No, the device shown here is not a battery charger,although it certainly looks like one. Rather, it's a Lester Battery Discharge Unit (or BDU), a gizmo  I have been using recently to establish baseline data for some battery testing I'm planning to do onboard Betty Jane. What this particular BDU does is fairly simple--by means of a large interior coil it short-circuits a given battery in a very controlled way, precisely measuring the amount of time it takes for peak voltage to be drawn down to approximately 10.5 volts at a rate of 75 amps. This measurement (in minutes and seconds) gives a fair idea of the health of the battery being tested.

I used the device shown above last weekend on one of my three Deka Dominator 4D gell-cell batteries--I spared the other two mostly because I was slightly suspicious of the BDU's seemingly amicable personality. The point was to see what state this particular 5-year-old Deka was in--I'd synopsize it as flaky, flaky, flaky, given the numbers the dang thing spit out--so I can subsequently test the efficacy of a solar-powered product from an outfit called Pulse-Tech. This coming weekend I will hook the Pulse-tech product up to the Deka, expose the solar panel that comes with it to the sun in a semi-permanent way, and see what happens.

The Pulse-Tech is supposed to reverse some or even most of the sulfation activity that tends to sap a battery's strength. Of course, because tearing my Deka apart to determine exactly how much of its present weakness is due to sulfation and how much is due to other factors is an untenable option, there's no way to say exactly how effective any resulfation-type activity that may occur will actually be. But then again, an increase in battery strength after a little Pulse-Tech action would nevertheless be a fairly good common-sense indicator that the technology actually works.

I plan to let the Pulse-Tech run for approximately two months and then do another discharge test. With any luck, the Deka will be at least a little stronger.

Said test, by the way is just a tad spooky. The Lester tester gets almost hot enough to fry an egg on, any loose paint burns off, and the coil inside snaps, pops, and crackles. Of course, all this stuff is almost as much fun as some of the crazy experiments (the best entailed the inspired reinvention of gunpowder) I used to do as a kid. You'll be able to read about the results in the pages of PMY somewhere down the line.

About this time of year--every year--my thoughts turn to a favorite (or sorta favorite) topic: varnishing. One of Betty Jane's more gorgeous aspects (and something that lots of folks comment upon) is her brightwork, consisting of teak rails, teak caprails, teak trim strips, teak nameboards, and teak sidelight boxes (is there a recurring theme here and could it be the word: teak?????????). And keeping this brightwork looking presentable for public consumption is far from a full-time job although it's certainly a once-a-year job.

To deal with it as devilishly as possible, I've got myself the little varnishing kit shown above. My kit is housed in an old fishing-tackle box and includes one quart can of Awlgrip Awlspar varnish, one quart can of Pettit Flagship varnish, a tack cloth, several pieces of 220-grit sandpaper, a drop cloth, one cheap three-inch brush (disposable), one expensive three-inch badger-hair brush (I can't remember for sure but I think the darn thing originally cost me $25), a couple of Scotch-Brite pads, two rolls of blue varnishing tape, a bag of inexpensive rubber gloves (over the years I've virtually bathed in diesel fuel while working on commercial boats and later while hooking up magazine test gear on diesel engines and anything that's even close to diesel, whether aromatically, chemically, or genetically, inflicts a rash on me that's dang-near tantamount to leprosy), and a bottle of aspirin to be used only in emergencies.

Because I've got so many coats of varnish on Betty's brightwork already, I don't have to get too tangled up in prep work each year. I just start out with a piece of sandpaper on Betty's flying bridge and lean on  it pretty hard as seen above. Then I proceed downwards, in large part thanks to the help of momentum, gravity, and exhaustion, and finish off with the nameboards at the transom.

The critical thing with the whole shebang is to make sure the new layers of varnish truly adhere to the old stuff, which tends to be fairly weathered and dull after a year of languishing in the Florida sun. I use Flagship for my topcoats mostly. It imparts a nice amber color to everything and, I believe, has the highest UV rating going. Maybe this latter claim isn't true, but hey--the  stuff hangs in there like fish smell in a fish box. I use the Awlspar for spots that, for one reason or another, have been rendered bare, either by scratches, gouges, or other difficulties. Two or three coats can be applied in a day and then the Flagship applied after that. The two types are quite compatible, by the way. 

The happy result is a glowing finished product, of course. I am not an expert on varnishing by any stretch of the imagination--about the only true expert I know of is Brian Hicks, a guy who lives and varnishes in Panama City and actually varnished Betty for a couple of years--but  I do have three little tips that seem to be working for me these days.

