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 [...]

Surrender

30 December 2017 | st marys, ga
Capn Andy/chilly winter
When THE COMPUTER GUY was talking to me about running shell scripts to convert old charts I had mentioned I liked to manually crop each chart and save it from the image manipulation program. Every chart. He looked at me funny. The shell scripts are ways to do a lot of that manual data processing and let the computer do the work. I could just let the charts be converted blindly and do a lot less work, but these charts have large borders with printers instructions and other stuff, so I would rather trim them down to how I like, do each one individually. Plus, I love charts and like to look at well drawn charts. Some of these charts are obviously pen and ink drawings, no color, elevation contours, calligraphic notations. Just beautiful.
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When you download a free NOAA chart it will probably be totally correct and accurate, and they are nice to look at, but these old charts are an echo from the past when skippers drew their own notes, sometimes in regions where no one else had sailed before them. Now we have Google Earth and photographic detail. What happened to Treasure Island and the treasure map.
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It’s good to have multiple sources of information when you are navigating. I not only like the old charts because of their hand drawn beauty, I like the idea that they were made in the days when the skipper would lick his finger, hold it up to the wind, and lay his course into port based on visual cues, polaris (not the star, but a degree indexed telescope or transit) sightings, land features that had to be kept in line, and casting a lead sounding line with wax on its bottom to capture whatever it is down there. You have depth and bottom composition notations on the old charts. Sand, mud, or rocks, you will know what to expect on your waxed sounding lead.
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Another bonus of looking at each chart in your library is clarification of your geographic knowledge. I find myself getting confused when talking about Antigua, Anguilla, or Anegada, they all swim around and I just can’t get all the locations located. But, if you look at every chart, you will get to know the area a lot better, and a good exercise is to find out the course bearings from port to port. When you write something down it will stick with you more than just mouthing it and saying, yeah ok, I got it.
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If this chart stuff is boring, think about the grinding work, that is best left to someone younger with more stamina and less imagination. My 10 pack of grinding discs came in, after scolding Amazon, suddenly they were shipped and now they are here. Also a roll of gorilla tape that the skipper specifies to have on board for all of his deliveries. I have never used it before, so I will try it on the Miata’s passenger seat which had been temporarily repaired with TV studio gaffer’s tape (black) back in 2009, before I retired. Sometimes I try things and it will be a decade before we know if it worked or not.
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On the port hull back in about 2004 or 5, I had to make a hasty repair on the keel. The boatyard then was Pleasure Cove in Maryland, but names can be misleading. I had been doing a huge job on the starboard hull to replace the sheathing that came off easily just pulling it by hand. When I was done with that and it was time to launch, the marina/boatyard was going to be redone and all the boats had to go, for some reason I looked at the bottom of the keel on the port hull and saw a crack. It would have gone unnoticed and the boat would have gone in just like it was, but I found that crack and decided to grind it out, fill the gap with epoxy filler, and correct a defect that might expose the wood in the keel to seawater, which would lead to toredo worms, rot, loss of keel. I kept grinding until I had solid wood and glass/epoxy that was actually stuck to it. The ground off surface was 11 feet long and about a foot up the side of the boat from the keel. Time was running out. The edges of the old glass were feathered out on a scarf-like angle of about 10:1, then a bandage of glass matt and roving was prepared, it was two layers, like matt/roving/matt roving, and I laid it down on a plastic tarp and saturated it with epoxy. Then the tarp and its contents was positioned under the keel and under it was an inflatable bed and under that were some borrowed packing pallets. The whole shebang was engineered to force the epoxy/glass bandage up and around the keel when the bed was inflated, and so it did its job. The end result was a new glass/epoxy shoe under the keel and some lumpy edges that were ground off. In the end there was no indication of any repair, just a fair, solid keel.
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What I have now, after grinding off the antifouling paint, is places where the epoxy keel shoe is still intact and no cracks or anything, and other places where there is separation. Plus, there are places where impacts have damaged the keel and removed its protective shoe.
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The next step is to go over to the starboard hull, which was resheathed about 12 years ago, and continue removing old bottom paint and old barrier coat. This is a removal process, nothing will be glassed back on until warm weather returns.
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Back to the charts, the Caribbean Imray-Iolaire charts are converted into .png’s now and I can look at them in detail. When I started converting another package of charts, it turned out that at least half of them were in the Caribbean folder already, just a few of Republica Dominica were new to me. Charts of Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands are readily available and up to date from NOAA. Next I opened a bunch of charts of the Bahamas from an old Explorer chart book. These are digitized charts and I went through them one by one, cropping and converting each one into two files, one a .png and the other .tif. This was a lot of work, not backbreaking, but tedious.
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I finally had to convert a package of charts from the Caribbean coast of Central America. This includes Belize, Yucatan, Cozumel, and Boca del Toros, Panama. Little did I know that also planning charts for passages around Cuba, and all the charts for Jamaica and the Cayman Islands were also there. There were also some charts for the San Blas coast and archipelago.
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There was a certain amount of go ahead and get on with it, due to not knowing what each chart really was, they were numbered, not named. When a chart would open up in the conversion software I would want to look at it in detail, sometimes, and have to wait as the chart was converted and saved, then zoom in and look at details of some anchorage in Jamaica or look at the layout of Boca del Toros. Other times I was disappointed that the chart was some reef or shoal that was unknown to me and off the beaten path, I would never get there, and I had no wish to learn more about it.
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There was a lot of duplication. The very large charts that cover all of the Gulf of Mexico or all of the West Indies are superfluous, the vector charts on OpenCPN do a nice job on large areas, no need for old paper chart conversions. So I had duplicate charts in all the folders that only needed to be rendered once, just one version was necessary. It would be a different chart number, but the same chart, the different number because it was in a different chart package.
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The Explorer charts of the Bahamas were useful because they had waypoints and pilotage information that was outdated, but probably good to have and refer to whenever I eventually get there. I wanted to calibrate them and load them into OpenCPN where they would appear as tabs on the bottom of the screen. Where I would rather use a more modern up to date chart for actual navigation, clicking on one of those tabs would bring up a chart that would have some notations on it, descriptions of the town and the marina, of twenty years or so ago, but interesting to look at now and compare to what is left after innumerable hurricanes. At some point you lose count.
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The problem is that the conversion process to a chart format that OpenCPN can use is tedious in itself, and after the torture of getting each of these tiled charts into a single image we could work with, the calibration process failed on the first chart I tried to convert. It doesn’t mean I can’t open up a chart and look at it on the computer, it means I can’t use it in the navigation program where I can plot courses, plan passages, measure distances, and maybe it is time to quit doing any more with them. Maybe organize them in a folder and rename them, instead of obscure numbers, name them with their place names. Put them in a folder organization so I can open a folder of Panama and then look at charts of the canal or Boca or San Blas.
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The image is a chart in the Caribbean, called the middle Grenadines.
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