Posts In The “Technical” Category
Rigid Hull Inflatable Boats (RIBs) have many advantages. They don’t mark a boat’s hull when alongside, they have sufficient buoyancy to stay afloat when completely full of water, and they are sold in large enough quantities that pricing is competitive. They have lots of downsides as well and the demise of most inflatables is slow…
In 2014 we published A More Flexible Power System for Dirona. This article ran in the April 2016 PassageMaker issue and aspects of this design have been offered as options on new Nordhavn builds. Since that article was published there has been considerable progress in lithium-ion battery technologies. All forms of Li-Ion battery technology offer…
For quite some time now we have been watching a very large low in the weather models coming down from Greenland. The storm is currently predicted to bring 20′ waves on 10 second period, with 25 to 30 kt winds. With 20′ waves nominal, there will be some that approach or exceed our 30′ mast…
We plan on getting underway this weekend for Kinsale, Ireland. It’s a tiny bit early in the season but we have what looks to be a blocking high developing in the North Atlantic which will stall the steady stream of low-pressure systems that we’ve been watching for the past several months. Unfortunately the high is…
A couple of days after we arrived into Newport, we found the breaker for the pilothouse 120V outlets had tripped. We investigated all the electronics plugged into the PH outlets but the breaker would still trip. We eventually unplugged everything and it still tripped so it had to be a bad breaker or a circuit…
We’ve been studying the weather every day as we prepare for our Atlantic crossing from Newport, RI to Kinsale, Ireland. We use a variety of data sources, including NOAA surface analysis and 500MB forecasts. The sources we rely most heavily on are GRIB files containing data from computer-generated models such as NOAA GFS and WAVEWATCH…
Boat range in ocean conditions is remarkably hard to predict but it’s just about guaranteed that your real range is far shorter than estimates or even careful measurement if it wasn’t done in real ocean conditions. Ocean swell slows boats remarkably. We had no idea how much impact this would have when we first got…
Besides a fire at sea, few things are more frightening for an ocean-crossing vessel than uncontrolled, and potentially undetected, water ingress. Safety Digest, published by the Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) of the British Department of Transport (www.maib.gov.uk), often contains reports of small boats sinking in minutes. Many might have been saved had their captains…
PassageMaker Magazine April, 2017: Non-Stop Adventure: 56,000 Miles at Sea…And Counting
While in Florida earlier this year, we considered a variety of routes for our upcoming Atlantic passage. Some of the possibilities are shown in the screenshot above (click image for larger view). The waypoint east of South Carolina is Bermuda, and the one labeled Terceira Sao Miguel is the Azores. The other waypoints are mostly…
Most John Deere engines are scheduled to have the vibration damper replaced at 5 years or 4,500 hours. However, our Deere 6068AFM75 uses a viscous coupling with an 8,000-hour replacement interval so we went nearly 7 years before needing to make a change. We crossed 8,000 hours as we headed into Boston early last year,…
We are interested in all ocean-going power boats, but right near the top of the pack is the FPB series from Steve and Linda Dashew. We’ve seen many FPBs over the years as we completed our around-the-world run and the first things that jumps out is they are unfinished aluminum. When we were in New Zealand…
In Newport we found a washer on deck below the crane and concluded we likely had a critical crane issue, so stopped using it until we understood the problem. We later found a bolt on deck as we arrived into Baltimore. It was pretty clear that something was coming apart in the crane. James took…
While we were in Lunenberg, Nova Scotia, the crew of a 134-ft scalloper in port for maintenance work gave us a tour of their factory ship. (We were asked not to include boat, crew and company names.) The ship was built in 1997, but is well-maintained and is equipped with the latest scallop auto-shucking equipment….
As we completed our previous attempt at changing the engine mounts, we still had two major issues. The first was the front mount material seemed thicker than what originally was on the boat, and the second issue was we couldn’t jack the engine up far enough to remove the old rear mounts. We spoke with the…
In Boston we noticed that our forward engine mounts were starting to deteriorate. We purchased replacements but expected the current ones to last for months yet. While in Newfoundland, they suddenly started deteriorating badly and over two weeks the isolation material just crumbled away in a pile around the mount. One morning we picked up…
When we go to sea in Dirona there are usually only two people on the boat. That means automation and reliability are super important to us, and we want early warning of problems or unusual conditions. Maretron N2kView is a good-value display system that has worked very well for us and allowed us to incrementally expand what…
When there’s no room for error, even a small mechanical failure can make for a very bad day. In this case, one of the four main engines on Boston Harbor Cruises’ Regency remained in forward gear coming into Long Wharf and, with only seconds to figure out what was wrong and take action, time ran…