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 [...]

Claude Diode

03 February 2018 | st marys, ga
Capn Andy/chilly winter
The android app that helped me so much is called quadcopter XG simulator. It is free and seems to accurately mimic actual control of a quadcopter.
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I can't ignore my unfinished boat business and go out and fly a toy helicopter all day, mostly because it's battery takes 6 hours to charge and only lasts about 10 minutes of flight time. I will not give in to the urge to buy extra batteries, I will do what I can about twice a day for ten minutes and learn how to fly the thing.
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I can't wait till the i60e camera comes in, it will be my first real action cam. I did buy a very cheap standard def camera that recorded onto an SD card, it was very small and did work, but the video was noisy and I only used it one time. The i60e shoots in 4K, which is supposedly 4 times sharper than HD, plus it shoots in most of the ordinary formats 1080, 720. If you are uploading videos to You Tube, there is no sense in shooting higher resolution formats only to have them compressed when you upload. Some editing and post software allow reframing, so a larger format will allow zooming or cropping of the video and still have enough left to fit the You Tube restrictions.
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The next day the camera arrived in a small black box embossed with silver lettering. Elegant. The camera is very small. I am not used to Go Pro's or the other action cams, so I was surprised. It took a while to figure out how to go through the menus, how to link the camera with the android phone via wifi, and find out that there is no way to use the camera as a USB camera with a linux toughbook. There might be a way to bring HDMI video into the Getac. A micro SD card did not come with the camera so one had to be ordered. It was about 2/3 the price of locally available, so for just under 20 dollars a 128Gig card is on its way. No hurry. It will arrive in about a week. Free shipping by helping a fellow yardbird with an order that got us above the 25 dollar free Amazon shipping minimum. I am not a Prime customer.
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The ThiEYE app that is shown on the internet must be for the iphone, the one for android does not appear to be the same style, the menu pages look different, I only tried a couple of things. I wanted to see how 720 at 60 frames looked. The camera will shoot at 120 frames and then you can play it back at normal frame rate and you have slow motion. Also 1080 can be shot at 60 frames and that gives half speed slow motion. The camera can be set at various time lapse rates to shoot time lapse video. It also can shoot bursts of frames like the EOS does.
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The android app has quite a bit of lag to it, so the camera can be pointed at a new subject and it takes a while before the image on the phone changes. It might be a function of the age of my phone's android system. The 4k video will not transfer to the phone with the wifi app. To see it on the computer I'll need that SD card. The 128Gig card is the same size as the hard drives on the navigation computers.
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Some research turned up that the camera shoots 4k video in motion jpeg format, which is an old clunky compression algorithm. If you'd like to know more about video compression I recommend going to wikipedia and search for discrete cosine transform. This search for more compression without losing quality has gone on a long time, it wasn't some brilliant person popping up one morning with the answer. As compression has become more and more attuned to our visual perception, more and more data can be left out, and we see what we think is the complete picture.
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When you think about how moving pictures first developed with individual frames displayed at a rate just fast enough to look like smooth motion, and each frame was a complete photo of its own, and in 70 mm film each frame was about 3 inches across, there was a tremendous amount of detail being captured by the camera. Think about the optics and the film chemistry, the peak of film production required a huge investment in mechanical, optical, and photographic technology. That was about where I came into TV and TV was headed for videotape. The film chemistry was going out. The transfer of optical information no longer relied on an optical device at the delivery point. It was using a graphics display with an electronic input, the TV set.
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Over time we saw TV cameras increase their signal to noise and resolution, problems with dynamic range were overcome with tricks. When HD quality video became available, the cinema look could be mimicked, but progress didn't stop there. 4k became the goal, 4 thousand pixels of resolution per frame. This was impossible for a long time, but now I have a tiny camera that can achieve that resolution, something that maybe a young videographer would take for granted now, but I am astounded. Of course this is not a camera that offers a lot of the tools we would like to have, no interchangeable lenses, not a lot of control of the image quality.
