Sustainable Sailing

April 20, 2024

Galley progress

We have made lots of good progress on the galley this weekend. First Jane has painted the insulated hull plus the bulkhead. B&Q kitchen and bathroom paint (Whistler for the main areas and Monaco for the highlights). We then dry fitted the sink worktop. As we did so we redesigned it. Now that we are…

April 19, 2024

Staysail sheet winch options

We managed to get two old Lewmar 30 self-tailing winches from ebay to use for our staysail. Four options for where we might position them. At present we favour the first option (very close to the primary winch).

April 15, 2024

More worrying destruction

From the BBC today BBC News – Coral bleaching: Fourth global mass stress episode underway – US scientists It’s increasingly obvious that by the time we get to the tropics there isn’t going to be much coral life left to see.

April 6, 2024

Sailing UMA scary delamination. Are we ok?

This video from the lovely Sailing UMA is scary. It does end on a cliffhanger. We see that the test model they built failed catastrophically. They built a small section of GRP intended to replicate the original hull. They added a foam core rib, covered it with GRP and then a foam core stringer, also…

March 23, 2024

Composting and our forecabin layout

In Our Compost Toilet deadline we said we that our current plan is to create a place for composting the septage (the dry solids from our Nature’s Head compost toilet). To achieve the temperatures to rapidly kill all pathogens three things are needed: We need to insulate the space where are composting because our volumes are…

March 23, 2024

Improved insulation for our galley

A couple of weeks ago we wrote Insulating the galley, today we have improved the way we are holding the insulation in place. The vertical battens we tried last time didn’t work well. The bend was too sharp. So now we have 120mm wide strips of 3.6mm plywood with the small battens to prevent the…

March 22, 2024

Parts preparation

Rather than go to the boat last night we have been preparing some parts at home (and working out a bit better what we need at home and what at the boat). First task was ripping a 40mm square batten diagonally in half to create two triangular sections. This is to act as a large…

March 19, 2024

Raspberry Pi Pico for boat projects

So our Raspberry Pi Pico W microcontroller kit arrived today. We have been through a first video tutorial which has got us to connect it to my laptop, download MicroPython and Thonny. Then when wrote a little program to make the LED flash.The kit comes with over 450 items and will allow a lot of…

March 16, 2024