http://josephoster.com/billsvoyage/index.html
I suppose every wife in any generation wants their husbands to be safe, but each generation has a different approach to risk and adventure. I know my wife would be resolutely opposed to any voyage like this (says the man with a dream of sailing a Hobie Cat across the Great Lakes...perhaps when my son is grown).
This page also includes a 100x136 pixel high-resolution color digital photo of the boat, and the year: 2002.
http://josephoster.com/billsvoyage/potter.html
There's also an update page with a GIF animation of the weather accompanied by the text "WARNING!!! file size: 1.5 MBytes"
From the article:
> The batteries were charged for about 1 hour daily using a Honda EU 1000 gasoline generator coupled with a 3-stage battery charger. The generator burned 1-1/2 gallons of gas in 24 days. ... There was no backup power source for charging the batteries.
24 hours of runtime and 1.5 gallons of gas equate to 0.625 gallon usage per hour. From the spec sheet, an EU1000 generator has a 0.55 gallon tank and can run for 6.8 hours at 225W output, that's 0.081 gallons per hour, so I estimate that the generator was operating at about 174 watts, given it ran for an hour that's 174 watthours per day.
23 years later, anyone would assume that your default source of 174 watthours per day would be a solar panel. A single 2x3 foot rigid panel would do ~100W peak and see the equivalent of 4-6 peak hours per day, easily beating that requirement. Any serious sailboat (even a little trailerable 19' coastal boat like this one) would have a whole array powering lighting and sensors and radar/radios and telemetry and would budget much more than that.
That letter from his wife, Naomi, contains a link to her website[1], which is itself fascinating. Its About page contains the following, which made me think her particular brand of value-add in the world is of the kind that will survive:
> I fill-in the details of the couple in each Ketubah by hand, with ink and pen, as Jewish scribes have done for thousands of years. Nowadays, most Ketubah artists use fonts and fill-in the texts by computer rather than by hand, because many have not studied calligraphy, an art which takes much time and practice to master. I, personally, like writing the details by hand, though it is not easy work, because it is traditional, and because it connects me in a personal way with my clients and my prints.
So there were a lot of diesel powered yachts generating power throughout the day. Something that was pretty common back then as an adjunct (and much rarer now) were small wind generators. Seemingly you could choose between noise and power output because the fancier ones made a racket and the quieter ones always seemed to be on boats idling their engines all the time anyway. When we entered anchorages, we'd make sure to avoid being near the loud ones. I can't imagine what it would have been like living with one.
Hydrogenerators weren't very common (they're a bit more common now) but my dad was given an old 12V tape drive motor by a friend and I remember him letting us help him build a towed generator. The tape drive motor sat on the back of the boat connected to about 20m of rope going to a dinghy propeller on a piece of stainless rod to try keep it underwater. Drilling a hole through the motor shaft with a handheld drill was the most time consuming part of the build. We called it toady (short for towed generator) and watching the input Ammeter on the battery bank go all the way up to 6A on a cloudy day felt like magic. It's part of what made me want to be an electrical engineer as a 10 year old.
Given all that, on a 19ft outboard powered yacht in 2002 a generator probably was the best solution for one voyage.
And batteries like the cyclic nature of the sun much more than a constant on float charger.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Guzzwell
https://goodreads.com/book/show/1037445.Trekka_Round_the_Wor...
The "Loose Ends" section of Teplow's write-up mentions that he didn't bring along a radar detector. Then or now, would a radar detector significantly increase a solo sailor's situational awareness?
If you're interested in doing something like this, you could join the Vic Maui race: https://www.vicmaui.org/
https://arachnoid.com/sailbook/index.html
I read it years ago and still think of it from time to time. It's a great read.
HN submission:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=901072
His site never gets much love from HN:
wow
Is a pinhole leak on a can really that dangerous on a 24 day trip. I get ocean air...but wow. That is something I would have underestimated for sure.
wondering if someone in the know can weigh in? is this over cautious or like yeah, good idea?
