that is what we are using. Kees has written a nice clean system that is very reliable.
Canboat works great for input operations and it’s super easy to use. On output operations, it’s more complex and bounded by idiosyncrasies in the PGNs you want to write, the hardware you are writing it, and how much you intend to write. So it’s a bit messy but with some trial and error, it can be done. The NMEA2000 spec costs something silly like $10k and, without that, you are stuck reverse engineering some of the PGNs you might want to write.
Overall, Canboat is a really nice system and it makes it all as easy as can be when working with resource constrained interfaces on a protocol where the spec isn’t reasonably priced.
Thank you! I just started reading the spec. So, you read values from the NMEA PGNs, do some calculations on your host PC and send the results out on a PGN (like battery voltage) for a certain instance such that it can be displayed in N2Kview?
Yes, exactly. Some synthesized PGNs were sourced external to NMEA2000. For example, satellite connection status. And, as you said, some data was received from NMEA2000 in one form and pushed back onto the network in another. An example of this use case is taking the Deere ECU computed fuel burn rate, correct it to my calibrated values, and push it back onto the network.
You got me started on this project. Is there a way to get data from Maretron, like total fuel remaining or consumption, out or do you have to intercept all the PGNs and calculate them externally? I think I understand how to generate new PGNs at a surface level.
Assuming you have an electronically controlled engine, the Maretron J2k100 (J1939 to Canbus converter) will get engine fuel consumption data. If you have a mechanically controlled engine, this data is unavailable. Note that fuel consumption data is bang on at rated RPM but, on our Deere 6068AFM75, it’s off by as much as 13% at low engine speeds so we read the data, compute the calibrated correction, and then put the data back on the bus. For total fuel, you need to read all the CANBUS fuel levels, sum them, and re-emit the total fuel back onto the bus. For devices where there is no data on the bus like our KVH satellite system, we would programmatically scrape the data from the KVH reporting page (e.g. signal strength) and then push that data on the bus. I believe I used temperatures for these computed values.
Hi from Greece on a sailboat, great site and a ton of info. I am looking at a 52 again after i toured her in 2015 and we are ready to change but honestly there are still some doubts. I still have the feeling that the hull, even if beeing quite tall and the design is superb, but the installation, plumbing can make life complicated. I know from dutch boats that they put all technical equipment from engine to aircon, heater, inverter water maker in one big engine room.,Looks overwhelming but you see problems easily. In the 52 it seems its placed all over the boat, in cabinets, under beds etc which make things not easier. Additional when boats get older parts have to be exchanged or some material like brass in aircon manifold or wrong gasket in tanks or cooler will show up after 10 years only and out of guarantee. So how to you see NH ageing over time and how often did you yell f****** why its so difficult to reach things…..,In the end the small bits can make it difficult. I have a oneoff with 90 pct superb installation but the last 10 pct drives you crazy…,,.Carsten
Many Nordhavns including the 52 look high and I’ve heard many observers concerned about the stability of the vessel but, what you don’t see, is the 6’7″ (on Dirona) of below-the-waterline weight. Dirona has over 6,000 lbs of ballast, up to 1,750 gallons (more 10,000 lbs) of fuel,as much as 400 gallons (3,200 lbs) of water, and an incredibly thick and heavy hull. There are downsides of all this mass including slightly lower fuel economy but it allows the boat to be incredibly stable in even very rough seas and to carry a lot of above the waterline space. The N52 is designed to pass Class A Ocean (highest rating). More data here: https://mvdirona.com/2019/03/deck-fuel-and-vessel-stability/
The short form is these boats are built tough and crazy heavy but, the more difficult the weather, the happier we were in that boat.
On service space, just about no boast is as big as you might like when servicing but Nordhavn’s are all serviceable. I did just about all service on our N5263 over the 10 years and more than 12,000 hours we owned the boat and I know it very well. I’ve also helped other Nordhavn owners over the years and I’ll admit that a N68 is much easier to work on than a N52. Smaller boats are almost always more challenging to service than large boats but the work can be done.
There were numerous times when more service space would have been really nice but Nordhavns of all sizes have been designed to be services and, in my opinion, the brand is above average by that measure. If you flip through the blog, you can get a rough perspective on how much service is required when a boat is used heavily with high annual hours and it’ll also give you good read on how accessible components are on the 52.
Dear James and Jennifer. Funny coincidence — I’ve been scouting for a good travel charger, and I just noticed in your photo (at the Granville Island Hotel) you’ve got one that looks like it could charge two laptops at once. What model is that? Looks like exactly what I need.
