Blogging – Page 2 – Caro Babbo

Electric Lights, Not City Lights, Part 2

The shunt with minimal wires on the load side, connected to the starting battery with one yellow wire and a small gray wire to get its voltage in the app. The 60A terminal fuse in under the red cap.

Point Hudson, 17-FEB-2026 – The last post should have been two parts. It ran on forever. I’m sorry. This is part two. We can mourn the fact that it is not part three. That would have made everything easier to read.

I finally finished the project by removing the wires from the shunt to a bus block. I also removed the mass of negative wires from the negative terminal to an existing bus block. Fusing is the reason why the positive was moved to a new block, and the negative was moved to an exisitng one.

Electric lights, not city lights

Port Townsend, 8-FEB-2026 – There is a lot to learn, and a lot of ways to learn it. I installed LiFePO4 batteries in Caro Babbo. The battery was $500. The electronics, another $500. A thousand all up, not bad.

The Itch

This is a post I wrote four years ago that I did not publish. I like it and wanted to share.

Amtrak Train #11, south of Salinas, CA 13-APR-2022 – Once the itch starts it doesn’t leave. Time to leave for Homer is getting closer, the days between now and then are planned and full.

Jennifer and I are in motion, and feel like we will stay in motion until we leave Homer heading west. Yet, somehow, once we’re aboard we don’t feel like we’re in motion anymore. I would say we’re home, Jennifer would say we’re onboard. We’d both say we’re alone, and it’s quiet in both the literal sense and the more abstract.

Catsaway, Les Paul, Vesper, Les Paul once again Part 2

Port Townsend,WA, 17-JAN-2026 – I almost got what I wanted, and I can, if I want to use a phone app for anchor drag.

I have a number of things to talk about, the Predict Wind documentation and instructions along the way.

The lead-in diagram shows how the Raymarine NG is connected to the NMEA 2000 backbone. I’ll refer to NMEA 2000 as N2K.

Catsaway, Les Paul, Vesper, Les Paul once again

Port Townsend, WA, 13-JAN-2026 – As we add different electrical systems to Caro Babbo the number of WiFi networks we have climb. We find we have two sometimes three different WiFi networks running to access everything we want to use.

Saturday with the seals and Selkie

Eagle Island, 20-SEP-2025 – We’re continuing our travels around South Puget Sound. We traveled nine miles yesterday, four the day before, and twenty-something the day before that.

Not much traveling and no extra fuel tanks, something I can’t remember if I thought I would then get while we were in PT or not. I didn’t, so that is that.

The vagaries of dock space

Blake Island State Park August, 28th 2025 — Labor Day weekend starts this Friday. Today is Thursday and I expected people to start to fill the docks last night. Instead, it is more than half empty this morning.

We were here last Friday. The marina was completely full with boats, jockeying and rafting.

People

Parks Bay, WA, 4-Aug-2025 – I haven’t been writing. The compunction hasn’t been upon me for a variety of reasons. The first time we went to Alaska, I wrote fifty posts in 150 days. This is my third post this year, we’re 100 days into the trip.

The reasons are manifold: It has become like work, something I never wanted to happen.* The places we’ve been to have been very much like every other place we’ve been to. Jennifer’s fears have infected me so much I have to fight against my fears to sail, which has taken a lot of life out of me.

Things have been good, however, beyond not writing.

The Broughtons

Echo Bay, BC, 7-JUL-2025 – It was only an hour or so from our last stop, Waddington Bay. Yesterday, there were three boats on the dock and Irvin, the dockmaster and hereditary Chief for a local tribe came down to guide us where to dock.

I SPEAK*

Waddington Bay, 5-JULY-2025 – It’s been a month or so since I’ve written. I haven’t had much to write and had tons to write. The tons to write are all the places we’ve been and spent time, all the people we’ve met. The nothing to write is that it is very much the same as it has been in all the years we’ve been doing this: nothing is very different; we’re returning to places we’ve been and most of the new places are pretty much like the old places. We’re not traveling great distances, the rhythm is different but the same, just shorter.

Jennifer has taken control of the destinations, as she does and we’ve fallen into ‘‘getting there before everyone else does.’’ This is different. We haven’t been anyplace that getting there later would have made much of a difference.