That dreaded POX

I think I have contracted that dreaded scourge of boat owners. I have all the symptoms, excessive time on the computer, eagerly awaiting emails and attachments. Carefully scrutinizing picture after picture of boats, a dreamy look on my face, with screwed up sketches of possible modifications strewn around.

Poor Karen has to put up with me constantly asking if she likes this or that boat... I almost wish she was suffering from the same illness.  For a while I thought I was alone with this syndrome, but I heard some friends are also suffering the same malady, it must be going around. They have even found a name for the sickness, the dreaded 6 foot-itis. 

Of course Mike and Larissa deserved to get it, spending years living on a 34 footer with two kids is bound to bring on such an nasty affliction, but me.. What did I do to deserve it?

Anyway look on the bright side, it could be worse, it could be 10 foot-itis or even 20 foot-itis.

So yes it is official, I am looking at other boats, nothing to serious yet, it's a big leap. But I always saw Snow Petrel as more of an interim boat, at some point I need to get serious about things and make the plunge. Boats being so cheap at the moment is certainly a factor. I just have to make sure 6 foot-itis doesn't develop (as it so often can) into that most fatal of diseases, the dreaded Dreamboat-itis that will leave me crippled, my back broken forever under a mountain of debt.

I have looked at catamarans, old racing boats, even older rusty cruising boats. My wish list is as follows :

1. Cheap
2. Strong
3. Fast and easy to handle
4. Shoal draft
5. Beautiful
6. Low maintenance 
7. Good light airs performance 
8. Roomy and comfortable at sea and in port

I am guessing I will be looking for a while, but if you hear of such a boat please let me know right away.

A tale of fire and ice

Well, not really much ice, more sort of rain and some cold wind but hey.. got your attention. But the fire, yep a real fire on the boat!

Intentional of course, and nicely contained in the welded metal firebox, nicely warming the boat to 29 degrees, and warding of that icy weather. Finally after many years of procrastination the wood heater is on the boat, and working exceptionally well.

It replaces the smelly little Taylors diesel heater that I never really bonded with. In fairness I did buy it from a garage sale for $100 and it really needed a bit of an overhaul, a very small diesel leak used to develop when it heated up and it gave of a slight whif of diesel... Yuk. 

This wood heater was of my own design, (or rather adapted from my friend Adrian's design). It is just big enough to fit a normal sized log, and has a  mesmerizing window, a secondary burning chamber, and enough controls to keep a concord pilot busy. 

I love it, I love the slightly smoky warm fug inside, the flickering of the flame through the door, and the radiant heat. 

I love the hot kettle simmering away on the top. I love playing with all the controls, stoking it, lighting it, and the lazy way the smoke curls out the chimney. Shame it has taken 6 years to build, and now I have it installed just in time for summer...

See the post on welding stuff for details of the tools I used and a photo of the door being made, I managed to source some heat proof glass to fit inside the scrap stainless steel door. It's welded up from 6mm (1/4") mild steel plate (that I also got from adrian, thanks mate!), and it weighs a ton.

The installation is not quite complete. Hopefully soon the stainless steel heat shields will be fitted instead of the cheap galvanized one, and some tiles will be glued on the floor. I also need to make a new stack top, the old one was washed overboard in the knockdown on the way to Antarctica. And finally weld up some fiddles and guards. But all in good time, I guess I have until next winter!

Maybe amongst this hive of activity I will find time to post a few things on here, my apologies for the long lapse. Some time soon my old man will get his website up and running about his book "Snow petrel". So soon I can post a link to that, and with luck it may stop him harassing me to put something about the book on here...

Ohh, Important stuff I nearly forgot, Playing with fire is something most of us grow out of when we are about five, I clearly have not yet achieved this level of maturity. However I am very careful about shielding, and do not leave the fire unattended. I was told by a firefighter that wood can slowly change into a more flammable state after years of exposure to "safe" temperatures. Then one day it bursts into flame at the same safe temperature it has always been exposed to. A homemade wood heater is also liable to nasty antisocial habits like belching carbon monoxide, flames, and hot embers, or worse. Be careful... 

A long time...

I just looked at the date of the last post and realised what a long time it's been since I last posted. Well I kind of knew it has been a long time, and I have written two big posts (and re-written them at least three times), But for certain reasons (which I may or may not reveal) I have not posted them yet... sorry.