It’s a great charger and it can run two laptops at once if they are modern and fairly efficient. The max power delivery from this unit is 100W. It works perfectly for our two 13″ HP Dragonfly G4s. This is the Anker Prime 100W: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CZ6LXL8R.
Wow, I actually bought that one just last week—but I was a bit worried it might only offer slightly more power than my 65W ThinkPad charger.
By the way, do you usually rely on having power sockets available when you travel, or do you also carry a power bank for your laptop?
I was looking into this Anker model (A1340, ASIN B0BYP2F3SG) for that reason:
https://a.co/d/aMlud75
We also use this power bank that can drive a full 65W on demand: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DBHC9F8B.
I have liked your website for a long time. The content, layout, and especially the live and interactive map is fantastic. Can you give a bit of insight on how difficult this was to create and manage? Could a mid-level-technical (no computer programming) person manage/update this site? I am interested to have something similar but I am quite intimidated. Thanks ahead for any insights or recomendations.
A simple WordPress site is easy to setup and maintain. Other than the interactive map, that’s all our site is. You could easily do it. The map is a lot of custom code and would take time but the rest is easy for non-programmers. My recommendation is to dive in and chose a WordPress theme and bring up a site. Try changing themes as you learn more. Have book on WordPress to consult when you are stuck. It’s all easy and no programming expereince is needed.
Thanks for your quick response. It does seem like a basic site based on one of their templates shouldn’t be too hard. That is about my technical level. I was hoping you had an easy secret…. Thanks for sharing your adventures. I am super impressed that you have been to both poles. Happy travels.
When are you heading to outer space?? I am sure you have looked into it. It is about the only place left!
Yes, your right. If we could afford it, we would definitely do an orbit of earth.
Have you shared any details about your custom raspberry pi watch commander replacement anywhere? I searched the site and did not find anything beyond the initial mention. Thanks!
The details on what the watch commander does and how it behaves are described here: https://mvdirona.com/2022/03/watchkeeping-revisited/.
The software is fairly simple. It’s just a timer driving a set of 5v digital outputs each of which drives a relay and the relays control power to warning lights and/or alarms. It also has one digital input that senses when the user presses the switch confirming the operator is alert and another digital input that is used to activate/deactivate the device.
A recent post in the Puget sound boating Facebook group says that Cruising the Secret Coast is sold out everywhere and is in demand.
It’s true, The Secret Coast is no longer in print. We would prefer to see it in market and easily available to those that want it but the publisher didn’t see sufficient demand to justify an additional print run. For us, we’ve never cared about revenue from the book — we just want it widely available to those cruising the area.
We’ll follow up with the current publishing rights holder that doesn’t plan to further monetize the book and request republishing rights.
Just checking on you two, I recently viewed several video’s , I was always impressed with your skills, and confidence in motoring around the world. Hope you two are healthy and enjoying life.
All good on our end. I’ve been in a role at work where being in Seattle is much more effective so I’ve been working in that model for the last three years. We’re still adventuring though having been to the North Pole, the South Pole, other parts of Antarctica, Greenland, Iceland, Switzerland, Italy, and others.
Hello there!
Today I have discovered your blog by pure luck and I am litteraly impressed of how good you are in balacing hyper techincal work and enjoying life. Right now, I am spending hours reading around your blog. And I truly admire you.
I have spent the last 17 years pushing hard my limits… Improving both technical and soft skills… Reaching whatever I set as career goal… (e.g. now I am Director of a Cybersecurity Lab. I do exactly what I wanted to do. Hacking, Researching, etc.) But at the cost that my wife cannot withstand me anymore… and soon will leave with together with the kids.
Logically speaking, I can’t blame her. Job was always my first priority.
As a person that reached that level of expertize at work… but in the meantime still enjoying family and life… what advice would you give?
Shall I keep push further my limits to reach yet another career goal?
Shall I slow-down and enojy more life, knowing that the rest of the world won’t wait for me and will keep going & advancing… meanwhile… me… if I slow down I will just be left behind (form a technical skillset POV)?!
P.S. Apologies for this rant. I have not even close friend left to talk with.
Dear Jennifer and James,
Given your extensive experience with cruising, even if not specifically with sailing yachts, I wanted to get your thoughts on the tragic sinking of the Bayesian in Italy on August 13th at 4:30 AM.