The first is use the tack cloth liberally--no sense having bumps in your finish. The second is keep your coats thin--I know the thick stuff looks glassy and good going on but it tends to look uneven and problematic upon drying. And the third is don't be in a hurry--in this age of super-computerized, attention-deficit-disordered, multi-tasking mayhem, there are few jobs that require, nay, even induce a meditative state of mind and varnishing a boat's brightwork is one of them.

Up with the varnish! Down with the iPhone!  

So, believe it or not, I don't spend all my time onboard my trawler Betty Jane. In order to pay for all the essentials (and a few of the foibles) that keep Betty comfortable and well-cared for, I have to spend a lot of time working, pounding out marinized prose on one laptop or another. After all, as most any long-time boat owner will tell you, the list of essentials (and foibles) I just mentioned is typically long and stunningly expensive.

Let's see. You've got the monthly bill for insurance (a whopper in Florida, unfortunately), the monthly bill for the slip (a not inconsiderable sum), the monthly bill to the mortgage holder (also a not inconsiderable sum), the fuel bill (a pittance thanks to Betty's highly economical propulsion plant), and a whole bunch of incidentals, like (hmmmm, just this month so far we've got:)  a quart can of Awlgrip Awlspar varnish from Jamestown Distributors, a quart can of Pettit Flagship varnish also from Jamestown (I use the Awlgrip to build coats and the Flagship to add a sun-resistant amber patina to the whole extravaganza), a small tube of West Marine silicone, and finally, for now at least, a general chart of the area Betty is now calling home.

The photo above gets to the heart of the matter, of course--your's truly ticklin' the ivories in the ol' home office, with rather large coffee cup I've just recently started using in order to keep me going when the going gets tough.

I try not to overdo, by the way. Just two cups per day, one in the morning, one in the late afternoon. Imbibing much more than this modest amount tends to make me just a tad skittish and mercurial, or so says my wife BJ, although I've been known to opt for a third cup when  intense deadline pressures loom in simultaneous league with the monthly arrival of the AmEx bill, whereupon an appalling list of Betty-related purchases is ocassionally (and often quite painfully) writ large.

If you're as seriously into boats as I am (and you are supporting your habit with either one job or several) you may want to consider getting a rather large coffee cup yourself. I got mine--or rather my wife purchased mine for me--from Ron Jon's, the famous surf shop in Cocoa Beach. I'm not sure whether it was Ron or Jon who had the thing labeled "The Big Kahuna," but whoever it was hit the nail on the head. Top this baby off with a couple of quarts o' Starbucks and you can rave on 'til midnight--how great is that!    

Departing the Gulf of Mexico was a sad affair for both Betty Jane and I, I think. As I worked through two entire weekends in a Panama City boatyard discombobulating aspects of Betty's flying bridge in order to get her air draft (when loaded on Bob Paquette's low-boy trailer...Bob is Atlantic Marine Transport's one and only owner/driver and he's based in Navarre, Florida) down to approximately 13' 9", she seemed to be feeling just a tad gloomy.

So before Bob showed up with his trailer and big red Freightliner, I managed to give Betty's mast and windows a fresh coat of Pettit Easypoxy paint, touch up her Sea Hawk bottom paint, and add a set of brand-new transom and prop zincs since galvanic-corrosion issues in the marina Betty's called home for many years had apparently rung the final bell on the ones I'd installed only a month or so before. And Betty seemed to appreciate all the attention, one way or the other.

It had taken me quite a while to find Bob. I'd spent six hours at least talking with friends, interviewing folks over the phone, comparing prices on the internet, and calling boat yard owners (who typically deal with marine-type truckers all the time). And I'd asked Bob for a bunch of references, insurance paperwork, and various other odds and sods, a move I think he had a certain grudging respect for, by the way.

It took us about four hours to load Betty, a process that involved centering her on the low-boy, precisely measuring her height, removing her compass and engine control from the flying bridge (to reduce the air draft by an additional  4"), precisely measuring the height of the load, and finally attaching and tensioning a whole raft of cargo straps.  Bob and I spelled each other while cinching down these latter babies due to the incredible heat--somewhere between 100 and 105 degrees. I'd do a few while he sat in the air-conditioned cab of his Freightliner and he'd do a few while I sat in my air-conditioned Prius.

Zooming down I-10 at 70 mph or thereabouts--Bob's in his 60s but doesn't let middle age slow him down even a lick--was a wild experience. I shot the above photo from the driver's seat: I know, it wasn't a very safe thing to do, but I simply had to photographically memorialize what I figure was the fastest trawler in Florida (or perhaps even the whole United States) at the time. Bob had what he called "a pole car" leading the way, about a mile ahead. It was really a truck with a pole sticking up that was slightly higher than our load. "If the electronic alarm on that pole even sniffs a bridge," he said before we hit the trail, "we stop and assess stuff immediately."

