Thanksgiving has come and gone, all in all it was a great one.  My parents came to visit, was great to spend time with them.  I am blessed to have such supportive parents.
As far as Surprise goes, she has a new battery for starting the engine only.  This will take the starting load off the house bank and extend its life.  SSB radio is up and running, I have made a check in with a cruising net once so has pretty good range so far, but still want to do more test to see how far out I am getting.  I have removed the dingy davits from the stern and relocated the dingy to the bow, this will give the Hydrovane more room to work and take some weight from the stern and move it forward.  More importantly it frees the stern up when doing passages for fishing and also prevents the stern rail from leaving with the dingy if a wave ever swamped it.  I have a list of projects that I will work on a little at a time, I will post some of my plans later.  I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas.
Capt. Bear

couple of pics with dingy on the fore deck, with a cover for it and all the hatch to protect from tropical sun.

Time for an up date since the year is almost out. 
The year started pretty good, then after my post in March I was ambushed by health problems that slowed me to almost a total standstill.  I have made it past that for the most part, still battling things from time to time, but for most part I am making it.  More on that later. 

Okay, for the big update.  I was finally able to get the SSB radio hooked up and it works.  I was wondering if it was working but once I got clear of all the interference in the marina I was able to hear stations some as far away as Hawaii, now to work on the getting the proctor modem so I can set up email. 
I did go ahead get the Hydrovane, I am pretty happy with it so far.  I have only used it once, but it worked nicely just as I expected.  It was nice to sail along with out the ships autopilot eating up battery power.  I can see it being a great addition to my gear. 
The next big thing to happen was replacing the dingy, the old one had to go, the transom was made of marine plywood and had rotted out, it cost almost as much to fix it as to by a new one, so I got one from West Marine, a RIB, has hard fiberglass bottom as well as transom.  I also moved the dingy to the foredeck and removed the davits from the stern.  This frees up room for the Hydrovane to have full range of motion, takes the weight of the dingy off the stern, makes off shore passages safer.  Having the stern free makes room for the Jordan series drogue the I am getting as well as bringing a fish aboard when we are fishing.  Nothing like fresh fish for dinner. 


I also took time off  at the end of September and first week of October for my annual sailing trip with Rob.  He came down and we spent a few days in the Marina and then motored over to Horn Island spent the night there then sailed over to Ship Island, visited the island, explored Ft. Massachusetts and the beach.  I think we saw a sharks fin.  We then motored back towards home stopping and spending the night at Petit Bois Island, taking the time to explore here, collected some sea shells had a great dinner from the pressure cooker.   Sailed and motor back to the marina the next day.  I will take time a little later post a better log of the trip.

As I get closer to moving aboard Surprise I plan to take more time updating the blog and my hope its to link it to my YouTube so that there will videos to go with the blog.  I am not sure that it will be as fantastic as some of the blogs and video logs that I have seen but I am going to try and and I am sure that over time it will improve.  I do have one helpful addition that make my videos a lot better, I bought an iMac what a great addition to video production it will be. 

Preparing for long distance sailing

Its 2014, I am so glad to be out of 2013, I just did not like the 13 thing all year.  Any how, things are moving along little by little. I have made several big decisions this year as far as preparing for future cruising. 
1)  Installed LED tricolor on top of mast, this will make more visible while sailing at night.  It gives me the red for port, green for stbrd and white stern light as well as the anchor light.  The main advantage is it places the Nav lights 50ft of the water rather than 10, a huge difference.  When I am in the trough I couldn't be seen, but now I will be visible in all but the highest seas, stuff I don't plan on being in. 

2)  I also installed an LED steaming/deck light combo.  The deck light had gotten water in rusting the connections, I tried to find a new unit and would replace the bulbs in the deck light with LEDs but that proved impossible at the time, so I replaced the whole assembly with an LED.  It works great. 

Now the biggest things.

3)  I now have SSB radio, not installed yet, but its ready to be installed.  I had wanted SSB radio for awhile, and I decided now was the time.  I am close enough to making final preparations to go that I felt it was time to make the move.  This will give the time to learn all about using it so I am not learning when I need it.  

4)  The biggest decision that I made this year was the purchase of Hydrovane self-steering gear.  Many said I dont need it, just use the boats auto pilot.  I agreed for a while, the read some articles about boats that lost rudders or lost the ability to steer.  I did more research and made the move to get the Hydrovane.  I can mount it off center so I can still use the swim platform for its intended purpose as well as boarding point from the dingy.  It acts as an independent rudder steering the boat, this helps balance the boat while sailing as the ships rudder helps balance the boat while sailing.  Also makes the ships steering gear last longer by taking the load off the main rudder.  Acts as an emergency rudder in the event of lose of steering.  It uses no power at all.  Saving on valuable battery power for other things.  I do plan on doing some long passages so it will pay for its self. 

5)  I am also installing solid stainless steel rail in place of  the life lines port and strbd.  This will run for the aft railing to the boarding gate on both sides.  This will allow me to relocate my life sling to a place that makes for sense for man overboard emergency.  I will also locate my life raft here as well.  

That's about it, I will need to save money for more later, and for sailing this summer. 
I am not sure if I mentioned in an earlier post but I replaced the C90 chart plotter with a more up to date C140 and digital HD color radar.  I was not concerned about the radar it ended up being a required purchase due to the C140 being digital and not talking with the analog unit that I had.  All together this is great addition to navigation on the boat.  The larger screen makes planning and navigating much easier. 
I think that's it for this post.  I will post some pics as I get them.  As I was posting pics I forgot that I installed cabin fans, they are great, really move some air around.   Thanks for reading. 
Capt. Barry