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Saturday, May 27, 2017

A bit of Progress

A rare day off and a rare clear day and we finally got a bit of work done on the revisions to Tesla's Revenge.

The new hardtop, the roof that will enclose the cockpit into a wheelhouse and support the solar panels, will be a pergola-styled structure, stained to match the teak on the rest of the boat.  So on a cloudy day and in our right minds and everything we ventured out and purchased wood for the top.
Shaping the beam ends for the pergola roof.
One of the purchases we've made recently was a suite of cordless power tools, including a jigsaw and mouse sander.  The sander, particularly, proved useful in dealing with this project, but in dealing with the 1 1/8" holes in the beam ends, I was forced to resort to the massive drill I purchased to drill the holes in the support beams of Floating Empire nearly four years ago.  The little 20V drill just wasn't up to the task.

Stain going on.
So after the insanity of Memorial Day weekend, we'll be getting more lumber and fabricating the rest of the top and, hopefully, removing the mast before all this happens.

Stay tuned.

Hey, more stuff over at Life, Art, Water.

M

Tuesday, May 23, 2017

Stateless

Stateless: the downsides.

As we renovate and prepare the new boat, Gail and I were discussing the pros and cons of our livaboard lifestyle. So much of what I've put on these pages has been in glowing reference to the joys of the way we live, the place and the people. I thought, perhaps, it might be good to temper that with a bit of reality. . . not TOO much reality, mind you. Reality and I have always been barely on speaking terms, but here are some considerations you might take into account before taking to the water.

Sigh...here we go again.
First and foremost, as a livaboard, you are relatively stateless. Living on a (potentially) moving platform, your mailing address, your utilities, your “home” anything is largely a fiction. Slip four lines and shove off and you're somewhere else. By and large, this isn't a problem, but you will find, occasionally, that “we can't verify that address” will come up as the marina, a commercial address, can't be verified as a residence. 

Of course, the bug out potential is there as well.

Living on a vessel, you are living effectively in a floating tinyhome. Boats, particularly sailboats, can have a surprising amount of storage, but it's mostly “dead” storage. Want the tupperware? It's right there, under the cushion, under the hatch, underneath the extra life vests, the bagged catfood, the box of DVD's, my dad's photos, a box of tools that we had no place else to store, a bin of art supplies, and the peat moss for the composting toilet. No problem. But having to move six things to get to anything you want can be a hassle, and takes a bit of forethought when you arrange your storage.
It's also a compressed space. I'm fond of telling people that I don't take up any more room in a phone booth than I do in a stadium, and it's true, but this is, after all, a tinyhome. In a boat, Peter Dinklage from Game of Thrones could reach each and every top shelf. From where I'm sitting right now, I can open the fridge, reach the wine glasses, type of course, reach the battery bank, the towel storage bin. . . .all without getting up. It's a convenience. If you're claustrophobic, it's the third ring of hell.  Your new "kitchen range" is likely a single burner stove, your refrigerator, if you have one, is likely the same one your kid has in her dorm room at college.  Hot and cold running water?  You must be kidding.

On a boat, you just can't “let things wait”. Like houses and apartments, of course, they can burn, gas leaks can make them explode, shorts can cause fire. Unlike houses and apartments, boats can sink. They can ram the docks in high winds. They can leak around the hatches. They can break free of their moorings and go drifting off uncontrolled, with you sound asleep belowdecks. You have to be a bit more proactive, and no one is going to do it for you. 

Boat repairs can be expensive. I once asked a distributor what was the difference between a $.40 stainless steel bolt and a $2.30 Stainless Steel Marine Bolt. He said, candidly, the word “marine”. Tack “marine” onto anything and you're likely to pay at least 40% more for the same stuff.
Not that “marine” is a vain piece of marketing, not entirely. Marine environments are damp, corrosive, full of stresses that no landlocked construction would ever experience, and you don't DARE let that slide. One good wake from a drunken powerboater, one grounding, one lightning strike, and you are, figuratively and occasionally literally, toast. You have to pay attention. You have to keep yourself safe, because no one else will.

Having said all that, here we sit. We're up to our butts at the moment in new wiring and making decisions about motors and solar panels and where what goes and what we keep, but here we are.
We're free. I can slip the bonds of this dock at will. The cat loves the place. We wake in beauty every morning, and no amount of wind and rain and dryrot can ever change that.

We live aboard. Neither of us would have it any other way.

Don and Gail and Magellan aboard “Tesla's Revenge”

Wednesday, May 3, 2017

Fixing Composting Toilet Issues

The composting toilet aboard Tesla's Revenge
For those of you who have followed this column for a bit, you'll know that we're big fans of composting toilets for vessels.  After years of dealing with smelly, wanky, miserable to service blackwater heads, the simplicity of a composting head--even a simple bucket composter--is a joy.  They have very little to go wrong, and they NEVER stink.

So imagine my surprise when, just a few days ago, my wife and shipmate goes "wow, the toilet stinks".

And so it did.  Why?

I looked inside.  Source of the stank was pretty apparent:  urine was pooled in the toilet.  Liquids=anaerobic bacterial action=stank.  I tossed in some more biomass, in this case some rather disintegrated wood stove pellets, and forgot about it. 

And yet the stink persisted.  I kept adding more stuff.   What was going on?  This is EXACTLY the same setup we'd been using for near four years now.  It never smelled before, not ever.  What the hell, man?

So, being a good American, I turned immediately to them interwebs.  At first, nothing.  Then on a forum for one of the self contained composting heads, one of the commercial ones, I ran across a statement to the effect that "the finely ground peat moss sold in some garden centers is far less effective than wood chips or coarser biomass."

Finely ground.. . . .hmm.  I looked at our woodstove pellets, the stuff we'd been using for years as biomass.  The last two bags I'd gotten--the last two available at the end of the wood stove season--had been sold to me for, well, nothing, because they had gotten damp.  As a result, what I had was essentially two big bags of very, VERY fine sawdust as the pellets had disintegrated.

If you're using wood stove pellets, they should look like this, not like powder.
So we trucked off to the garden center at one of the big box stores and came back with a 3 cubic foot block of compressed sphagnum moss peat, broke some of it off, and tossed it in.

Bingo.  Urine absorbed instantly, smell completely gone.  This is a very good thing as the head in the new boat is RIGHT next to OUR heads as we sleep.

So, what have we learned today, kids?  We've learned that liquid is not your friend in composting toilet land, and that bulky and absorbent is waaaaay better than fine and powdery.  The object is to create the circumstances for aerobic decomposition, the stuff that happens on a forest floor, and avoiding the cirumstances for ANaerobic decomposition, the stuff that happens in a septic tank.  This means locking up the liquids and providing a way for air to circulate in and among the waste and biomass.

WOW am i glad that worked.

More really cool stuff over at Life, Art, Water, check it out.

Much more later

M