A Boy and his Boat

We are now in Deer Harbor on Orcas Island, back in the US after 2 convoluted weeks in the Gulf Islands of Canada. This photo is from Montague Harbour on Galiano Island... we were hiking among the glacier-worn rocks, shell middens, and ancient madrona trees of Gray Peninsula, and Sky snapped this candid moment with Nomadness in the background:

(photo by Sky Myers, clickable for large version)

That idyllic scene already seems impossibly far away; tomorrow will see the cutting of a large hole in my steel deck for the Little Cod wood stove, along with the corresponding substantial change in the ship's interior. Among other things, we'll need to modify the engine access panels and add grab rails to minimize the potential for stumbling into a hot stovepipe. This is a critical life-support component... being able to scrounge heat without being dependent on diesel fuel is as essential as the solar panels and watermaker. A wood stove is cozy, too.

Canada was relaxed and almost dreamlike, though perhaps that feeling is partly a by-product of my own current perception of initiating a mode-shift into facilities-dependent complexity in a time of massive economic and political absurdity. Frankly, I'd prefer to just keep meandering around in my favorite traveling style of avoiding straight lines, as revealed in this GPS track of the past couple weeks:


As to the upcoming geek overload, all is not lost! My old friend Tim Nolan, who built the Microship's peak power tracker as well as a number of other interesting devices, is planning to come visit to take on a project or two. I welcome other techies to participate, and will try to keep a current version of the OmniFocus outline view here on the site as a sort of menu of gonzo engineering and gizmological goodness. We love company, as well as the stimulating synergy of building toys with kindred spirits.

It's quiet at anchor tonight, but tomorrow the steel chips will fly!

(PS: My partner, Sky, just did an excellent blog posting about self-sufficiency, with another take on the projects that are getting underway.)

Rafting and Focusing

A great mode shift is about to occur... re-entry into the US and a sudden whirlwind of projects to begin the final phase of making the full-time transition to water. I'm rafted in the rain to a mighty ketch in Saanich Inlet, headphones pumping An Tua, genset thrumming coulombs, Sky ashore with friends, Java padding 'twixt boats, tea steaming... and the thought of the upcoming commute between lab and marina with a truckload of tools is, frankly, ridiculous.


But it is going to have to happen. 2 months and about 600 miles have taught many a lesson and re-ordered my once-fanciful to-do list. If Nomadness is to move beyond the seasonal cruising level, which she must, then she has to go under the knife from stem to stern.

Much of it has already been discussed in these posts, the various systems that must be brought up to snuff and the layer of integration that ties them all together. That's the fun stuff, at least in principle, and I'm actually looking forward to it... the Inner Geek rubbing hands together in metaphysical glee at presiding over a system architecture reminiscent of TNG-era Star Trek, enhancing my primitive humanoid sensorium whilst linking ships into a fleet across multiple communication modalities and providing the tools of a long-range voyage of discovery. What's not to love about that?

It's the missing team of white-jacketed engineers and technicians swarming over the vessel to make it all happen on a tight schedule, that's what! I reminisce fondly on the BEHEMOTH era, the bikelab at Sun Microsystems a sort of skunkworks that attracted all sort of brilliant folk who took breaks from their real work to inject wizardry into something that became larger than any of us. ("Thanks for reminding me of why I became an engineer," quoth one fellow, beating me to the gratitude punch.) Part of the reason this worked so well, I believe, is that bicycles are accessible, and the sheer lunacy of BEHEMOTH technology atop a pedal-powered frame tickled the fancy of every grown-up kid who once pedaled the neighborhood with visions of rocketing onward, unfettered, forever.

The Microship, years later, held much of that allure (after all, it was a canoe at its core, and had pedals), though moving from Silicon Valley to the remote woods of Camano Island didn't help in the volunteer department. When that dragged on for too long with too little fun, it became a rather lonely enterprise, and the once-thriving network of technomads and exuberant fellow geeks moved on, grew up, settled down, kicked back, and put their attention elsewhere... constructively commenting on my postings, perhaps, but rarely pulling all-nighters to get me out of town.

Fast forward a decade. I'm still layering seductive gizmology atop mobile platforms, but it's now on a very different scale. Here we were a few days ago, in Genoa Bay (Nomadness is the petite one):


That's 56 tons of collective boat, one a delicious old ferrocement ketch with an interior built for comfort, the other a steel pilothouse cutter that's almost austere inside. The ketch is a gem, conventional wisdom about ferro aside, and her skipper has continually refined her with a sort of laid-back passion and an inspired thrifty funkiness that makes me embarrassed at how much I've spent on some of the blinky bits that still don't work properly.