Part of her preparation was removing the labels from all tinned food, and then re-writing what was in the can with a permanent marker on the lid, before fully immersing each can in laquer. Presumably this was done to help deal with corrosion problems.
[0] https://www.spinsheet.com/cruising/sailors-offer-tips-long-t...
Neat story through!!
When we can food, sometimes there's a jar that doesn't seal. We just put it in the fridge and use it in the next few days. It'll keep at least as long as if it hadn't been canned.
Having said all that: if I went to open a can of food and saw that it had a leak, I wouldn't eat it, because how could I be sure that it wasn't leaking when I packed it 24 hours ago? A visible leak now might have been too small to see then, so who knows how long it's really been leaking.
We never had this issue, but we also likely had better storage conditions in that there was precious little chance of actual seawater reaching our food cans. Cans would sometimes rust on the rim, but I don't think I ever saw a can rust all the way through, despite some of them being likely years old.
This seems like overkill unless you are very convinced that your cans will come in contact with seawater.
Much gratitude!
It seems like a really minor effort layer of protection with almost 0 overhead to protect a person against death. Getting botulism food poisoning at sea by yourself in a tiny boat could very well be a death sentence. Especially if a substantial portion of your food was compromised.
$20 at costco for bags and an hour bagging all of your cans before your trip is hardly overkill.
Its cheap and relatively low effort, but I just don't see the benefit. Modern cans typically already have a plastic coating on the inside that will take care of things getting in through any pinholes, and to preserve flavor.
I spent close to a decade as a professional sailboat captain, including on long offshore passages. I never saw a single can of suspect food, and it wasn't something that is ever talked about. Even in survival kits you would see canned goods that weren't wrapped in plastic.
Really, if you are in the business of minimizing risk, you don't undertake an open ocean voyage in a 19 ft. sailboat.
(Spoken like the project planner I used to be)
Maybe he’s concerned about cans banging around on a boat.
Thanks for your thoughts!
Can't speak to his latest stuff, so YMMV, but for a while it worked for me as incredible background. I imagine there's more and more content like this on YT, what with more powerful technology becoming more ubiquitous.
Q: can anyone tell me what these solo people do when they need to sleep and it’s too deep to anchor?
But solo sailing longer passages is inherently a dangerous proposition.
Though I'm not sure who decided the ʻokina needed its own character rather than the traditionally used apostrophe. It's a pain to type without a Hawaiian keyboard.
Besides, the Hawaiian diacritics are not part of English orthography, so the name of the state (and the big island) is just "Hawaii" in English. In Hawaiian, it's Hawaiʻi.
I dunno, the glottal stop sounds pretty different from normal English usage of apostrophe. If anything it's closer to - than ', like in uh-oh.
French uses both grave and acute accent marks, and they sound very different.
Makes sense to me
It seems the apostrophe started to be inverted in Hawaiian in the 1940s.
This worried me reading it, wouldnt redundancy be sensible, or at least solar panels as redundancy via alternate means?
It also makes me think about fiction and how the same problems are even worse. For example, I always wondered on Star Wars -- how many redundant parts do they keep onboard a ship, just in case?
Solar panels weren't as available back then. Satellite messengers weren't available. Both are popular with sailors now.
Edit: It mentions other GPS units so could be more recent.
If you find this story interesting, definitely recommend reading about Robin Lee Graham. In 1965 at the age of 16 he started a solo sail around the world.
He ended up writing a book and they made a movie. Highly recommend.
https://sfbay.craigslist.org/eby/boa/d/san-leandro-west-wig-...
"Well we're going to take an unplotted shortcut here through the uh, <<checking notes>> graveyard of the atlantic, according to the charts it's 7 feet deep and we have a 6.5 foot draft so fingers crossed the charts are up to date" type shit.
IIRC he has some very serious chronic health stuff and that may have something to do with it. I don't love the risky sails when he has a passenger though. But also who the fuck am I, a weekend lake sailor, to judge. At this point he's got to be among the most experienced solo sailors on the planet. I feel a similar way about slocum or the pardeys and they are more his peers than I am.