How could a 56-meter (183 ft) sailing yacht collapse in under a minute while anchored just half a mile off the coast of Porticello, Palermo (Sicily, southern Italy)? (I’ve included a video that appears to capture the sinking.)
The Bayesian had a 75-meter (246 ft) mast—making it 34% taller than the yacht is long. Could this have been a balance issue, or is that too simplistic an explanation?
Investigations have revealed that the mast remained intact; it didn’t snap. Is it possible that wind alone caused the sinking? Gusts in the area were estimated to be around 50 knots, possibly reaching 70 knots at the incident site.
I’ve often heard the saying, “the sea knows everything you did wrong,” and I greatly value your analytical approach to incidents like these, especially in identifying potential causes to avoid similar tragedies in the future.
The captain, James Cutfield, was reportedly very experienced—a 51-year-old from New Zealand.
It’s a heartbreaking loss for the families involved.
complete analysis by BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy0nwe4d7k5o
video of sinking: https://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/naufragio-palermo-riprese-ricerche-dispersi-speleosub-nuovo-azione-AFjQ9UTD
Its definitely a tragic situation. Small to medium sized recreational craft generally don’t have water tight compartments and, for those boats that do have them, they only help if closed. Without watertight compartments, bulk water ingress if it occurs will sink a boat amazingly quickly.
The mast is tall but relatively low mass relative to the keel, hull, and machinery in a well designed sail boat. Where the mast will certainly have contributed to the problem is the wind pressure on the mast will blow the boat over unusually far and higher winds will blow over to greater angles. If the boat had open toy garages, windows, or doors, as the boat inclines over unusually far, it can take on water quickly. Even if the boat was sealed up, there is an inclined beyond which the boat will suffer water ingress as engine room intakes and other openings allow water to rush in. In our boat, this angle was 61 degrees. Beyond this angle, the boat would take on water.
I expect we’ll learn that the boat was blown over unusually far for at anchor conditions and suffered rapid water ingress and this sunk the boat.
A question I have is that in all of your cruising did you ever encounter any unusually wild weather conditions or hear other cruisers mention something like this?
We have never in weather that would be classified as wild but we have been in sustained 40 knot winds with well developed seas (around 20′) 3 or 4 times and don’t love it but the good news is it didn’t feel unsafe. We have never seen roque waves or truly dangerous weather. We know that our boat and us are fairly comfortable in 20′ seas but we don’t really know the limit having never seen worse. But, I suspect that double what we have seen, which definitely does happen, would be high risk and fairly uncomfortable.
Another question I’m curious about is that in all of your cruising, and land travels outside the US how accurate did you find the forecasts issued by local weather offices?? Were there countries more accurate than others?
When we are offshore we show the ECMWF, PWG, PWE, Spire, WWW3, and GFS models through PredictWind. The ECMWF model is our primary go to model but, when we see great variation with the others, we dig deeper and use more caution. We’re generally impressed with both PredictWind and the accuracy of these weather models when off shore. Near shore, we find local weather forecasting from the host country more accurate and more detailed than the models. There are definite differences in the accuracy of the local forecasts depending upon how much the host country invests in weather forecasting and whether the prevailing wind patterns were over land where there is lots of information or over water where there is less.
Good-morning James and Jennifer,
My husband and I are currently anchored in “the Wizard” after two nights in Echo Bay off Stryker Island. Both of these anchorages we chose because of your book “Cruising the Secret Coast” and we couldn’t be more thrilled. We have had our boat “Slow Dance” (a Kadey Korean Whaleback) for four years now but this is our first season North of Cape Caution. We are so grateful for your book and that you so generously shared these beautiful anchorages with other boaters. Thank you. Best regards and good luck with your ongoing travels and adventures. Edan and Andrea Oestreich
That’s kind of you to take the time to pass on the feedback on “Cruising the Secret Coast”. Thanks and happy cruising.
Hi James and Jennifer
Fist of thank you for this great blog. It has certainly inspired me to remember to be adventurous with my travels and get better at documenting where I go and what I see.
On that note, I very much like how you display all your GPS tracks and photos on google earth, make me want to do the same thing. What do you tend to use for GPS tracking for your flights, hikes and trips.
A small Garmin perhaps? I’d be curious to know, I have trip to multiple destinations in Asia coming up and would like to collect GPS tracks while flying, sailing, driving and walking :)
On another note I hope you enjoyed your trip to Greenland via Iceland.