I juxtapose these in the context of the BEHEMOTH bicycle to make the point that pulling together a project on this scale is a completely different game. It will never fit in a sponsor's trade-show booth, it won't roll onto a stage for an hour of engineering yarns and puns about unixcycles, and few folks grew up with one in the back yard that they could hop on whenever struck by a restless urge. People who do love working on these things already have boat projects of their own (or charge lots of money for their time), and the logistics of a skunkworks-style project are complicated by the remoteness of marinas or the bandwidth-limiting nature of the dinghy.

And so, it's likely to be a rather solitary venture, this upcoming winter of geekery. Sky is always eager to help and can wriggle into tight places like a contortionist, but I'm going to have to hold it all together.

That brings me to my favorite new tool, OmniFocus. I've always broken projects into Clearly Defined Tasks and made a science of project management, but in recent years the culture of Getting Things Done has elevated that to an art form and moved well beyond my own methods. I won't attempt to summarize GTD here, but will admit to having tried three pieces of Mac software over the years that purport to implement the principles... but none of them felt like home. As such, I've continued with my quirky blend of notebooks and outline files, fully recognizing that the occasional fleeting sense of having things under control was very much an illusion.

But OmniFocus is amazing. Although I've only been using it for a week, I am already seeing it as a lens that sharpens my awareness of what has to be done next. The myriad tasks spread over nearly a hundred projects each have modal contexts and priorities, and instead of browsing pages of to-do lists I just say, "OK, so I'm here with these tools, and in this particular mood, and I have about this much time. What would move me forward most efficiently?" As one who quickly crumbles into 100% context-switching overhead when trying to juggle more than two or three simultaneous jobs, this is brilliant... and the Mac integration is so smooth that it's actually sexy. I can even snag a task from the middle of an email and lob it over to OF without having to context-switch to "project management" by opening the app!

Here is an exported file showing the first clear tasks within each project group.


So, I was just on the verge of talking about some of those projects, but I'm going to resist that temptation... there will be plenty of time for that as I actually do them. This is still the moment for floating over a constellation of jellyfish, watching counter-rotating dinoflagellate bioluminescent swirls from dinghy oars, hoisting the sails for a long reach, fragrant curry and music jams with new friends, lazy rainy mornings with droplets spattering hatches, catching a lift from a tidal current, pulling off a tricky maneuver on the first try, landing on uninhabited islands, smiling back at my pal, and dreaming of the way it's all gonna be when OmniFocus tells me that there's simply nothing left to do except cast off the docklines...

Java, APRS, and Financial Madness

How bizarre it is to be at anchor in the Gulf Islands of British Columbia, confronting the daily challenges of field electronics projects and keeping up with battery/food/water usage while slurping catastrophic financial news via the Internet and trying to assess the impact. Talk about a cognitive disconnect... kayaking the harbor at sunset while numbers that affect my life careen out of control.

I rather envy Java's perspective on all this:


She's always walking on air in her mock-serious sort of way, and seems unaffected by everything that drives my life except where it converges with food acquisition (and she happily handles that on her own when not confined to a floating island of mouse-free steel). I try to emulate her detached attitude sometimes, but there is so much at stake... so much on the to-do list. Tonight I finally got the old B&G Network sensors interfaced through an h1000 and an AT10 to the N2K network, so the DSM250 displays wind and depth data. She slept through most of the excitement, grumbling when I commandeered the captain's chair to fiddle with my new numbers.

But the other night at anchor in Roche Harbor, I was out making the rounds of the mostly quiet setting (well, quiet except for the megayacht Discovery that always had an engine running; presumably shore power was insufficient). I returned to my modest little ship in glassy calm water with bioluminous puffs trailing from each stroke of the oars, and drifted up to the stern. Java was waiting.

I could see the thought bubble forming, but didn't expect her to follow through. She made her way down the steps and put a paw on the dink gunwale... it floated off a bit, alarming her, and she bounded back to safety. I kept telling her about it, offering a ride. Slowly she returned, and this time I held the boatlet firmly to the mothership. She hopped aboard, and I pushed off.

Rowing softly with the forward-facing system, we made a big lazy loop around Nomadness. I have always heard that one must really start with a kitten if the intent is to have a cat aboard, but she took to it beautifully... watching bright-eyed as our little magic carpet floated around the universe of reflected stars and anchor lights.