So I am kind of firing this off to let you know I am still alive. (I am) But I did have abit of a fright the other night, seeing lots of water in the bilge I tasted it to see if it was fresh or salt, (kind of more fresh, not salty so had another taste to check) and looked for the leak. I couldn't find any leak anywhere so I pumped it out and went home...

Light-bulb moment at 10pm, cooling water from engine, antifreeze... toxic? Panic google search YES IT IS TOXIC!! !@#$%

Anyway to cut along story short Karen drove me down (I was suffering from extreme hypochondriac syndrome) I got some samples from the bilge and some salt water I stuck them both in the freezer and they both froze OK. Also the Cooling water was still full and very green (the bilge water wasn't green) so I think I am not going to die (from that anyway).  Many lessons learnt here, many that I should have learnt when I was two, like don't swallow anything unknown.

But seriously I was surprised that 30mls or so of antifreeze can be fatal, but relived that the cure was strong alcohol... so I decided I'd better have lots of the cure just in case.

As well as rewriting posts and trying to poison myself I have just put Snow Petrel up on the slip (the hard? for you Americans). I decided to try slipping her closer to town this time (Kettering where I keep her is 40 mins drive away). So I had to sail her up. With all the weed on the bottom it took much longer than I had planed, and had to motor sail to keep her moving... very sad... It got dark and I learnt that my masthead light wasn't working... Another job to do...

Anyway today she went up and after three hours on the end of a water blaster all the flora and fauna making their unwelcome home on the bottom of my boat were evicted and the bottom was clean (it was pretty bad, kind of glad I don't have a photo...). The reason for such bad fouling, paint detachment - the epoxy paint sealing the old antifouling away is starting to fail badly after 6 years, and much of the 18 year build-up of paint was blistered and loose, with weed growing through any cracks.

So really I think this means a sandblast job to remove the assorted antifouling paint build up on the bottom. Unless any of you have any better ideas... While I am at it I should make all those modifications to the boat underwater that I have planned. I will get around to describing some of these in later posts.

Cheers

Ben

Questions, Comments or Contact

If anybody has any questions, off topic comments or wants to contact me you can do so by leaving a comment here, I check this pretty frequently so will try to get back to you as soon as possible.

Alternately try emailing me at bensnowpetrel(at)yahoo.com.au but I as I get lots of crap in the email this page is probably better.

Cheers

Ben

Blogs, Ego's, and Nerdiness..

I Have been writing this stuff  now for about a month, I can tell you it's alot harder than it seems. Especially for me, I have always hated writing and at school I had to do remedial english... (I was excellent at maths and science... think it's called being a nerd) so I often wonder why I am bothering (some of you may also be thinking the same thought...)

I guess I wanted a place to put some of my ideas down, forums and comments make it hard to actually write as much as I need to explain myself... A chance remark "Ben, that was long enough to warrant it’s own blog!" by Nathan  got me to thinking...

Hopefully I will get better and my posts will get more coherent with practise (although I think alot of my earlier posts were actually better..). I have found some posts turn out OK and others seem to never be right and I fiddle with them for ages before either ditching them in disgust or chucking them on here, and hoping no one actually reads them.

What I end up writing is usually completely different to what I have in my minds eye when I start... It's all very hit and miss. I use spell checker constantly... And call on Karen in to have a look occasionally to make sure it is sort of OK (She finds my posts very boring and technical)

I ask myself how much ego is involved in all of this, and honestly have to say it's probably more than I am comfortable admitting, I check the stats more frequently than is healthy, and stress if I haven't got a post out for a while due to work (like last week) or just me stuffing about trying (without success) to turn the mess I have just written into a masterpiece (like last week)...

The highlight so far for me was John from Attainable Adventure Cruising recommending my blog, thank you John and I hope I won't cause you to regret the recommendation.

Surprisingly some people have come for a look, (mostly poached from Attainable Adventure Cruising) and google has found my site, causing some funny visits. Like the Google France search for "Sailing + Tits" that somehow found my Sextant and Tits on Bulls post, Probably not what he was expecting... Stats to date are 872 hits from some many countries around the world, most commonly being USA, Aussie and Canada.

My most popular (if you can call popular with a measly 88 views) is my Berserk... Lost in the Ross Sea? Post, goes to show bad news sells (we are pathetic creatures really...). 51 people were bored enough to look at Snow Petrel the boring details and 44 looked at the videos page.

Where to from here? I don't know, I am sure my posting frequency will drop. I hope the quality will improve and hopefully more people will comment if they find anything useful, if they disagree with what I have written, or have something to add (thank you Chris at Periodically Peregrine)... I guess I am trying to stimulate some thought, myself included.

