Posts In The “Technical” Category
We purchased our first digital camera, a Canon PowerShot Pro90 IS, in 2002. Many of our pictures are taken from a boat, with the subject often at a distance. So we wanted a long lens to successfully get those distant shots. Since light conditions in the Pacific Northwest can be poor, and we’d often be…
I maintain a work-related blog mostly focused high-scale services, data center design and operations, server hardware design and optimization, high-scale storage software and hardware systems, flash memory, service design principles, power efficiency and power management at http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/. Because most of my work centers around making very high-scale services run well, run reliably, and run economically,…
We keep our boat ready to sail at all times, with drawers all latched and loose items stowed. When we’re heading out for the weekend, we just need to start the engines and go. Before we lived aboard at Bell Harbor Marina, we could arrive at our Elliott Bay Marina slip on a Friday night…
We’ve spent the last few days lazing in the the sun in the San Juan Islands after returning from Prince William Sound. Yesterday we anchored in Reid Harbor on Stuart Island. Jose Sousa, who had been following our trip online, stopped by to say hello. His 1999 Lord Nelson Victory Tug 41 Carolina is so…
Last spring, Bob Lane interviewed us and reviewed Dirona for PassageMaker magazine. Bob has an experienced reporter’s eye for detail. And as a long-time boater who has toured and written up a lot of boats, he notices what works and what doesn’t. After touring the boat and describing the systems and upgrades, we discussed our…
Dirona recently was featured in the Three Sheets Northwest My Boat series. When we answered their questions, it had been about a year since we’d taken delivery of 5263, so it was a good chance for us to reflect back on the purchase and decision process. One of their interview questions we had the hardest…
This year at the Miami Boat Show, Northern Lights announced their new Wavenet generator digital monitoring system. Wavenet was installed on Dirona a couple of months prior to the announcement in Miami to test out the gear on a busy NMEA 2000 network in real boating conditions. I was pretty impressed with Wavenet from the…
Last April, Circumnavigator magazine came aboard for a day to review the boat and its systems. On board for the magazine were contributing editor James Kirby, photographer Stephen Cridland and John Marshall, owner of Nordhavn 55 owner Serendipity. Also with us was Larry Schildwachter of Emerald Harbor Marine, who commissioned the boat and installed our…
Although we hadn’t run overnight before the Alaska trip, we frequently ran at night in the previous boat. And we did make a couple of night runs in the 52. The learning from those two runs proved invaluable in our 24×7 trip. We found that 1) the navigation screens were too bright, even turned down…
We’ve been ordering a seemingly endless number of supplies and spare parts for the boat, ranging from fuel filters to zincs to alternators to pumps, and even a spare inverter. Stowing it all has been a big job. The boat has a large amount of storage space in various lockers, bilges and other spaces, but…
One of the things we learned from our trip to Alaska is that 24×7 operation with a double-handed crew is achievable for us, and with reasonable comfort. We arrived at the end of the run feeling alert and well-rested. In planning for the trip, we researched aspects of running a boat 24×7, ranging from…
Because the Nordhavn 52 is a new boat and because we chose to go with a more powerful engine than standard, we receive many questions on how we like it, whether more power is a good idea, and the fuel burn at different speeds. Now that we have over 600 hours on the engine and…
Dirona has plenty of storage space—we’ve not yet come close to filling all the lockers despite living aboard. But it is a boat, and storage space is at a premium. So we’re always looking for ways to make the most efficient use of the space we have. When we visited the yard during construction, one…
We’ve cruised with two different cats: Gremlin was 10 years old before we introduced him to boating and Spitfire was a kitten when brought him aboard several years later. Both have enjoyed being on the boat and have seemed as content afloat as on land. In our experience, cats need time to adapt to a…
Last weekend we presented our experiences in going through the design and build process for Nordhavn 5263. The slides are at Hamilton_TF10_BuildingTrawlerWebPost.pdf In discussing purchase costs, we broke the total cost into three components: 1) base boat & standard equipment 2) factory/dealer options and 3) post-delivery items. The amount you spend above the base price…
Last week we answered this blog comment: Given you have all these changes taking into consideration the PNW waters, I am wondering if you feel you have had to compromise at all on design given you are introducing the idea of taking it out on the open ocean. In other words, one of the things…
We have four Lenovo ThinkVison L1900p monitors for navigation. They have a low-profile bezel and controls in the front, so can readily be flush-mounted into the pilot-house dash. The display is crisp and clear, and we’re very happy with them. But we found they were a little bright for night running, even with the screen…