I’m actually from Iceland although I live in London and spend a lot of time in the US for work, in Jersey City at the moment. So anyway if you ever go to Iceland again and want to explore perhaps more off the beaten path I can give some pointers and ideas.
All the best
Arni,
Thanks for the feedback on the blog, and for the offer of Iceland tips. We’ll certainly return so will take you up on that when we plan our next trip.
For most tracks we use the Android Geo Tracker app (https://play.google.com/store/search?q=geo%20tracker&c=apps) on our phones. This works well except on ships, planes, and rail where the signal is often blocked. To handle the ships case we hang a Garmin inReach Mini 2 (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09PSSSFPF) outside on a balcony rail so it gets a clear signal. For planes and rail, where putting the tracker outside isn’t practical, we just use the InReach inside since it has a better antenna than the phone and it does somewhat better.
Jennifer
Thanks for the information on how you do GPS tracking, the Garmin inReach Mini 2 sounds like a good option, I had been looking at it and the way you use it make sense, I’ll get one for my next trip.
Yeah feel free to drop me an email any time you might be thinking about planning a trip to Iceland, I can certainly share some ideas for interesting places to see there, etc.
There are plenty of places that are well off the beaten track that are interesting to visit.
Perhaps your next trip there might be to see the 2026 total solar eclipse that will be best visible from the tip of the Vestfjords.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_August_12,_2026
Arni
Hello James and Jennifer,
We are planning a trip down the Columbia River. I know you did this back in 2012 and I have a couple of questions about the trip.
1. Do you have a recommended guide for the extended Columbia/Snake Rivers?
2. Why didn’t you travel farther up the Columbia River to Wenatchee, the Grand Coulee Dam, or beyond? Does the river get too shallow?
3. Any tips or warnings for the trip? Favorite moorages or restaurants?
I guess I should say UP the Columbia River…
Griff,
1. The two guides we used were “Umbrella Guide to Exploring the Columbia-Snake River Inland Waterway” (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0945397585/) and “Boating Guide to the Lower Columbia and Willammette Rivers” (https://columbiariversailing.org/boating-guide-to-the-lower-columbia-and-willamette-rivers/). The first isn’t specific to boating, but gave lots of good information on what to see and do.
2. Beyond Hanford, our charts didn’t have any soundings. We stopped at the confluence with the Snake and ran the tender up the Columbia to check out Hanford
3. Our best tip is to go outside the summer locking schedule for recreational craft to give you more flexibility on when to lock through. See https://mvdirona.com/category/destinations/north-america-pacific-coast/columbia-river for a detailed description of where we went, what we did, and our impressions.
Enjoy your time on the river system—it’s a fabulous adventure!
Jennifer
Hello, james:
I’ve been following your blog for a long time and I love it.
Thank you very much for your continued sharing about the data center.
For the frequent power and cooling failures of Google and Azure in the past two years, AWS has not happened for a long time. What is the secret or improvement?
The sad reality of really focusing on operational excellence is that outages are always noticed but avoiding them seldom is. Thanks for the feedback.
Our approach is to go with simple approaches to design redundancy and then years of honing operational practices where every event where systems or the team performed short of perfect gets analyzed deeply. It’s amazing what can be learned from even very minor operational or system glitches.
Dear James,
Thank you so much for continuing to share such important content.
As you say, “Outages are always noticed but avoiding them seldom is.”
Power and cooling failures in data centers have been the source of Scale failures.
Reducing or even eliminating these Scale failures through design redundancy of infrastructure or design redundancy of services is certainly good news for the data center.
I sincerely hope that an innovative architecture can be found to support this goal.
We have good sized teams on both the hardware infrastructure side and the systems software and applications side focused on resilience and availability. We constantly tune operational processes and design choices to deliver stable systems that just about never skip a beat. We all appreciate your feedback.
In you picture of Langley Harbor – what classic old cruiser is it passing south to north in the upper right?
Good to hear from you John. Unfortunately don’t have a good enough resolution photo to determine the name of that vessel. We had a great weekend in Langley–it’s been ages since we visited and staying on shore rather than anchored off as we used to gave us a different perspective.
— Jennifer
Thanks for continuing to take us on your journeys. Thought of you today when N92 Warbird pulled into our anchorage at Cambridge Cay, Exuma, Bahamas. Do you still have plans to do the loop someday?
Thanks for the feedback on the blog. Yes, we would like to do the Great Loop sometime but don’t have immediate plans.