Little Yellow and Fall in Indiana

It is officially Fall here in NE Indiana.  Lots of rain this past week, about 2+ inches, leaden skies and cooler temperatures of low 50's at night and days in the 60's.  We hauled Little Yellow last week in glorious weather and trailered her to the pad at home and applied the IN numbers for the first time.  S couple of days later she was taken to the Angola Canvas shop to be fitted with a boom tent that is c;dosed at both ends.  The tent should keep out all the rain water plus if we ever take he to a different lake to sail we could do an overnight sleep over.  Here is what LY looks like pretty much as she sits now.


LY is a nice little sailboat for a nice little lake and is a good trainer as she overpowers easily and you had better be on your toes in variable wind conditions.  She will make headway in a breeze so light that you can hardly feel it but I think the best wind is 5-10 mph.  I re-rigged her to allow boom reefing by rolling up the sail.  The jib is a little too small at 90% so tacking through can be iffy at low forward speed.  Like I said - a good trainer.

LY is now at the canvas shop getting a tent cover made, fitted and installed.  I will so enjoy not having to go down after each rain to bail her out.  I had the tent made closed at both ends so if we get caught out on some of the bigger lakes up North then we could be out of the elements for the over night stay.  The cockpit padding is such that it would be a long night for us olddies.

We are starting to think of southerly waters but still have a lot to do here in non-nautical areas: Cutting trees, splitting wood and the Fall leaves that always seem to drop about mid November or earlier.  Cheers.

Polar Melting

My original image disappeared so I added this one from a nearby site.

Summer Sailing on a Pleasant Lake

The summer sailing season is almos over for this northern season.  I have been down to Little Yellow many times over the summer and did a lot of maintenance items, removed engine and cleaned carb and re rigged the sheets and installed two new cleats just outboard of the aft part of the cockpit.  I have one more re-rigging task and that involves adding a turning block and a cam cleat for the main halyard and jib halyard.  With this final addition I can dump the sail quickly and make life a little easier for the pilot.

As far as sailing goes it was a pretty poor season.  The Pleasant Lake is not the best to sail on since it is surrounded by trees and down in a glacial moraine depression.  However, when the breeze is right it is oussible to run down the length and tack like crazy to get back.  If you get really desperate then you can start the outboard and get back that way.

The full moon was out yesterday under clear sky and just at deep twilight I snapped a picture of the lake looking east.  If you look real close you can see Little Yellow's mast and our kayak by a pontoon boat.

Still looking for a boat

On and off due to constraints to my time I am looking for a boat.  the ones that come to mind are Catalina 30 diesel, Pearson 303 and Pearson 28-2.

The Catalina 30 has a lot of room below but is low on fuel/water tankage at 10/20 gallons.  Plus the lift pump seems to be a failure area and with no bilge to speak of it is sort of iffy except for coastal day-sailing in good weather.  However, it would suit us just fine as a live aboard for the winter season.

I sort of like the layout of the 28-2 but everyone I have seen has leaks around the Stbd side portlight aft by the nav station.  It seems suspicious that all would have these leaks.

All-in-all it seems like the Pearson 303 (pictured) may be the keeper in this whole deal but it is the most expensive.So I guess I just cannot win them all and have to choose the lesser of three evils.  This vessel has the most tankage of them all and for some reason this is important to me.

The big re-shuffle

That time finally came to clean out my little corner of the Family Room.  The impetus initially came from my sister who called and said "Come and get the grandfather's desk we have been storing for

you".  Ok, fair enough so SAM & I went over and loaded it up and brought it home to the up north house.  It really looks nice in the selected spot.

Since I was on a roll, the next project was to clean up the work station area.  I consolidated the work station, a monster Dell Precision with 32Gb RAM & two Xeon Quad core 3 Gig processors, and a backup quad core used in emergencies.  I put it together as an extended desktop on the Monster and robbed the speaker system from another system.  This allowed me to remove a

table and put it into the newly completed Technical Room.

So now I will show you a bad picture of the work station area.  The Family Room now looks a lot better but the dark paneling has to be lightened up.  Enter SAM into the equation, SAM likes to paint so spent the entire afternoon putting paint sample is various areas to check the colors. 

We may have this place ready for who knows what in the near future.  We were thinking of an AirBnB to supplement our sailing habit.  Certain people I know use only AirBnB for their travel lodging.  Thanks for reading:  Moore later.

Surviving the mass extinction event

According to some we are in the beginning of the 6th mass extinction.  I think most cruising sailors will find this subject fascinating and have time to read books.  This post is about such a book & before today I had never heard of this person but watching one Youtube about the subject of Futurism immediately lead me to her interview.  The person, book and a 20 minute Youtube will tell you all you want to know and if you buy the book keep it and keep it as a Lender. The name of the person is Annalee Newitz and the book is Scatter, Adapt, and Remember. This is a smart lady. I am going to purchase this book as soon as I read the other 5 hardcopy books I have sitting at my nightstand.

When ur hot ur hot