Repairs and Upgrading

Stuck inside of Dockton with the Boat Repair Blues Again

Dockton, Quartermaster Harbor, WA – 10-SEP-2026 – We arrived on the Sunday of Labor Day weekend – last weekend – to visit my friend John Riley. To see him again and work on his boat a bit. It was good to see him. He arranged a mooring ball for us. He came over for breakfast and dinner, I rowed over to his boat and he rowed over to ours. When we cast off the mooring ball on Tuesday, it sounded like someone had attached a coffee can full of bolts under the cockpit.

Chaffles and Eagle Island

Eagle Island, Puget Sound, WA 6-SEP-2026 6:45 AM – ‘‘Get me the dog blanket, please,’’ says Jennifer as she settles into the cockpit to drink coffee, read the NYT and look at the seals.

This our fourth day at Eagle Island (after three nights). It is an island one can walk around in ten minutes at low tide and there are no eagles. Across the sound from us is part of greater Tacoma, north is a prison island, and south Anderson Island connected to Seattle by ferry. There are three mooring balls, one on this (east) side and two on the west. This time of year there are generally mooring balls available. The bottom here has very good holding so one can just drop an anchor if there isn’t a mooring ball available and then there is no limit on how long you can stay.

Sound Sailing

McMicken Island State Park, 29-AUG-2026 – It’s Saturday, the last Saturday in August. We’re at anchor, on a mooring ball in Puget Sound. The people we run into don’t take there boats out of the country generally and the Sound is their boating world. Most are still working, so it is quite understandable.

We’ve been back from our Canada trip about a week and half and been on the boat since then. We’ve been out of Port Townsend for nine days. Three of those were in Swantown in Olympia.

Despite our travels, family and family responsibilities (and business) have crept into our travels. We were in Olympia to help Jennifer’s daughter change apartments. The new space is marvelous for her daughter and cat. It opens onto a public patio where there are people and those people bring their animals. I worked on the move one day, Jennifer worked on it part of two more, then her daughter had had enough of mom’s help and we left the next morning (yesterday).

It’s taken Ten Years…

I have it all figured out – just in time for this information to be useless.

Port Townsend, WA 19-Feb-2026 – This is what I have learned about my Taylors Stove. (I still am not sure whether an apostrophe belongs between the r and the s. I think it might.)

In ten years†, I’ve learned what fuel to use, and no matter what fuel I use, the burner will clog up. But it can be recovered.

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.

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.

It looks like I ’ll have time for the optional stuff, meaning the 277 items on my to-do list.

Point Hudson Marina, Port Townsend, 22-FEB-2025 – Of course, much of what I work on doesn’t show on the to-do list because I didn’t know I needed to work on it, which brings us to the rudder post.

I don’t look at the rudder post much. It sits in a locker in the aft cabin, pretty much minding its own business. The last time I looked at it was in 2019 after we arrived in Hawaii. Someone in the Maxi 95 group correctly pointed out that the reason we had some water in our port locker was a leaking rudder post seal. I had sealed it the year before while on the hard in Boat Haven in Port Townsend. I don’t remember what I did to stop the leak. I expect I just tightened the nut which compressed the packing further.

Repair, don’t replace (when you can)

Point Hudson, WA 4-FEB-2025 – The steering wheel on Caro Babbo has wiggled since, perhaps since we got the boat. There were times when I thought it might come off in my hands, or worse still, Jennifer’s hands. I thought about how I could steer with the sails, or with a wrench attached to the rudder post. Eventually, I had an emergency tiller fabricated in Hawaii.

But, most of the time, I knew it was just a bushing that had worn through. I didn’t know what the inside of the steering mechanism looked like. Like most things, until you’ve seen one, which I hadn’t, you’re frightened by what might be there, or when taking it apart what might pop out never to be found or reassembled again.