We arrived at our destination just about sunset, having endured a veritable maze of back roads (to avoid bridges that were too low) and several  rain squalls and a lightning storm of cosmic proportion. And, after some seriously clever maneuvering (followed by a visit to the local Subway for a couple of sub sandwiches), Bob got the trailer strategically positioned near the boat yard's launch/haul-out slip for an easy and efficient Travel Lift unloading the next morning. With the last long rays of the sun glowing the way they do in Florida sometimes, Bob posed for a quick photo before he sacked out in his sleeper. I thanked him profusely--the journey to the east had gone off without a hitch.

It took me another couple of weekends (and about a half a quart can of Dolphinite bedding compound) to put Betty back together again. The engine control was the pip of all pips, mostly due to poor access--did I say poor...let's call it catastrophic--under the steering station on the flying bridge. Ultimately, though, Betty went back into the water a couple of Saturdays ago. Check her out below. With a few projects still obviously languishing (among them weather cloths, windshield, compass, and depthsounder module) she's tied up near the boat yard's launch/haul-out slip awaiting a series of holding-tank flushes (with fresh water) followed by a fine, final, cleansing pump-out.

"Your boat seems to be happy to get back in the water," said the boat yard guy helping me with the do-do hoses. At the time Betty'd been out of her element for dang near two long months. "Right on, brother!" I replied. 

Tuesday, June 8, 2010 was a grim sorta day. Over the preceding weeks I'd tracked the slow easterly crawl of British Petroleum's oil spill across the blue-green waters of the Gulf, driven in part by an unusual spate of winds from the west. Eventually, I'd decided that there was little chance my trawler  Betty Jane would be spared an oily encounter should I leave her in the marina she's called home for several years now, not given the possibility that BP's crude would continue to flow well into August and perhaps beyond. So I checked my boat's vital fluids early Tuesday morning, fired up her engine, coiled her shorepower cord, removed her canvas flybridge cover, and otherwise prepared her for the long sad trip to Miller Marine, a boat yard to the north where a truck will eventually pick her up and transport her to a marina my wife BJ and I've picked out in Jacksonville.

The atmosphere on the docks as I made ready was pensive, inconclusive. Friends and acquaintances wanted to know what I was doing, what my plans were. Most of them were planning to wait a few more days to decide whether to haul out, stay put, or try to run for the safety of more southerly waters. I've always been a tad conservative concerning navigational matters and other marine-related decisions. My take on the whole mess, particularly in light of reports about oiled-in boats I'd got from a friend in Pensacola some few days before, was simple, if none too pleasant. Better safe than sorry!

My friend Ed helped me with Betty's lines just before I pulled out. As I stood on the old girl's flying bridge during the rousing back-and-fill turn that typically puts me square in the fairway and headed in the right direction, I shot a few glances over my left shoulder to see Ed waving goodbye. There are some goodbye gestures you tend to remember and I guess that was one. I waved back and yelled, "Goodbye Ed." 

The day itself was misty for starters but soon turned gorgeous, the best the Florida Panhandle has to offer. The sun shown like diamonds on the green depths and white sand guarding the opening of Grand Lagoon. As I crossed into the main channel I could see the Gulf of Mexico over Betty's stern stretching south to a bright steely horizon. The presence of commercial vessels, construction barges with cranes, and what I took to be skimmer boats in the vicinity of Shell Island constituted an unusual sight off the starboard side. As Betty and I toodled along a few memories bobbed inevitably to the surface.

Three decades ago, I worked as a commercial seafarer on the Gulf of Mexico, and I've lived alongside its immense loveliness much of my life. During one period, for a whole five years straight almost, I never once set foot inside a house, living as I did on a Bristol sloop on the fringes of  St. Petersburg and working weeks and sometimes months at a time on oil-field supply boats and oceangoing tugs, sometimes plying the Gulf, sometimes not. I remember the whales we used to see from the decks and wheelhouses of those vessels and the giant hammerheads and how we used to go swimming in the evenings sometimes, jumping off bollards and exhaust trunks like kids at a swimming hole. In hundreds and hundreds of feet of water that was clearer than air, bluer than ink.

I especially remember a trip from Tampa to Houston, to load grain for Haiti. One afternoon, myself and another guy were standing at the rear of the Betty Culbreath, a big oceangoing greyhound, in the shelter of a giant towing winch. The weather was atrocious, with heavy seas, white horses for miles, and a gloomy sky. However, the colors, shapes, and power of the scene as we looked aft, off toward the barge we were towing and the miles of emptiness beyond, were indescribably spectacular. "You know," I said to the other guy, as we both stood there semi-stunned by the stormy beauty of it all,  "You see stuff out here in the Gulf that you simply can't explain to people ashore. This is magnificent." "Yup," he replied, "It is."

