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 [...]

Bahama Track

10 November 2017 | st marys, ga
Capn Andy/85 degrees
So we are back in St Marys, back in the boatyard, the gulag. Nothing has changed, still the same boat and no rush to launch. Kaptain Ken has got his boat off the marsh, but now he doesn't have the time to talk. I do the laundry and get a shower. Shave the handsome beard off my face.
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The woodshop has some spring mix lettuce on hand, so we join forces to make a salad. Rotisserie chicken is deboned and I bring tomatoes and an avacado, very ripe, perfect for a salad. We prepare the foods. Capn Jock joins us, welcome with his wine, and we end up in a discussion about residency.
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It seems as if boat people have a problem with the authorities. We do not have a permanent address. Before 9/11 it was possible to use almost any mailing address on your driver's license, after 9/11 and the Patriot Act it became necessary to use a residential address. This meant that liveaboard boaters and others who live a mobile lifestyle had to break the law to have credentials. We used addresses of relatives or friends and had to put them through the trouble of collecting our motor vehicle department mail and other mail they received due to our use of their address to get a license or passport. We can use a mail forwarding service to send our mail to whatever port we are in, but our important mail concerning our credentials is usually not forwardable. Some cruisers maintain a cheap room or apartment solely for use as a brick and mortar address. I think there is a constituency of people who do not own or rent a residence who should be able to possess legal credentials, a driver's license, a passport, without having to look for a loophole around the law. Usually when I get an idea there are many others that beat me to the punch, so I hope some activists are working on this problem.
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Capn Ford sends me a text that he is reserving a car for Sunday. That means we will be driving back down to Ft Lauderdale to help an owner deliver a Lagoon 410 catamaran to somewhere in Mississippi. My progress on Kaimu's bottom obviously will suffer, so I ask Ron the carpenter if he would like to do some of the work. It feels sinful to me to get paid to go sailing while I pay someone else to do the dirty work of grinding paint off my boat. It's the way the world works, I guess, you will find employment doing what others can't or don't want to do. I am helping someone sail their boat who couldn't otherwise handle it alone, and Ron will be grinding my paint, something I'd rather not be doing. If I didn't have any sort of deadline I wouldn't hire someone else to do what I would be doing otherwise. But the year is growing to a close. I have to recalibrate when I hear of people talking about snow and winter. It will grow cold here in a month or a month and a half. I want to launch my boat and not be stuck in the boatyard another winter.
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So, what am I doing, what did I do today, how am I making progress on the boat project. I looked unsuccessfully for my tape measure after successfully finding my notes made long ago about where the waterlines are located on this boat. The hull area above the waterlines has been painted and now the area below the waterlines has to have the old paint removed, any questionable surfaces ground down to good substrate, new glass and fairing to build up the lower parts of the hulls preparatory to painting, then painting on 4 coats of antifouling paint. Then the boat can be launched.
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I used my now old rigger's tape measure, a 100' tape with faded numbers, to mark the bows at their waterline. That's the extent of what I accomplished today. It took a long time to find the notes about the waterlines, and a long time to find a tape measure. The actual measurement and marking took less than 15 minutes.
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The local A to Zincs boys, that's their business name, were working on a powerboat right off my port bow here in the yard. Also, a couple with a beautiful Pearson 38 or 39 were working on their boat off my port bow. It seems I am now an old project, laid down in a north south direction, and these other projects are laid down in a 45 degree angle, like herringbone, to fit more boats into the yard and still be able to get them out when necessary. So I have a couple of boats herringboned on my port bow and they are grinding away on their projects.
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The A to Zincs interrupt an important phone call with a noisy forklift that they run across my bows, then they haul an old generator up out of the boat. They lower it to the ground and begin tinkering with it. Someone says the boat had been sunk by the hurricanes and from the looks of it, it hadn't been seaworthy before the hurricanes came through. The propellers have been eroded by galvanic action so that there is almost nothing left of the blades. The young kid employee who is helping says he could not turn one of the shafts and had to cut it out of the boat. Also he said the water in the bilge of the boat was very bad.
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It was too noisy, another fork lift came by gathering up wood blocks, I wandered over to where a boat was being cut up. The fellow who was cutting up the boat said, are you Andy. Then he said he had some perforated toe rails for me. What? It was others in the boatyard deciding that I needed some perforated toe rail stock, so now what was I to do. I gave him 30 bucks for 16 feet of perforated toe rail. A bargain.
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I had taken pictures of two boats in St. Croix, one a Wharram with rails to attach the forward trampolines, and the other an outrigger canoe named LAZARUS. Someone decided I didn't have to make my own rails to attach my trampolines, I could use salvage material from a cut up boat.
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I did some research on Lazarus, it is a rehab of Russell Brown's first proa, Jzero, built when he was just a teenager. When it comes to proas, Russell Brown is the guru, but he never designed for others, just make boat after boat. His videos on YouTube are very interesting. In one he is broad reaching at 17 knots in a 10 knot breeze. The Chesapeake Light Craft proa called Madness was designed with his input as a consultant. Madness and Lazarus are very similar.
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I also talked to the boat cutter up guy about fuel tanks and binnacles. He has other boats to cut up so when I go away on a delivery he will still be here cutting and accumulating boat parts.
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I have to add trampolines at the bow because headsail work will require going forward up the bow ramp to the bow crosstube. It is possible the sailor will fall from there and if there are no tramps to fill in the gaps, he will fall into the water and watch the boat sail away. Also I am told the tramps are where the bikini clad women sunbathe.
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The miata had its flat tire as expected and I used a can of fix a flat to pump it up, partially, then used the machine shop's compressor to finish the job. I then went for a ride, the long way, to Walmart to buy groceries. I don't need much as we are going away in a couple of days to do another delivery. I need bread to make super egg toasties for breakfast and sandwiches for lunch. The ride is more of a tire conditioning trip, the fix a flat has to be spread out within the tire and that takes a bit of driving.
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The photos taken during the run up from Cap Cana Marina to Fort Lauderdale were uploaded to a flickr album at:
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https://www.flickr.com/photos/8728395@N03/albums
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I was experimenting with program mode on the camera and lots of photos didn't come out, so they were excluded. Some of the iffy ones were uploaded anyway. There is a photo of Capn Ford and one of Capn Ron, the other crew.
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The image is of the route we planned on the way through the Old Bahama Channel. It was planned on this computer using OpenCPN.
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