Yesterday our little princess wrote her name – all by herself – for the first time !! And this only two days before her third birthday which will be on the 21st. That definately deserves a little attention and it’s own blog post.
Here is a pic of her work:
And although I know there are too many blogs out there only posting pics of the cute kids, but I can’t resist and have to show you two more beautiful photos of our little angel.
One of the better parts in preparing for a long journey is that you get to buy all kinds of new gadgets. Some are more boatish gadgets (chartplotter, GPS, radios) and others seem more common.
Our new gadget is a tiny little PC from Asus. The Asus EEE PC 1015PEM. And of course the first thing to do is to get rid of all that stupid ‘Intel Inside’ and ‘designed for M$ blah’ stickers. – I don’t get it why PC manufacturers still put them. But hey. Then I boot it up once to verify that everything works (yes it does, I hear some Windows start sound and can see the loging screen). That means: now it’s time to disassemble and upgrade that thing. Of course I ordered a memory upgrade and also a SSD-harddisk to replace the oldschool 250GB disk that’s inside. And the best part: when replacing the harddisk, I also get rid of Win7 automatically. Hehehe.
Here some pics I took from the upgrade procedure. I would not like to do that too often since most of the casing is held in place by little plastic clips – and they don’t seem to be too stable. Well somewhere there has to be a difference between a €300 laptop and the €1300 MacBook with metal casing… Today in the evening, I’ll install Ubuntu Linux and all the programs we’ll use later on (OpenCPN, Sailmail, zyGrib, fldigi, Faxviewer, etc.). Enjoy your weekend !
As the time draws near that we are without our DSL-connection, I’m starting to rearrange and update our website:
We’ve added a new page: FAQs – where you’ll find all those questions everyone keeps asking us…
We’ve eliminated the ‘books’ page. There’s not enough room in the menu bar and I’m doing book reviews in normal blog posts from now on. And that’s where you’ll find them: Just select the category ‘books’ in the menue to the right. Or click here.
Update 20110413:
And finally I’ve managed to translate the description of our ship, the Rancho Relaxo of the Seas. Also the Pictures section was cleaned up (but still requires registration for access).
Sometimes you have to do discoveries twice, I guess.
A couple of weeks ago, Micha mentioned a quite crazy project called ‘Windvinder’ on the Ironlady blog. I scanned the page, confirmed the crazyness and forgot about it. Well, yesterday while browsing the TO-Forums, I ran across a witty posting and somehow the user ‘Wipke’ sounded familiar. That’s how I ran into that website the second time. And this time, I stayed and klicked pretty much through all the content there is.
This is really one amazing project. And the website, the style, the pics are first grade. – As is the Windvinder itself. What an unbelievable beautiful vessel ! I hope the followup expedition to catch the Windvinder will be a success. It’s gonna be a good journey anyways (-> Crew wanted !).
After an unusually cold Winter on the outside and having survived the catastrophic fire in the shipyard, today the Rancho Relaxo of the Seas got back into her element ! Yay !!
The process was quite unspectacular despite bringing the crane to its limits – our ship is actually a little too heavy for that 10t crane but it got into the water without problems. Also we replaced the old rusty anchor chain with a new, whopping 70 meters of 10mm chain. That thing actually weights 170 kilos ! On one pic you can see the nice antifoulding job we did, together with the new sacrificial anodes and the shiny prop. (After brushing it for approx. 1 hour.)
A (quite boring) video of the craning will follow…
…just arrived at home. Thanks to Gerd, who was really helpful to get us the equipment needed, we’re now proud owners of a ICOM IC-718 short wave tranceiver ! This piece of high-tech gear will enable us to stay in contact with our friends and family – even when in the middle of the ocean. IF I’ll manage to stem the amateur radio exam, we’ll be able to send and recieve emails using Pactor and Winlink, get weather information and of course stay in touch with other sailors.
And – again – thanks to Gerd, also our kids had their moment, when they discovered about two square meters of bubble-foil to jump around on. I should have done a video of that. – Priceless !!
Another time laps video. This weekend Wolfgang and me were doing the new anti-fouling. Before that there were a few little scratches to take care of but in general the hull is in really good condition.
Mmmmh. Every boat owner likes it ! Doing anti-fouling once a year. This saturday we spent scraping the old paint from last season off the hull. Niiiiiice work ! Here’s a stop motion video done with our new Go-Pro cam: (to be continued)
After five weeks alone in Berlin, yesterday night my family arrived from Argentina. Yay-woo !!!
Around the world single-handed / The Cruise of the Islander
by Harry Pidgeon
I wouldn’t dare to say that the books about families going cruising are boring but it IS another thing to circle the world alone (‘single handed’). And even more so if the journey starts in the year 1921 and with a self-build wooden boat and without much nautical experience.
Well this book was really amazing. Harry Pidgeon is a fascinating person and his journey alone around the world from 1921-1925 was only the seconed one after Joshua Slocum (in 1909). The journey of Pidgeon from a 21st century viewpoint was a very romantic one. There were no telephone lines, no weather information and when he visited some islands he was only the second or third ship to arrive in a whole year. People were interested in his journey and as he was a hobby photographer, he was doing dia shows for the local people.