Pelicans are about my favorite sea bird--I  love their droll facial expressions and their seeming sense of purpose. And I saw plenty of them diving and flying around on my way for the haul-out at Miller. I saw plenty of dolphins too. They love to ride Betty's bow wave for just a while. Betty's so slow that they soon tire of the modest levels of speedy excitement she's able to provide. The pelican above sort of followed along for a while, long enough for me to snap a picture. The presence of the bird made me wonder.  What will happen to all the aquatic birds, dolphins and other animals I was seeing if the oil eventually comes to this part of the Panhandle.

Up in North Bay I came across a long, seemingly unending strip of brown sludge riding the tide line. In light of recent news reports and the periodic oil-spill trajectories put out by NOAA, the stuff was most likely something other than oil but I'm a suspicious sorta of guy, especially when it comes down to promises and pronouncements made by governmental and/or corporate entities. Call me a paranoid, mistrustful, old combat veteran of the Vietnam War, but hey! I found a spot where the strip was comparatively narrow and zipped though as quickly as possible,  vaguely wondering the while whether a quick frothy shot of BP sludge might be enough to gum up the raw-water pump on Betty's engine.

Just before turning into the creek that leads up to Millers I passed a fishing boat headed south. The guys onboard waved and I waved back, rather poignantly perhaps. Over the years, I've known shrimpers and commercial fishermen of all sorts, from Texas to Florida. I've worked with a few, too, guys who started out on shrimp boats and found their way into the oil patch or some other commercial line of work. Many of these people were superb boatmen, with biographies that included nothing but boats, boats, and more boats. Seeing this little vessel set me to wondering again. What will happen to all the Gulf's fishermen over the next few years, as well as everybody else who lives a life touched by the Gulf, whether deeply or not?

I took the above photo this past weekend (on May 16th, 2010, to be exact) as Betty Jane, my wife BJ, and I cruised the Intracoastal Waterway west-bound between Panama City and Choctawhatchee Bay. The beauty of what the denizens of the Florida Panhandle call "The Grand Canyon," a not totally off-base moniker given the lunar-looking sand formations that decorate the GC's sidelines here and there, was stunning and we were all encouraged to see no signs of oil anywhere, a state of affairs that may not last indefinitely of course.

Choctawhatchee Bay was seemingly clear, too. A charter captain we VHF'd  on a sparkling Viking battlewagon, however, said he was taking a "wait and see" attitude toward future inshore as well as offshore developments, most notably those having to do with the many fishing tournaments that take place along the Gulf Coast during the summers.

In any case, I noted an angry consensus on the docks at Baytowne Wharf Marina in Sandestin where Betty spent Friday and Saturday nights. "BP could stop this thing--they're just afraid they'll somehow damage the well so they won't be able to make billions off it at some point in the future," charged one guy.

A cynical point of view? Maybe. I personally wonder why our government hasn't thus far assembled an independent team of experts--sort of like the group of experts who comprised the Manhattan Project back in the day--to come up with a way to at least stop the flow of oil. BP's had darn near a month to deal with this tragedy and failed miserably. Our president should make a command decision, as we used to say in the infantry, and give somebody else a shot!  

If you enjoyed the story about the old Riva Aquarama that was made new by "The Riva Guru," Alan Weinstein of Alan Weinstein Associates of Ft. Lauderdale, but came away wondering how much cash you'll have to fork over to become the proud owner of such a classy watercraft, check out the photo above. It shows an antique Riva Super Aquarama launched in 1970 (some six years after Weinstein's Sweet Dreams arrived stateside from Carlo Riva's lake-side facility in Italy) and up for bid on Saturday, May 22, at Dana Mecum's 23rd Original Spring Classic Auction in Indianapolis.

The boat, by all accounts, has been "meticulously maintained" throughout her entire life. She went through a "mild restoration" about five years ago--as opposed to the radical restoration Weinstein did (as described in Sweet Dreams in PMY's most recent April issue)--and, until recently, resided along the shores of Lake Tahoe. She has her original Chevy big-blocks and a lobster-red vinyl interior, according to some promo material from auction officials.

Wondering what dollar amount to start your bidding at?

"Regardless of the current economic environment, the value of a Riva boat has steadily increased over the years, as evidenced by another Aquarama we sold at our recent January auction for $775,000," says Dana Mecum. "Whether you plan to use this boat daily or preserve it in a climate-controlled facility, it is a world-class investment that will no doubt continue to appreciate over time."

I love boat yards, in part because you meet such interesting people there. On Betty Jane's recent stay at the yard she visits for refits and repairs, a couple of interesting folks stopped by, using their admiration of Betty's studiously maintained good looks as an opener for conversation.

