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. |
07 April 2024 | St. Marys, GA
Clammy Hands
Items came in from TEMU, the Chinese cut rate retailer. One was a nice little drone that cost about twelve and a half dollars. It looked like an easy thing to play with while I coughed and sneezed. I was fighting a summer cold, even though it is not summer elsewhere, it seems like it here. A nice [...]
02 April 2024 | St. Marys, GA
Sun Doggie
After laminating the cedar strips onto the gunwales of the dinghy I found the screws I used wouldn’t come out. The epoxy had seized them. The screw heads were stripped so I cut a straight slot in the heads with the cut off wheel. The cedar smoked when the screw heads got red hot. I could remove [...]
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.
Specious Delivery
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A pair of binoculars came in from eBay, Celestron Skymaster. This is a 15X70 binocular that will replace my 12X70 Celestron Cometron. The Cometron was ruined by salt water and it is cheaper to buy another binocular than repair the damage. It would be enjoyable to disassemble, clean, and reassemble the Cometron, but I don’t have the special tools to remove the lenses. I have repaired camera lenses, but the Cometron lenses are 70mm and require special tools.
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The 70 mm size means a lot of light is gathered by the objective lenses of these binoculars. The large size also means high magnification to bring that 70 mm shaft of light down to the 6 or 7 millimeter size of the pupil of the eye. High magnification makes the binoculars difficult to use on a sailboat that is jouncing away at sea. Most prefer 7X50 as the upper limit of size for use on a boat. The Skymaster will allow a quick view in low light and render color, when it is too dark to see color with the naked eye. This is very useful when approaching a channel at dusk. You may not be able to steady the binocular to read the number of the buoy, but the color is important to determine where the channel is.
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I now started to take apart the Cometron and didn’t care if I broke anything or couldn’t reassemble it. It turned out that I could take it apart and put it together, but the cleaning process didn’t remove enough of the crud, so it was like looking through a binocular that is made out of muddy glass.
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Here is a video blog on youtube that was recommended to me, I didn’t bother to go view it at first, but now I’m hooked, there are many short episodes, well made, young couple fixing up an old boat:
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https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXbWsGV_cjG3gOsSnNJPVlg
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It’s called Sailing Uma and is very popular with the yardbirds. Lots of hands on show and tell, well documented.
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If you buy a cheap GPS puck online, like I did, and it doesn’t work with OpenCPN, it may be that it is being recognized by the operating system as something other than a GPS. In terminal, run lsusb, (that is an ell not a number one). You run it once with the device plugged in and again with it not plugged in. In my case the device was identified as U-Blox AG. In order to get it to work you have to edit GPSD. Details of how to do that were posted in this blog Feb. 17th, 2016.
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We are planning a catamaran delivery in the next few days, but the owner hasn’t been responding promptly and hasn’t completed the first steps on his part, so perhaps we won’t be doing it. The image is from passageweather depicting the wind pattern of the southeast coast from Cape Lookout to Florida. If we do do the delivery it will be in fresh breeze off the port quarter.
