Kaimusailing

s/v Kaimu Wharram Catamaran

Vessel Name: Kaimu
Vessel Make/Model: Wharram Custom
Hailing Port: Norwalk, CT
Crew: Andy and the Kaimu Crew
About: Sailors in the Baltimore, Annapolis, DC area.
21 March 2024 | St. Marys, GA
01 March 2024 | St. Marys, GA
23 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA
15 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA
11 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA
06 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA
26 January 2024 | St. Marys, GA
14 January 2024 | St. Marys, GA
09 January 2024 | St Marys, GA
23 December 2023 | St Marys, GA
10 December 2023 | St Marys, GA
25 November 2023 | St. Marys, GA
17 November 2023 | St. Marys, GA
17 November 2023 | Somers Cove Marina, Crisfield, MD
03 November 2023 | Somers Cove Marina, Crisfield, MD
26 October 2023 | Somers Cove Marina, Crisfield, MD
17 October 2023 | Somers Cove Marina, Crisfield, MD
11 October 2023 | Somers Cove Marina, Crisfield, MD
04 October 2023 | Alice B. Tawes, McReady Pavilion, Crisfield, Maryland Eastern Shore
03 October 2023 | Alice B. Tawes, McReady Pavilion, Crisfield, Maryland Eastern Shore
Recent Blog Posts
21 March 2024 | St. Marys, GA

Just Add Water

The rainy weekend started off with overcast and fog but no rain. It looked like I might be able to get something done on the D4 dinghy. I wanted to change the bow seat which is really the bow deck. The sailing option uses the deck to hold the freestanding mast. I didn’t like how the deck looked, [...]

01 March 2024 | St. Marys, GA

D4 Dinghy Alternative Seats

The rain event was more wind than rain, strong winds with gusts up to 44 mph. We drove into town to see what the harbor was like. There was a small sailboat that had dragged anchor and was sitting close to shore. The tide was out. We left and played with Bleu at Notter’s Pond.

23 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA

D4 Inside Seams

Day two of the dinghy build started out with me finishing wiring the hull bottoms together on the centerline of the bottom panels. This was much easier than the wiring of the chine edges of the bottom panels and the side panels.

15 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA

D4 Dinghy Day One

A Wharram Pahi 26 had been anchored in the river nearby the boatyard and was hauled out with the travel lift. I went around to look at it and talked to the owner couple. I was surprised that it had been built in Martinique in 1988. The boat is more than 30 years old.

11 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA

D4 Redux

The inflatable (deflatable) dinghy I had bought was deteriorating. It had bottom seams separating. It is a West Marine branded dinghy made out of PVC. HH66 is the adhesive to reattach the seams. A friend had a similar problem and bought the same adhesive. I was waiting to hear from him how it worked [...]

06 February 2024 | St. Marys, GA

The Clincher

We decided to go to Amelia Island for the day, probably to the beach. Our plan to cycle around on the Raleigh 20’s seemed like a bad idea, Bleu can’t keep up with a bicycle for very long and when he quits he quits. So we would walk, where?, Fort Clinch State Park. She has a forever pass for Florida [...]