One guy'd just bought a giant Brazil-built motoryacht and the yard was trying to make her seaworthy enough for him and his friend to survive an ocean passage. The two of them picked my brain for about a half hour on the subject of varnish, perhaps because they could see so much of the stuff on Betty, presuming me an authority based solely on possession, I suppose.

Another guy told me he was a vacationaing crab-boat skipper from Alaska. Unfortunately, he'd turned the helm of his sailing yacht over to a traveling companion for a couple of fateful early-morning hours not far from Shell Island and the guy'd managed to slam the vessel into a shoal, from whence she'd straggled disastroushly onto the beach. "Just about totaled her is what he did," the guy said, ruefully. "Probably the most expensive two-hour nap I ever took in my whole damn life. Waitin' here in the yard for the insurance adjusters to come."

I digress, however.

The reason I had Betty hauled recently was her need for new bottom paint. And as I mentioned in an earlier post, I chose Sea Hawk Biocop this time around, a comparatively new product with a good and growing reputation, over the Interlux Micron 66 that's been on Betty's running surfaces for the past two years.

My take on the stuff thus far? Having had a hand in its application, I can flatly state that Sea Hawk Biocop (of the dark blue variety) is some of the easiest bottom paint to apply I've ever encountered. Although the stuff dries to the touch in just a few minutes, it goes on so smoothly and evenly that you wind up with virtually no brush marks or roller marks. Moreover, I noticed no extra thicknesses anywhere. Once the last dab of my two-coats-and-a-third-on-the-waterline job was finished, Betty's bottom looked as smooth as a baby's.

I also used a Sea Hawk product called Tuff Stuff to coat the metal brackets that undergird Betty's swim platform, by the way. A one-to-one, two-part epoxy paint, Tuff Stuff works as both a barrier coat for boat bottoms and a tie-coat between underwater metal and bottom paint, according to the folks at Sea Hawk.

Tuff Stuff brushed on a little differently than the Biocop. It seemed a tad thin and milky at first but then leveled itself out nicely, covering streaks and uneven spots within a few minutes of application. And again, it dried quite quickly in the Florida sun and I had no trouble covering it with just one coat (I skipped the second due to time constraints) of Biocop.

One more thing. I normally operate Betty at 1,750 rpm for a speed of approximately 7 knots. On the trip back to the marina from the boat yard, Betty  perked up considerably, doing approximately 8.5 knots at 1,750 rpm. Now I know--high-performance jaspers are not going to be impressed here, particularly in light of the fact that I also had some fancy propeller work (more about this in another post) done in the yard by an outfit called Marine Wheel.

But frankly, I don't recall Betty ever achieving such a stunning level of forward progress before, unless you count the times she's come down a river of some description, or had a hearty tide roaring along abaft the beam. And hey! I didn't notice any rivers or tidal currents raging on the way home to the marina.

Check out the photo above. Is Betty Jane happy going (relatively) fast or what!   

So not all boat rides are exactly dry. And this one, for one reason or another, was particularly soggy for my friend Dave Worley and I. The weather report had been totally spectacular earlier in the week...hardly any wind, lots of sunshine, balmy temperatures. However, when Thursday arrived, it dragged itself in on little rain-splashed duck's feet.

I got the above shot of Dave guiding Betty Jane toward the boatyard she visits every couple of years for various ministrations to her bottom, a fresh layer of ablative bottom paint, and various other odds and sods of the sort that make a cherished vessel look and feel even more cherished than usual.

There's one new wrinkle this year, however. Instead of the Interlux Micron 66 I typically use on Betty's nether areas, I have opted to go with a product called Biocop from Sea Hawk, an up-and-coming paint company based in St. Petersburg, Florida. The folks at Sea Hawk tell me they're expecting great things.

 Hmmmm. At present, the last of a four-gallon extravaganza (two coats of Biocop everywhere and a third around the waterline) is drying in the sun and the launch will occur just as soon as I can make it happen.

How will the Sea Hawk product stack up against good ol' Micron 66? We'll begin to see after a few, summer months have passed. As luck would have it, there's lots of slime and other grungy growth goin' on in North Florida's coastal waters during June, July, and August. 

Anything look familiar here? Of course, you've never (or probably never) seen my good friend Lee before. But the Nautic Air unit he's standing next to? Yup, it's the very same one I blogged about some while back (An Experiment Begins). You know, the one I said I was going to temporarily install oboard the Betty Jane in hopes of registering an air-quality uptick.

