“Sunset”

I had to ask myself that today. I am working a full-time, totally unglamorous job, and trying to run a business, and trying to work on the boat at the same time. And why? So we can take a few years off. And do something that so many people have told us is hard, and stressful, and that most people don’t manage to pull off anyways.

We could scale back our working hours – sail our boat every nice day – and heck, we live in one of the most beautiful cruising grounds in the world – but instead we’re stressing ourselves out, not enjoying the sunshine, not going sailing, in the hopes that we can do something grand, that may turn out to be a bust.

Why? Is it a feeling that life is meaningless, so you have to do something that few people do, so you can look back on it and say, “I did that – I did SOMETHING.” Is it a gesture against the hollow material life? I mean – living in a tin can 34′ long there’s not a whole lot of room for flat screen TVs and Lincoln Navigators. Is it because we just love sailing? Or maybe that we hate working?

I have my doubts sometimes – OK, a lot of times. But I guess at the end of the day, for me, it comes down to this – what the hell else are we going to do with our lives?

MT27

Anyone ever own one of these? We’re thinking of putting one on the Muffin for sort of “emergency cold storage” (ie: Frankie needs an ice cube in her cocktail once in a while… )

“Fridge”

eBay: NEW Miele Electric Deluxe Double Wall Convection Oven (item 220011138405 end time Aug-05-06 15:04:49 PDT)

Buy our oven! It’s worth something like $4000.00 – never used once – super fancy-pants gourmet oven. We are going to use the cash to buy our friends Fleming self-steering windvane. They want $1800.00 for it, so we figure, if we can get $1800 for our oven, it’s an even trade. BUY NOW

Portland Pudgy multifunction dinghy–the fun boat that could save your life!

We’re seriously considering one of these – does anyone out there have practical experience with one?

Frankie and I like to have long arguments about our route – which islands we’ll visit, whether to go around the Cape of Good Hope… The typical route (from Europe) is in red, our route is in blue:

“The

The yellow line is the “antipodal point” of the red route:

“A basic definition of a world circumnavigation would be a route which covers at least a great circle, and in particular one which passes through at least one pair of points antipodal to each other. In practice, different definitions of world circumnavigation are used, in order to accommodate practical constraints depending on the method of circumnavigation.”

Whatever. Our route would certainly qualify. As you can see, there are a lot of side trips – that’s why we figure it’s got to be at LEAST five years… (!)

The big question is Japan. Noonsite has this to say:

Being distant from the popular cruising routes, not many cruising yachts visit Japan, but those who do find the Japanese very welcoming, often going out of their way to help visiting sailors.
Until not so long ago even local yachts were a rarity as the Japanese have no tradition as a sailing nation. However, in the early 1990s the government decided to actively develop the yachting industry, more marinas were built, and various international regattas were organised.
However, the one aspect that even the ingenious Japanese cannot do much about is their weather, which does not encourage cruising, for a cruise often turns into a battle against wind and current. Fortunately this one major disadvantage is made up for by the many attractions that Japan offers the visiting sailor.

But Neil has a friend who says that cruising in Japan was the worst experience of his whole life. Does anyone have any experience? Anyone out there ever sailed to Japan?

We’re changing the Muffin over to have a Solent rig, and people always ask us what that is, so here’s a short description:

“Solent

A Solent rig has 2 headstays, one right behind the other. You fly a big blooper on the outer headstay, and a 100-135% jib on the inner headstay. You only use one headsail at a time, unless you’re running downwind and want to pole them both out. The advantage is that you can easily set a big downwind sail, without all the hassle of a spinnaker, so you actually do so – and then you have a nice efficient jib for upwind work. We’ve added an extra headstay fitting to our new anchor platform

“Anchor

and an extra headstay fitting to the top of our crazy steel mast. Next spring we have to measure and install the second headstay and furling unit.

Our furler is a CDI Flexible Furler which is a TOTALLY AWESOME unit

“Flexible

The halyard is integral to the furler, so it doesn’t bind on the forestay – rolls in and out super smooth. You can’t adjust the headstay tension as well as you can with a traditional furler, but hey – it’s the Muffin – we’re not out to win any races!

Hi All -

This is just an introductory post to start off a thread – comment on this post with any and all muffin recipes you might have – we’ll post them, and maybe someday we’ll have enough to make a cookbook!

We’re getting towards the end of figuring out our electronics.

It was a long back and forth about how to do our email communication – it seems like, in this day and age, some form of satellite communication would be the way to go – Iridium, Globalstar, Skymate – something. But we were talking to our friends Neil and Stacey, and they said that all the cruisers they knew that used satellite were having problems.

So… the way to go is, I guess, to have a Marine SSB radio that you connect to a Pactor modem. These are spendy things – the radio is probably going to set us back a grand, and then you need an antenna and tuner, and then the Pactor modem costs $900 itself! So if anyone out there knows anyone who has any of these items for sale at a reasonable price, please let us know!

Thanks!

Icom M710 radio

“Pactor
Pactor Modem

Here’s the first post – we’ve updated it to a blog-style site, where you can comment on our ideas and schemes. Expect more and more content to appear here over the next few weeks as we get it up and running. In the meantime… what do you think of our new look? Write us a comment!