I have just modified the layout to make it look cooler, let me know if you don't like it. And I put a followers thing on the page too, who knows - one day I may even get one! See John Vigor's always amusing writing about his followers...

I must admit to being surprised (and abit scared) by the number of visits, hopefully some of you have found something interesting amongst my more coherent efforts, and thanks for coming over and looking.

Cheers

Ben

PS For the fellow nerds out there

It is scary how much information gets tracked isn't it...

	Pageviews by Browsers Firefox  290 (33%) Safari  256 (30%) Internet Explorer  222 (26%) Chrome 70 (8%) Opera  7 (<1%) Mobile  6 (<1%) NetFront  2 (<1%) Pageviews by Operating Systems Windows  509 (59%) Macintosh  211 (24%) iPhone  67 (7%) Other Unix  38 (4%) iPad  20 (2%) Linux  4 (<1%)

Iphones and Idiots

Had a premature posting problem, so now you know I have an Iphone, and I am also not very good at driving it.. So yes I come clean, I am one of those Latte drinking (actually a flat white) Iphone types.
So today due to being on the boat with a flat computer battery I thought I would try to email in a post about my lovely new sextant. But while halfway through composing my masterpiece of modern literature, my far to fat forefinger acidentally tapped the far to small screen in the spot called send.. so off went my half finished post into the interweb with that stupid iphone signature that I nomally delete..
Anyway the thing doesn't support flash or something so It won't let me go back in and edit the post on my site, hence this longwinded explanation, but anyway you can still answer my question in the last post, what to you think, are sextants like tits on a bull? (ie useless)
While on the subject of phones, for us power starved cruisers this little phone is a marvel, internet at your fingertips, draws next to nothing powerwise. Stores songs and brilliant sailing podcasts from Furledsails.com (you can look them up) And it also stores charts, for $15 (Navionics) I have the whole of Australia stored on It. (it even updates them for me!) Its now a pocketsized chartplotter (It has a built in GPS). Absolutley amazing.... now if only those screens were bigger.

Cheers from Snow Petrel

PS I'm sure the other brand smartphones are just as good, and infact the 3G part of this phone has died so its reception is pretty bad out of town. And in my defense mine is a crappy old 8 meg 3G not the way cooler 3gs or iphone 4, but if anyone from apple is reading this I do accept sponsership...

Videos

Hello,  I have added a video page, to access it click on the video button next to home in the top ribbon panel just under the header, It has a couple of short videos made by my little brother Matt, I think they are very good, but then I am a bit biased... They also show how you can make anything look dramatic and scary if you put in the right music. You can post any comments regarding the videos here if you feel so inclined.

Cheers 

Ben

Snow Petrel, an introduction

Snow Petrel in very open ice

Snow Petrel is a 34 foot (10.15m) steel yacht that has been my home and transport for a few years. She is strong and simple, the two of the most important qualities in any offshore boat.

She has taken me south from Tasmania to Antarctica and may be the smallest boat to sail to East Antarctica (the bit that doesn't include the antarctic peninsular).  
See the videos page.

I have sailed ever since I can remember, starting on my grandparents 34 foot ketch and then sailing my parents 45 foot gaff ketch. I Raced dingys as a kid and then did some some offshore racing. 

NZ Maid, My parents Herreshoff Mobjack

I went to sea as a navigating cadet when I was 17, sailing (steaming..?) around the world on  P&O container ships for 6 years, and getting my chief mates ticket.

Needing a change I jumped onto a square rigger as mate for two seasons around the pacific... A lovely ship. Soren Larsen

After sailing my 26 foot Warsash one Design (something like a Folkboat) across the Tasman singlehanded I have now settled in Tasmania. Since then I have done a lot of yacht deliveries across the Tasman and around Aussie, sailed to South America, and run an old open 60 charter boat on the Antarctic Peninsular, and more or less rebuilt Snow petrel (a never ending job, still not complete). See Snowpetrel The boring details for more information on the her.

Soren Larsen

Reiger

I will try to put up the odd post now and then, hopefully my writing style will improve with practice, please forgive any grammatical and spelling mistakes, writing is not a strong point...

Also be aware that there are many ways to sail an ocean, many ways to set up an ocean going boat and many valid opinions, I tend towards the crude and cheap options, but understand that those with better budgets may prefer other solutions. I also try not to get to set in my ways and always reserve the right to change my opinions without notice... Keep an open mind.

Fair winds

Ben Tucker