Well, I tried running the unit for a couple of days in Betty's saloon and, quite frankly, not much in the way of a discernible uptick seemed to occur. But then, Betty's not exactly a smelly, fume-chocked watercraft. In fact, if you stepped aboard today (after she'd been sealed up tight for a week or so, let's say) you'd likely note just a faint "old boat smell" at first. Then that'd disappear once the windows were opened even for a short time. And there'd be no smell after that, whether of the old-boat, new boat, or even weird-boat variety.

So l got to thinking. If Betty hadn't constituted a proper test bed for the Nautic Air unit, what about a vessel owned by a smoker? And more to the point, what about a vessel owned by my friend Lee who smokes cigars like they're goin' out of style and spends enough time onboard to darn near qualify for livaboard status? Wouldn't Lee's situation be a great one to test for an uptick (downtick or notick) in air quality?

"Sure," Lee agreed when I asked him to give the Nautic Air a go for a week or so. "No problem."

So a few days back, just before my friend Dave and I hopped onboard Betty to head for the boat yard that periodically pressure-washes, sands, and paints her bottom (I'll do a separate blog entry about this foggy, rain-soaked extravaganza soon), we visited Lee, dropped the Nautic Air unit off, helped him set it up and get it operational in the saloon of his boat, and then finally indulged in what we've all three agreed to call "the official pre-Nautic Air sniff test."

"What's it smell like in here," Lee challenged while giving Dave a hard squint.

"Cigars," Dave replied without faltering or flinching even a hair.

Old Navy Navy guys are like that, I suppose. And both Lee and Dave are old Navy guys. Pretty gruff as a rule, except when the conversation turns to aircraft carriers, submarines, and cinnamon rolls. 

In any case, I'll give you the sniff-test update on the uptick in a week or so. 

 They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Yeah, maybe. But to my mind, the teachability of an old dog like me is dependent upon just how open-minded said old dog happens to be. Consider the recent rainy Sunday afternoon I spent sitting in the cushy easy-chair in my office, with my laptop cracked open, and the Coastal Explorer program I downloaded just a few weeks ago percolating on my desktop.

Whaaaaaaa (as my grandmother Smith used to say)! The features of this thing, once you get into it, are so far beyond what navigation used to be (employing nothing more and sometimes a lot less than a chart, a pencil, a pair of dividers, a pair of parallel rules, and some sort of positioning device, be it sextant, bearing board, pelorus, Loran, Satnav, or when ded reckoning was necessary, the mere intuitive sense the navigator was hopefully born with) that it's pathetic. And quite frankly, I'm hard pressed to think of a GPS unit out there that can stack up, particularly when it comes to sitting comfortably at home and planning a cruise.

What makes Coastal Explorer so darn impressive is first how easy it is to use. The buttons, tool bars, and other control devices of the program work like most any other Windows application. So if you know how to use a few other Windows-related apps, you pretty much already know how to use Coastal Explorer. Creating a route is both incredibly easy and incredibly intuitive, for example. You simply click on an Add Route button, click on your starting point, set the next waypoint (click), the next after that (click), etc. Once you're finished a name is suggested, although you can choose your own moniker if you want. You can even employ a feature that surveys your route and lets you know if you've managed to chart courses over rocks, buoys, sand bars, you know, that sort of thing.

Other groovy features include a button that lets you superimpose aerial photography over your chart and adjust the transparency of the photography so that you can see both it and the chart at the same time. When I did this with an area I know from experience is mis-charted (the inlet has shifted a half mile or so southeast from where it's shown on the chart), I couldn't help having a rather self-righteous ah-hah moment. "Ah-hah," I said to myself, self-righteously, "the photo proves me right...the chart's way off on this one. I mean, way off!"

Add such capabilities to tide graphs, guide book info, topographic overlays, weather updates, panoramic photos of whatever area you happen to be interested in and hey, I'll take this approach to navigation--or rather the planning of navigation--over hovering above a chart table (with a pencil behind my ear and as much hope in my heart as I can muster) any day!    

Okay. So this looks pretty simple, right? You simply cut the old, broken piece of teak out (see the ol' clunker shown above as well as the pix in the previous post: Uh-Oh!) and then scarf in a replacement piece, secure it to the underlying metal supports with bolts, countersink the heads of the bolts in the fresh teak, then plug the countersinks with teak bungs and wait for the weather to turn everything silver gray and uniform.

Wrong!

The preceding bunch of verbiage would make a lot of sense if it was actually possible to put a bit of a bend into a 1 1/2-inch X 3/4-inch teak plank that happens to be only about five foot long. But since such a piece of plank is so short as to be virtually unbendable, you have to go another route, employing an old-time wooden boatbuilding technique called spiling to accomplish a fix.

