Captain's Blog

The book that started it all      I have been staring at the countdown clock in my office for about 2 years now. The countdown started in my head in 2007 when a friend of mine gave me a book entitled  "Honey, Let's Get a Boat"     It's  a very entertaining book about [by] Ron and Eva Stob published in 1999. With virtually no long range boating/cruising experience, they set out to complete the 6000+ mile journey in a 40' trawler.      Even though the Great Loop was reportedly first done by 18 year old Ken Ransom and three of his high school buddies in 1899 in a hand made 30' wood sailboat, and again in 1906 by a boat builder Scott Mathews and his family, this book was arguably the tale that started it all.     I thought, "We could do that". We talked about it for years, trying to decide how we would be able to do this with our two youngest daughter, a dog, a cat and all the other things that tether us to land and one location. Well time has a way of c

     Vacuum Gauge      As our time left for departure is coming to an end, so is the time for any last-minute projects. There really isn't much more I can do. But one very simple project but pretty important has to do with one of the most likely engine failure issues. Fuel, more specifically, fuel filtering.      I blogged about this in  The Importance of Clean Fuel  when I was going over the engine early on. I now wanted to take it one step further. With a single engine, clean fuel is even more important. If an engine is going to fail, you can be sure it will happen at the most inopportune time, like in rough seas or during docking. I wanted one more level of security.      You cannot always tell if a fuel filter is ready to change just by looking at it or by the amount of time it has been installed. The surest way is with a vacuum gauge. Installing this gauge should pay for itself by not wasting money replacing filters that are still good.      So how does it work? Pretty simple,