Tracker Magic

This blog has often carried screen captures of Google Earth with an overlay of recent tracking data, and I should say something about how that is being done (especially now that there are three separate data sources).

I've started capturing track logs from the MacENC navigation software that I have been using on the Macintosh - it is working so well that I'm about to install either a Planar or Argonaut sunlight-readable LCD at the outside helm, dedicated to a Mac Mini. This is now saving tracks, but so far I have only been using them as a backup.

The ones that have appeared here are from the GPS Datalogger that I threw together a couple of years ago, based on a tracker from SparkFun Electronics. I like those folks, and they have lots of interesting stuff to play with... this gadget reliably stores the lat-long fix every second of the trip into files on an SD card, then I take those and manually edit them into KML files that open in Google Earth.

Both of those methods only record here on the boat, so I compile and publish the results later. But I'm now also running an APRS tracker called the Rtrak, which transmits my location on an amateur radio 2-meter frequency every 90 seconds. It's only half a watt, so I didn't expect too much — the one I used on Bubba was 25 watts — but with a little Diamond mag-mount whip on the steel deck I am getting surprisingly excellent results. Here's the view of the past few days as displayed on the aprs.fi server:


In the Yahoo group for the product, I expressed my surprise at how well this was working, and another ham posted an amazing image that showed (for a the San Juan Island section) what stations had been receiving and forwarding my transmissions. As with all photos on this blog, you can click for a large version:

Image by Lynn Deffenbaugh

The red lines show the connections that made it as I sailed around, and the data payload they carried was then immediately piped through the net to various servers including the Finnish one noted above, as well as the venerable findu.com created by my old friend, Steve Dimse. You can always click that to see our current location with all the usual Google map features like satellite view and scaling.

If you are not a ham, and want a commercial version of this capability, I'm hearing good things about the Spot Messenger — though I have never tried one myself.

(By the way, speaking of sailing around - there are two Amazon 44 sisterships plying northwest waters. The blog of Ilari has some wonderful photos of the Queen Charlottes and the BC coast, and Mentor, owned by the broker who worked with me on this one, is home-ported in Seattle.)

Remember the Microships?

Back in the tonnage-reduction domain, there have been two elephants in the room for quite some time now: Wordplay and Songline. These are the amphibian pedal/solar/sail micro-trimarans that, in various incarnations, consumed all available resources from 1993 until 2003 or so... a rather large chunk of my life. (Photos are in an album over here.)

When I finally got around to writing my will a few months ago, I directed that Songline should go back to Natasha... when we split in 2002, I assumed that there would be nautical continuity in the relationship domain and thus kept the Microships together. But that's not the way things evolved, and I recently decided that there is no point in making Natasha wait for my demise to once again enjoy the lovely little red trimaran that she worked so hard to build (in some cases learning from my own exercises in over-engineering). The boat is now back in her hands.

Wordplay, on the other hand, continues to be the centerpiece of the 3000 square foot lab that was constructed specifically for the project.... she sits there in mute rebuke, really quite beautiful but covered in a layer of dust and neglect. It's not right. I keep trying to think of what to do about this, and have a few ideas.

First, if a budding technomadling were to come along with the right mediagenic nature coupled with true core hard-core geekery tinged with a yen for adventure... and there were sufficient funding available... I would consider a deal that would include extensive training and some kind of early involvement in the mission profile. I'm not holding my breath, but ya never know. This isn't the kind of boat that lends itself to brokerage... insanely expensive amphibian micro-trimarans that hold one person are not exactly what one would call a "seller's market" these days.

Second, during this coming winter of extensive projects, Nomadness is going to be a few miles away by water from my home base. This is endlessly annoying, and last year in La Conner I was frustrated by the difficulty of maintaining any kind of continuity with a 2-hour round-trip commute between boat and lab. If I can find a waterfront home for the Microship and streamline her for the task, she'd be a hot little commuter... perhaps augmented occasionally by the sailing dinghy. If nothing else, the time on water would give me the sense of amortizing the project somewhat.

And third, Sky and I have been seriously exploring the flotilla idea, as discussed here recently. Technomads, Dramanauts... call 'em what you will... the idea is to assemble a spiritied community of adventurers who travel together and share skills and resources to maintain a creative and productive life of global voyaging. Since Wordplay was designed specifically for an earlier incarnation of this (and we now have a proper mothership), this could be someone's magic carpet... or even provide a seat for a slow turnover of participants. I like this idea a lot... selling the Microship just doesn't feel right.