How does spiling work? Hmmmmmm, there are various ways of doing it, but  let me try for a brief explanation of how the technique was used to cut the piece of teak shown above to perfectly replicate the original plank, bend and all. I'm going to toss in a crude drawing (I did it myself) that may help:

The first thing you do is fit a piece of scrap board (pine works well) underneath the missing section of plank (with both ends cut diagonally with a coping saw to prepare for a couple of scarf joints) and secure it as shown in the drawing with temporary clamps. Make sure the piece of scrap pine or whatever is  reasonably flat, without a trace of warp.

The next step is the critical one. Use a woodworking compass (something like navigational dividers, but with a pencil on one end) to replicate the curve of one of the inner planks on the scrap planking, arcing across from one diagonal cut to the other. The key here is to make sure you keep the compass at right angles to the inner plank as you go along, thus drawing a curved line on the scrap that connects the two diagonal cuts and accurately parallels the inner plank you've chosen to work with.

The penultimate step entails marking the ends of the replacement piece you've drawn. Once you've done that, you remove the clamps and either transfer your scrap drawing to an appropriate slab of teak and cut out the finished piece or else cut the drawing from the scrap with a band or reciprocating saw and use what results as a template to cut the final version.

In either case, the job's remainder is comparatively straightforward. After doing a dry fit to make sure all is well, you simply secure the scarf joints at the ends of the teak replacement piece with epoxy, and bolt and bung the thing to the supports underneath.

About the only thing I've got left to do on this whole deal is mix some fine teak saw dust with epoxy and use it to fill and fair the older planks around the repair--I've decided to remove both brackets for my Weaver davits to obviate any problems in the future.       

You know...just about the time you figure all is well, something comes along that upsets the apple cart. Last Sunday my wife BJ and I paid a visit to Betty Jane just to make sure she was alright. Because of the abnormally cold weather in Florida this winter we haven't done much day tripping of late and our time aboard, at least for the past couple of months, has consisted basically of checking to make sure Betty's main engine hasn't frozen up solid, her water system isn't generating ice cubes, and her lines and other peripherals are chuggin' along okay.

So what happened here? The way I figure it, during an extraordinarily high tide during the preceding week (North Florida tends to have radically high/low tides during the winter months) one of Betty's criss-crossed stern lines got hung up under one of the Weaver davit brackets on her swim platform. As the tide went out, the line remained in place under the bracket, eventually pulling it up and away, along with a sizable chunk of one of the planks of the swim platform.

This particular plank section was slightly broken at the time my wife and I purchased Betty in Maryland, by the way, perhaps due to a crunchy encounter with a Chesapeake Bay piling. So the tragic little uproar shown above had historical antecedents.

At any rate, while I removed the Weaver bracket with ease thanks to the corrosion-resistance of high-grade stainless-steel bolts and nuts, the remainder of the plank was another story. Because the bronze (or brass...I'm not sure which) bolt fastening the plank section to the support underneath was seriously melded with a counter-sunk nut under a teak bung (thanks to effects of mucho saltwater), I had to twist and break the bolt off using a couple of pairs of trusty Vice Grips.

The fix turned out to be a little more complicated than I'd originally hoped for. For starters, I'd thought to simply 'squish,' as my wife and friends from neighboring boats suggested, the broken plank section back into place, add some epoxy to the equation to unitize the whole, and after the whole shebang had cured, smooth it out with an electric sander to achieve a reasonable aesthetic.

I should have known! After I'd attempted to put everything back together with slow-curing epoxy, the job simply did not even come close to my (some would perhaps say) rather perfectionist standards concerning boat repair. Indeed, while the job may have looked vaguely like a silk purse to a dairy farmer (not to be overly critical of the folks I used to milk cows with as a lad) it nevertheless bore the aroma of a sow's ear to me (not to be overly critical of the porcine race I used to feed and care for as a lad) and would never have been satisfactory long-term.

"I don't have time to fix this thing the way it really needs to be fixed," I noted, after ripping out the squished-epoxy extravaganza I'd managed to create before it cured. "But I bet my boat-carpenter friend Steve Mattke does."

Last I knew, Steve was pretty well along with the project and I can hardly wait to see the results. Yeah, scarfing in a new section of teak plank will cost my wife and I a couple of hundred dollars, most likely, but the job will finally effect a repair that's been hanging fire now for almost five years. And most likely, the whole thing'll look better than ever!

And incidentally...someone at the recent Miami Boat Show told me about a plate assembly now made by Weaver that lets you remove its problematic spring-loaded mechanism (and stow it some place safe) until you actually are going to use it. I'm gonna checkidout!