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This is a camera that came out of the mountain biking and snow boarding culture, slap it on your surfboard and let it rip. Now the tiny camera can get shots that were impossible before. There are smaller cameras that shoot well, tiny tiny cameras. I was looking at a 720 camera with a built in 5.8gig transmitter that would fit inside of a small egg and it was in the 20 to 30 dollar range. I think if you go smaller the price goes up. You could place these high quality cameras all over the place, unobtrusive, and transmit the video to a receiver that cycled through the 5.8 gig channels. This technology is commonplace, and it's coming from China.
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The question was, are you going to attach that camera to the drone and fly it, well, no, it wouldn't last 5 minutes. I kept practicing with the drone. I'm not very good at video games. My goal was to hover at first, just keep hovering till my reflexes would counter the wind or the fluctuations of the toy drone's prop motors and keep it level and in one place. The problem was there was a large boat in front of the communal kitchen where I could set the drone down and fly it without a lot of wind hitting it. The drone flew up and I could struggle with flying it out into the boatyard, tweaking it this way and that to keep it organized with room around it and no crashing into gravel. And now I came upon a difficult effect that I must relate, this is critical to newbie drone pilots, think of the drone as kind of a frisbie, a disc that can catch the wind and fly up or down, whatever its attitude, when the wind hits it, it will take off in some direction. In this case it flew up and I couldn't see it, it was behind the large boat, and I began running around, searching for it, I didn't want it to fly into the North River Marsh. Here's where my baseball skills, that never were developed, come into play, bystanders pointed up and exclaimed, the same way they might at a pop fly. I was in the same condition as the ballplayer who looks up at the sun and all is lost, only I didn't look up at the sun, I looked up at the Bugs drone, lost up in the heavens, I had no way of knowing which way it was pointed or what to do about it, it was way up there.
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I didn't know what to do but my mind raced ahead of the situation, imagining the drone killing somebody innocent who didn't know the boatyard that well. There are a lot of new people coming in and asking "Where's Rocky?" or "Are you Rocky?", really. Fortunately Rocky and the main guys that work the boatyard were away at lunch when the impact occurred. I of course couldn't see it, looking up in the air on the South side of the communal building, while the drone, made of cheap Chinese plastic, was plummeting down at who knows what speed to the North where the expensive sailboats are awaiting their own launch. When I came around looking for it I hoped no one was upset or hurt. But what if I couldn't find it, I had no idea where it had landed. It could be shattered up on the deck of these many large strong boats. It came down hard, no control, like a rock, a Chinese lithium ion rock, to impact a random spot and then I would have some liability. The rules today say you have to have liability insurance when you come into a boatyard. I wonder if there is a clause that exempts coverage if a boat owner flies a Chinese drone and does damage.
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I found the drone upside down on top of a deflated fabric dinghy. Good landing, no one got kilt. Was the dingy deflated prior or subsequent to the drone's arrival?
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I brought the dremel-like Black and Decker tool to the woodshop, where the damaged drone was waiting for some help. It didn't take long to fair out the propellers, and then make sure the drone could still power up, just take it out and get it rotating, lift off, then cut it down. Enough.
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Some had seen my exploits blowing up dust as I navigated the drone down to earth, then soaring up, out of control, what do you do now, correct, correct the correction, somehow get it down and idling on the boatyard. They said you are doing better now than yesterday, when did you get it?, two days ago.
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The drone is now a veteran, cowering down in the woodshop, not volunteering for future flights. It will be harder to get the same performance from the engines that power the rotors. After the crash I just powered it up and did a quick lift off and then powered it all down. It could still fly.
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When I put the battery on charge a puff of smoke came out of the little cheap Chinese charger. The charging light came on however and I hoped it would really be charging the battery. The next day revealed the battery had not been charged and when I looked at the little circuit board inside the charger I found a diode had burned up. It is hard to find components like this any more, no Radio Shack, and mostly surface mount components are used, not like this old fashioned diode.
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I found a diode in a damaged Harbor Freight fluorescent lamp and soldered it into the charger. It did not fix the problem, we are grounded until a new charger comes in. The image is from saatchiart.com called portrait of Claude Diode, who are a techno-punk band from Sweden, and the artist calls himself Slow Pulse Boy. You never know what you will run into when you search on the internet.
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