This baby deserves better than long-term storage in a pole building in the woods!

Meanwhile, we are slowly winding down this adventure (444 miles at this writing), and are starting to feel the wrap-up events looming on the calendar: wood stove installation, bow thruster, bottom paint and rust repair, movement to winter moorage, a mad push to set up my mobile lab in order to have on-site facilities, and the timely resurgence of eBaying to help pay for all this stuff.

No madness indeed. This is crazy. Good luck this week with the insane economy...

Steve

Geeking in the San Juans

My head is a-swirl with data, extrapolated subjectively from imperfect measurements and flawed instruments. There's the Link 10 that randomly resets itself, forgetting the status of the batteries. The Xantrex inverter that would like to charge at a decent rate but overheats when I attempt to do so. The trio of diesel tanks that offer up level-sensor data that is apparently random, requiring me to monitor engine hours and estimates based on RPM. The Simrad AP24 autopilot that can take 15 minutes or more after being powered on to allow itself to begin actually piloting. An excellent bit of navigation software (MacENC) that runs on my laptop down below... not outside where I need it when driving. The new holding tank (still mysteriously stinky) that requires opening its stowage bay to observe the level.

All of these things are soluble, of course, and many of the imminent projects have to do with not only fixing bugs but going well beyond to build a homogenous layer of modeling atop the ship's many systems... allowing me to see it all at a glance from a browser. We'll get there. But in the meantime, there is an added challenge to voyaging that comes from receiving a flood of data that is often misleading.

That is tricky enough when trying to maintain an internal mental model of a huge old battery bank, but it gets downright scary when navigating in an unexpected fog bank. That's what happened the other day, as we plunged through Deception Pass from sunny Cornet Bay, headed for the San Juan Islands, not taking too seriously the NOAA footnote about "occasional areas of patchy morning fog."

(photo by Sky Myers)

But we rounded the bend and the bridge was nearly invisible... just a vague outline against a backdrop of thick soup filling the strait to the west. It was a narrow slack between two 7-knot current extremes, so with misgivings ameliorated somewhat by having been through the same waters a week before, I pressed into the murk, pulling foulies over my shorts and T-shirt. The pass itself required that we stay more or less mid-channel and avoid bumping into other boats or the cliffs on either side... but both were easily visible in the narrow channel and slack timing was spot-on. For a few minutes after emerging to the west I was able to visually keep a constant distance off the rocks to starboard, working around Lighthouse Point and into more open water.

But the fog grew still denser, with visibility soon down to 3-4 boat lengths. Suddenly our stately 6-knot speed felt really fast... yet there was a paradoxical desire to blast through it toward what appeared to be a lighter sky north of us, not timidly creep along with a lack of steerageway (urgently needed when random boats would quickly materialize and zip past enroute to the narrow window of rock and slack). Since we hadn't quite anticipated this, and had been prevented by current timing from hanging back to shift gears and think it over, we found ourselves scrambling to gather information.


It became a sort of dance, actually. One of us would stand at the helm, peering into the soup, as the other would run up and down the companionway to gaze at the charting software tethered to the nav desk, and gesture appropriately (sometimes with urgency, other times with a thumbs-up). With the intent of hugging the shore and entering Burrows Bay, I kept tweaking the course, sometimes a bit randomly... you can see the result in the wiggly track above). While all this was going on, we were discussing our strategy; turning left and heading directly across Rosario Strait would get us away from the rocky shore and be the shortest route into the San Juans, but would also take us into the wide precautionary area filled with shipping traffic (I could hear one large rumbling engine as well as the foghorn of another somewhere off in the soup). I was tempted to follow our previous course up to the head of Burrows Bay and out the narrow gap north of Burrows Island, but the currents would be swirling like crazy by the time we got there, and if still foggy that might be unpleasant.

We decided to compromise and tiptoe out to Allan Island, then hug its shore around to the west and cross the strait where the shipping lanes are narrower. Somewhere in there I remembered that I have a radar (all this drama had been taking place in the space of 20 minutes or so), so I smote myself on the forehead, dashed down to the pilothouse, and fired it up... along with the autopilot.

