Here is the problem with a boat and tools. Space is at a premium on a boat and everything is a tradeoff. Do I put in another tool chest in the lazarette or a 10 HP margarita machine that makes you the life of the party at the next rendezvous? These are seriously important decisions people. It can be safely said that tools are required on a boat. I see it in three distinct categories. The first category is a…
WTF John Deere? In 2018 my wife and I were crossing the Florida’s lake Okeechobee heading east. We had just started out for the morning and were passing through the narrow winding channel to get into the lake proper when one of our John Deere engines alarmed throwing a high temperature alert. The Scooby team jumped into action. Shutting down one engine immediately we proceed to navigate the channels to a safe spot on a single engine. When we got…
One of the most useful Grafana panels we have done to date is our tide table. As I have been building up my skills on SignalK and Grafana in general one of the items that has been on our punch list for a while was to display the daily tides from NOAA based on our location. It seems simple at first given there was a plugin in SignalK for pulling NOAA tides. However, the project ended up stretching out for…
From the beginning the holy grail of our telemetry project has been to get valuable data and display it on two permanently mounted panels in our pilot house. It was a year in the making to get here, as we slowly built out our telemetry system. We would have approached this project sooner if I had seen a good write up on how easy and cheap this piece of the puzzle actually was. Our requirements were that a display had…
Hello and welcome to Part 2 of my blog posts series on building out the telemetry systems for MV Adventuress. In this post I am going to cover in detail how I built out the software for the Intel NUC. If you need a refresher on the overall components of our telemetry system go here for Part 1. My wife and I affectionally refer to our server as NUC-NUC and the little beast handles all our compute needs for Adventuress….
This will be one of several articles that I will be writing while floating around the Puget Sound this summer. One of the challenges with our last boat, an Ocean Alexander sedan, was little to no digital information available. And by digital information I mean streaming telemetry. In my profession telemetry is a key component in understanding complex system health and ensuring continuity of service. So when we purchased MV Adventuress in late 2018 I was determined to build up…
I think we can all agree that water soaking into fiberglass is not on the list of good things for our boats. One area that seems to be a persistent problem is gelcoat failure in our bilges. There are a number of factors working against us here. First, folks don’t always or cannot easily inspect all points in their bilge. Second, water leaks are most likely to settle and pool in the lowest part of our bilges. Third, the bilges…
Well it has been a six months since the last posting and it has been busy. Once the ski season passed for us it was time to roll up the sleeves and get to work on the boat. Mich and I both being techies decided we would use a web-based tool called GitHub to track all maintenance items, documents, and general boat information going forward. The value for us is that the information is stored in the cloud, is multi-user,…
23-25 December 2018 Sunday the 23rd was a grey, wet, and cold day in Victoria. When we woke, we thought we’d have Adventuress around 4:00PM, nearly dusk. Originally, when we thought we’d take delivery closer to lunchtime, we had planned to do a provision run after we got Adventuress tied in a slip. Now those plans were out the window, and we rearranged our plan. We’d grab provisions before getting Adventuress, drop everything at the hotel while we got Adventuress…
21-22 December 2018 It has been three months, five days, two hurricanes, and one great, big Pacific winter storm later, and Adventuress’ journey home is nearly done. On this morning, the last Friday before Christmas, we boarded the Victoria Clipper to take the high-speed ferry to Victoria BC. The morning dawned calm, with wispy high clouds filtering weak winter sunshine. But yesterday, the worst windstorm of the season raked through the Pacific Northwest, causing widespread damage. It had even shut…