St Marys Pahi

20 November 2016 | St. Marys, GA
Capn Andy/Cold Fall Weather
The last sunset photo was used on the previous blog post in reference to the photo I took while sailing Trillium down to Fernandina. That was supposed to be the last sunset of that cruise, but it wasn't. This time we had a westerbeke diesel that made sure we arrived on the right day, wind or no.
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We motored up the St. Marys river and tied up at Lang's Marine, off the beaten path dockage at a reduced rate. I had had only 3 hours of sleep on my off watch, so I was glad to leave the boat for a ride over to the boatyard where we let everyone know we were back, then returned to clear out the boat. The owner had received an offer and now wanted to keep the boat in St. Marys for a time, either to haul out for a purchase survey, or if not sold, a jumping off place for a cruise south.
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The news was that the deal to buy the Gemini had fallen through. The gap between bid and ask was only a couple thousand dollars. Sometimes a seller develops a personal bond with the boat and won't accept an offer that is within a few percentage points, a line has been drawn and the deal won't happen. Sometimes a buyer has several prospective boats in mind and has made an evaluation based on his own needs and then makes an offer that is in line with that evaluation. The skipper and I had considered a low ball offer would be about 25 percent lower than the asking price. The offer in this deal that had fallen through was well above that. It was a low offer, but if you wanted to sell the boat, then take it. The rule in today's boating market is the buyer has the market, the seller has to accept the current situation and take a loss, usually, in order to sell the boat. There is no such thing as a free boat. As soon as you take ownership of it, you start to shell out money.
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In my opinion, the Gemini is not the first choice for a sailor, it is a nice boat to have in a marina, not as nice as the larger catamarans, but you could live aboard a Gemini and not feel deprived. At sea it is at best a motorsailer, it points well but can't get going due to its relatively short waterline and displacement, the good points are that it is easy on fuel, so motorsailing is OK, and it can sail at an easy pace below about 8 knots, no sprinting for this one. One of the features that catamaran sailors look for is a turn of speed . The Gemini needs to lose weight or get longer hulls, it is too much in too short a boat.
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Back at the boatyard, the influx of boats and boat owners coincided with super moon powered high tides, which caused the little communal area bathroom to back up, and the populace was forced to use the porta-johns. This resulted in the porta-johns getting filled up. I was coming from a sailboat that was using a composting head, what a disgusting contraption. I used it once.
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There was always Kaimu's electric toilet available. If I didn't fill up the holding tank, which takes 16 gallons, I could use it on occasion, and maybe the boatyard could get its sh.., act, together. But when I got the exposure suit out of the head on Kaimu, and got the TV camera in its Pelican case out of the head, nothing happened when I pressed the electric flush button. I was wise enough not to try to use the head without testing the flush button. Very important.
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The batteries in the port hull where the head is located were near dead, only 2 volts on the meter. I put a charger on the batteries and hoped for the best. They were due for replacement soon anyway.
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What to do, I guess I had to use the porta-john. There was one near Kaimu and one all the way across the boatyard near the workshop. I lifted the lid in the one near Kaimu and lowered it right away. We were near flood stage in that one. Then I went over to the workshop area and found the porta-john there was in use. I did end up using it later, but I hope those batteries in the port hull charge up.
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I had made 16 brackets to mount the new solar panels. Maybe I should get started with mounting them. My order of work was to do the cabin tops, then the topsides, then the below the waterline (bottomsides?), then launch after the engine was commisioned.
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This was a sort of feel good job, just unscrew the old panel mounts, move them away, then procrastinate with the new panels and new mounts, some artistic chair time is necessary, because once they are mounted, that's it, the die is cast.
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It was not a feel good job because when I started, the screws were stubborn and wouldn't come out. Also I found more bad plywood in the port hull, that didn't feel good. It took a long time of looking for tools to unscrew flathead machine screws slotted for straight blade screwdriver, but after dulling a harbor freight drill on the screws and not really doing any damage to them, I began to attack the old solar panel mounts from above. I use wrecking bars, pry bars, hammers, crow bars, and the old angle grinder that had the chainsaw toothed wheel on it. It was dull and burned the wood. It made a racket. I was there on the cabin top swathed with wood smoke, then banging, then ripping off pieces of wood, making a lot of noise. Now it was getting to be a feel good job. The machine screws had bonded with the wood, probably due to the chemicals impregnated in the wood to stave off rotting. It didn't stave off rotting because I could see some areas in the wood that were bad.
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After getting the wooden panel mounts off the port hull cabin top, I realized the starboard cabin top would be a bigger challenge. I decided to use the circular saw to remove the panels and the top 2/3's of the mounts, then I could attack the little remaining strips of the mounts with the chainsaw bladed angle grinder and the other brutal wrenching and prying tools.
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Richard the Brit had borrowed my circular saw, in spite of its obviously noisy bearings, and mounted a thin kerfed blade on it to do his plywood for his catamaran dinghy, a project I really wanted to see, but he only works on it when I'm away. He quickly changed it back to my blade which was a good idea, because I was determined to cut away those wood panel mounts in spite of the stainless machine screws embedded in them, and the blade would suffer.
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It went quickly, surgery on the panel mounts, cut away and then, more smoke and noise from the angle grinder and the tools of destruction. I moved the new panel I was temporarily using from its temporary location above the galley to its new temporary location above the pilothouse. Then I could remove the old panels from above the galley. All done with the panel removal, I brought up another of the new panels to test fit above the galley hatch.
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I took a break then, and spent some time looking at this new installation to be. The new supports looked spindly, but I knew they were strong enough with 8 layers of 17 oz. roving in them. The corner of the pilothouse where the running backstay attaches was a problem, because the backstay and the panel's corner were too close together. Have to move things around there.
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The brackets for the solar panels that had been fabricated from fiberglass and epoxy were painted with rustoleum white. Another pair of brackets were made, these were simple right angles, to support the port and starboard navigation lights. They had been mounted on the old solar panels, now they had to be mounted on the cabin sides.
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A search through miscellaneous hardware came up with enough long and short bolts to bolt the panels to the brackets and the brackets to the cabin tops. First the brackets had to be painted and the last of a can of rustoleum gloss white was used up. Back to the lumber store for more paint and 50 fender washers. 16 supports, one fender washer inside the cabin as a backing plate for the carriage bolt that runs up through the base of each support, then two fender washers backing the bolt and nut that secure the panel to the top of each support. 16 supports times 3 fender washers, 48 total. A look through the plumbing section of the store resulted in purchase of four flexible plastic pipe fittings to serve as cable runs through the cabin top for the solar panel cables.
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The cables are on the way along with another set of 5 pairs of MC3 connectors, waterproof solar PV cable connectors.
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The town of St. Marys has a Thanksgiving feast for cruising sailors and many boats come in just for the occasion. In the middle of the night I awoke and realized we had neglected to shut off the propane on the Gemini, so next day I drove to St. Marys to shut it off. There in the harbor was anchored a Wharram Pahi 63. What a surprise. Perhaps I will meet the sailors of that yacht.
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