Radar is magic, of course, and we quickly started getting a better handle on the situation... seeing the ships out in the strait, the rocky shore receding behind us, the nearing wall of Allan... then YIKES, there it was looming out of the fog, just as predicted but real enough to trigger a hard spin of the helm and an epithet or two. Keeping a safe distance off and flying by impromptu compass courses and Sky's choreographically relayed news from the chartplotter, I kept fiddling with the Simrad WR20 bluetooth autopilot remote, a generally wonderful little gadget that chose this particular day to set a new record for the length of time needed to accept the command to get the hell out of standby and actually start steering. You can see where it finally did, up there, just to the west of Allan, where the track gets nice and smooth.

When the radar revealed an opening in shipping traffic, we headed west across Rosario Strait. Within a few minutes the fog cleared, and in sparkling sunshine we could revert to visual navigation, the fog already like a strange dream as we made our way behind James Island, through Thatcher Pass, up over Lopez Island, and eventually into Friday Harbor... where we have been anchored for 3 days.


While swinging on a chain and dancing in ferry wakes, I've been taking care of a few projects. One was the cabling of the pump that will allow the holding tank to be emptied at sea; another was the implementation of my long-awaited NOIDS (Nomadness Object Interconnection Database Server), implemented in FileMaker 9. This involved some painful relational database learning curves, especially since the book of choice didn't arrive from Amazon before our latest departure from the lab, and all I have is help files and late-night rum-sodden Googlage on generic terms. I've been a FileMaker user since version 3, but never delved too deeply into relational territory.

Although still primitive, NOIDS works beautifully! There are two tables in the database, one for devices and the other for connections. The former collects all documentation about each connected thing on the boat, including containers for PDFs and photos, clickable web links, power, serial number, location aboard, and so on. The latter provides a record for each link between devices. The auto-assigned device ID is the match field, and I found a trick that lets me have multiple instances so that buses and manifolds are supported. A portal in the device database shows all known links for a given widget, each connection record associates device IDs with their long names to make it more readable, and there are buttons for migrating back and forth, making new records, and so on.

This documentation method is orthogonal to the classic library of drawings, but since reality is a big mushy thing with lots of overlap between "domains," the database approach fits quite well and is easier to incrementally maintain. I think it will scale; so far I have only added the APRS tracker and holding tank stuff to provide a test dataset.

Cat on a Hot Tin Boom

Meanwhile, Java is adapting easily to the nautical life, seeming to enjoy the sensations of being afloat. In Cornet Bay we were on one of the mooring docks (little islands with no path to land), so in short order she hopped off Nomadness and found her way aboard Jacari Maru (whose owners, Larry and Nancy, joined us for an evening of nautical tale-swapping). Java spent much of her first couple of years wandering about 25,000 miles around the US during my BEHEMOTH-centric speaking tours of the era, so my fears of her objecting strenuously to seasteading are apparently unfounded despite her addiction to hunting the critters of forest and meadow.


Governments don't always agree with the free movement of pets, however, so one of our reasons for parking in Friday Harbor had to do with getting an international rabies certificate to facilitate entry into Canada. We dinghied her in, and a delightful Cape Dory sailing vet named Tess made a dock call, did a quick exam, and slipped in a subcutaneous injection so gracefully that Java barely deviated from her habitual expression of bemused contentment. I rather envy her.


The binder of official ship's papers now bulges a bit more: documentation, fishing, communications, insurance, taxes, border permits...

What Now?

The fleeting and frustrating summer season is nearly over, as if it ever really began. September is usually the choice month around here, and it is looking promising, but all too soon we are going to be stoking the ship's woodstove, firing up the Webasto, seeking protected anchorages, dogging down hatches, warily eyeing incoming windstorms, battling humidity, and diving in to the rather intimidating list of winter projects. I feel a sort of urgency about this, not trusting the world situation or the economy, and deeply regret my slothful approach to last winter's epic to-do list.

The difference, of course, is that now I know the boat; the tasks that are truly important have risen to the top, and the "would be nice someday" projects have been relegated to the hobby level. Still, this is huge, and one of the biggest challenges has been setting up winter moorage with associated workspace and figuring out how to actually take advantage of it. Camano Island is pretty much useless in this regard... it's an island, technically, but it neither feels like one culturally nor offers anything in the domain of nautical facilities. I wish I had the time and budget to relocate the home base; this is going to be a rather intense period of complex system projects overlaid with the never-ending eBay marathon to convert static tonnage into boat parts.

But after that, if it's not too late, our little magic carpet should be ready for open-ended seasteading on a global scale. Where is the fast-forward button?

Cheers,
Steve