The descriptions of the places he visited couldn’t be any more different from today. Fiji was still the paradise island, many islands in the Pacific were still completely without contact to ‘western civilisation’. If one reads about those islands now, it seems that on every second island there’s a naval base of the U.S. and telephone, internet, McDonalds, H&M are everywhere. There was no fish-poisoning as the coral reefs were still intact and in general, life seemed an easier and slower one. This of course is the romantic view – the downside, to have no weather information, no GPS is another story. But I like the book for it’s beautiful image of days long gone past and Harry Pidgeon for sharing his experience in a really unobtrusive way.
Just finished reading: Pacific High from Silke und Thorsten Hartmann
Since this book is written in German, I’m not gonna write a review. But here’s a link to their english homepage.
On saturday I did a few first steps in short wave technology. One of the basics is to be able to receive a wather fax. This is hardly anything new. People have been doing that since the eighties. The thing is: I don’t have a shortware tranceiver and I don’t have a Windows(TM) PC.
So I coupled my trusty handheld SW radio with my MacBook using a 3.5mm ‘headphone’ cable. The software I was using/testing was: CocoaModem 2.0, Fldigi 3.2 and MultiMode Cocoa. After fiddling around with the receiver (using mode: USB) I finally received a faint signal. But that was enough to pull that first weather fax from Northwood, UK !
It’s actually quite amazing that one can receive quite precious data using only standard components and free software – without internet, telephone, WiFi… Well. It was only a test for getting used with the software. The final setup will hopefully consist of a proper tranceiver and a dedicated small Netbook or Laptop with all software installed and configured. Unfortunately the ONLY piece of software that doesn’t exist on Linux or Mac is the SailMail program for sending/receiving emails via SSB. But maybe I can find a solution for that, too.
One of the little side projects Andy and me did when in Argentina was to build an arcade-style joystick as a christmas present for Gioco.
All the necessary ‘high tec’ parts I brought with me from Berlin (I bought them at the arcade shop). Those included: buttons, controller and the joysticks themselves. The idea was to build a wooden case, paint it and put the parts. The interesting thing about this was that there were no tools available except for a drilling machine. So we went to the diy-shop and got a saw, some screws and three pieces of wood.
All the wood parts were cut by hand, the wires for cabling came from old computer power supplies. That’s a really interesting way to do this thing. I didn’t have a chance to finish it but Andy should be painting the case this weekend and then it’ll be done. I’m gonna put pictures, I promise.
This weekend I spent at the SV03 at the wannsee to enjoy a two day weather workshop. When sailing you cannot know too much about weather. And there were a lot of new and very useful tipps – especially concerning 500hPa cards, the inner workings of low pressure systems etc.
Also there was an aditional part of the workshop focussing on how to receive weather info while underway (Navtex, SSB+Pactor, Inmarsat, etc.) This part was done by Norbert Kruse whose HAM-course I have the privilege of participating. I’ll do another post on that subject soon…
The weekend edition of the german newspapers ‘Die Welt‘ and ‘Berliner Morgenpost‘ both featured (a quite similar) article about the LosLocos and the planned journey that should start this summer.
A really nice article – unfortunately only in German. But here it is anyway:
One busy week ago, I came back from my last holiday. Three weeks in Argentina, while Gui, Bruno and Viola will stay there until the end of February. The last winter, the last holiday, the last stupid security check at airports…
Well, we had the most wonderful time in Argentina. Nice meat, saucages, cheese from the Barrilla, many hours in the pool, lots of nature and silence. Beautiful nights with a sky full of starts. During the day Campari Soda, building an Arcade Joystick for Gioco, Building little ships out of bamboo, etc.
Now that I’m back in Berlin and alone (until now), I’ll fokus on getting back into the Amateur Radio materials, reading some more books and updating this website. Some pics – the rest will be in the Gallery soon:
Our good friend Michael had time to travel out of Berlin to the Marina Lanke to look for our ship. And there she is, the Rancho Relaxo. Just a couple of meters away from the burned-out buildings, but without a scratch.
And thanks to the fortunate wind, there doesn’t even seem to be any dirt from the fire on the ship. I guess, this time we’ve been really lucky !
Just received horrible news via Email: It seems that there was a catastrophic fire in the shipyard where the Rancho Relaxo currently resides. I do not have much information but it seems that one of the main halls has burned down and so have the ships being inside.
Here are some pics, I found on the internets Pics are made by Andreas Meyer, (C) Berliner Tagesspiegel:
Pics deleted on Request of Mr. Meyer.
The Berliner Morgenpost also has a short Video of the fire:
Update: And a couple of more pictures, found on the webpage of the RBB. As one can see the ship in font of ours as well as the big crane at the waterside, I guess, the Rancho Relaxo is safe. Uff !
So what am I supposed to write about when Berlin is like frozen hell, lakes are covered with ice and the air is -18C ?
Well, we’re still doing preparations. I’m on the way of getting my Amateur Radio License and when I’m not reading sailing books, I try to improve the webpage or we’re doing journey planning. Speaking of. Here’s a temporary link to our planned route. Later on I’ll link the finished page somewhere on the top of our site here. Beware: all dates and coordinates are still subject to change and of course, everything more than one year ahead is pure speculation… And as I’ve said before: Maybe we don’t have the guts to sail through the Gulf of Biscay, we’re back in Berlin before the year ends… ;-)
Oh and btw: A happy new year to all readers !
Just wanted to post a cute pic of Viola, presenting one of her gorgeous works. ;-)