Anyone who reads the stuff I write will eventually see that I'm a little tetched on the subject of boathandling and slow-mo maneuvering. There are a couple of reasons. First, boathandling's very important--unless you can easily and safely extract your boat from various marinas and docking situations and then return her to either the same or another marina or docking situation with the same relative level of ease and safety, you can't really enjoy all the other aspects of cruising, fishing, or whatever else you want to do. And second, I love boathandling and slo-mo cruising, even though it's taken me years to learn how to do it and cost me more than a few scrapes, dings, and bouts of anxiety.

The picture above was taken from the flybridge of a boat I recently tested out of Miami--the Bertram 511. I snapped the photo while we toodled along the Miami River, a fairly narrow, scenic (it's loaded with boats, tugs, and island-hopping ships), and somewhat congested stretch of water that separates Bertram's manufacturing facility from sea-trial city, otherwise known as the Atlantic Ocean.

At any rate, while navigating the Miami River I was able to get pleasantly familiar with an onboard feature provided by the folks at ZF--it's called Autotroll. Yeah sure, there are numerous engine-control systems available on boats these days, but this one struck me as being particularly nifty, principally because it's so darn simple. Quite frankly, I've played with several other systems over the past few years and none of them seemed so self-explanatory and ergonomically comfy. Check it out:

The only evidence of Autotroll shown above is the small, squarish panel to the right of the steering wheel and mounted flat on the dashboard. Give this baby a couple of dabs with a forefinger and you're immediately in Autotroll, a mode of operation that precisely--and the key word here is precisely--controls the amount of slo-mo propeller power you put into the water. Lemme give you a close-up of the panel below:

The way this thing actually works is what I like most about it. Once Autotroll is engaged, you simply adjust your engine-control levers while gauging the result by monitoring a vertical series of annunciator lights on the sides of the squarish panel, in much the same way that you monitor trim tab deployment via a dashboard control panel. Fine-tuning operating speed in the slo-mo realm's never been easier. And, as I mention in the sea-trial report on the Bertram 511 (we're talking the March issue of PMY, I believe), it beats the livin' daylights out of clunkily clutching first one engine into gear, then the other, in hopes of maintaining steady progress along a restricted waterway without disturbing other vessels, particularly those tied ashore, with a sumptuous wake.

But hey, the frosting on the cake is this. Should you need to stop in a hurry (I remember having to do so once on an especially terrifying evening when, as chance would have it, I caught vague sight of an unlighted vessel smack dab in the middle of a narrow channel that had remained fairly obscure on my radar, due to clutter from nearby buildings), you simply pull your engine-control levers into reverse and get full power automatically. Cool! 

Okay, so now it's official. Betty Jane's new flybridge cushions will appear in the Upgrade section of Power & Motoryacht's March issue. At the present moment, the folks at Jones Upholstery, a local place that does both marine, residential, and commercial upholstery repairs and replacements, is  most likely finishing off the project and tomorrow (Saturday) I hope to toodle on over to the marina in my Prius (redolent with the smell of fresh high-grade, heavy-duty marine vinyl) to try the cushions on for size, fit, and aesthetics. Exciting? Oh yeah!

If anything, the pricing of the whole deal was more surprising than anything else. While I'd expected to pay a thousand dollars or more, six brand-new cushions from Jones only cost me about $600, a sum I couldn't quite believe until I'd checked with other shops in Florida that proposed similar bottom lines. Gives me hope, actually. At some point, I'm planning to replace the fabric coverings on Betty's interior cushions and, from what I can tell (based on the cost of the exterior cushion replacement job), the blessings of affordability may waft down upon me in the next couple of years, not the next couple of decades.

The machine the Jones guy (shown above) is using is German, by the way, and very old. According to Randy Jones, Jones head honcho, such machines are rare these days and quite valuable. They offer higher levels of control and precision.

One other important thing I learned from Randy goes as follows. For some reason or other, I've been under the impression for years that marine-vinyl welting (a raised tubular-type edging on cushions and other upholstered articles) is a separately manufactured product that's typically marketed and sold to upholsterery shops for incorporation into new cushions and other products. While this is indeed the case with some upholsterers and manufacturers, Jones and others refuse to use pre-manufactured welting, choosing instead to make their own (as is illustrated in the photo below) on site.

Why?

"First of all: color," says Jones. "If you buy welting already made up it's quite likely that the color you get will not match the marine vinyl material you are using to make your cushions."

Then there's one other consideration--quality. According to Jones, if a shop creates its own welting using high-quality marine vinyl and UV-rated thread from an outfit like Glen Raven Mills (the folks who make Sunbrella canvas products), the shop knows what it's got in the end--a solid product that will nicely accentuate and strengthen a new cushion for many years into the future. Go with pre-fab welting, Jones adds,  and while the job may look decent initially and save a customer a few bucks, the end product is likely to look like a silk purse trimmed with a sow's ear as time wears inevitably on.