Tomicles' Blog » Sailing

New boat blog setup!

Tomicles — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 04:05:38 +0000

I setup a new blog today, for use in my e-marketing class at sjsu. The URL is FAIL check it out. I’ll be blogging there about all my boat related activities.

Tom’s Boatyard

tomicles — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 01:16:44 +0000

Over the past two weekends Ive done a lot of work on my Laser. Alfonso came down last weekend and we worked 12+ per day on Friday Saturday and Sunday. Most of my time was spent cleaning up my deck and laying glass. In order to fix the mast step I had to cut a hole in the deck and lay some glass and epoxy around its base. Before I can spray new gel coat on the deck I have to patch that hole and make the deck smooth, then cover the deck with glass. The first photo below is showing the glass lip I attached to the inside of the hole, to hold the piece I cut out. Next was to actually place and level the piece of foam and glass that was cut out of the deck and lay some glass on the seam to seal it in. In the second photo below you can see where the bondo is on the bow section. In this photo I have already laid up two layers of glass over the bondo. earlier in the week I had been putting two layers of glass over the whole deck and cockpit which really strengthened the deck and there is now zero flexibility anywhere on the deck.

Once the glass on the deck was complete it was time to start spraying the hull once again. we put two coats of red gelcoat on the hull a week ago and now it was time for about 5 more. We actually ended up running out of red gel coat before the process was complete so I have to purchase another two gallons. The waterline stripe from its previous gel coat job was showing through even 7 thin layers of gel coat as you can see in the last photo. I still have a lot of work to do to get this thing ready to sail but the process is nearing completion. I still need to do some sanding in the cockpit to prepare it for gel coat and then comes the deck gel coat along with non-skid. After that its just a matter of getting the thing rigged and spraying the foils (centerboard, rudder)

Sailing rules of the road

Tomicles — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 05:17:52 +0000

I found these videos on YouTube and found them very useful. Now I need to study a few of them and make sure they get committed to memory. I tried to embed them here but the player just broke the layout of my blog, something I guess I’ll have to look into. Here’s the link.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=41358BA1DE3D28BC

A few Days in Sausalito

Tomicles — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 02:01:41 +0000

I spent a few days in sausalito last week. Alfonso helped me work on a few projects on the boat including cutting all of the uprights to support the floor, as well as fabricating the boards to cover the floor. He was also kind enough to let me crash at his place overnight. It was very stressful as usual driving the trailer through 19th street and across the Golden Gate Bridge. As I was pulling into sausalito, I went around a sharp right turn and the car made this awful sound like I had hit something, and the boat looked crooked on the trailer. My first thought was that one of the bunks had broken a and punched through the hull, but after careful inspection, nothing was wrong with the trailer or the boat. I had to drive to west marine down the street from his office once, and while turning sharp out of the driveway of west marine, I heard a big pop again. After returning home, I dropped off the expedition at our mechanic and there are two different problems with the suspenssion. Both problems are being fixed so we can tow the boat up to huntington.

Below is a video of some of the things I worked on in Sausalito.

August 22, Pickup Trailer, Work on Trailer and the rest of the week

tomicles — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 06:53:18 +0000

The boat trailer has been a pain in my ass for quite some time. It always seems that whenever we want to go sailing, something on the trailer doesn’t work, and its usually related to the lights. If you’ve been reading my blog you would know that I completely broke the trailer earlier in the year trying to pull the boat out of the water at Lexington Reservoir. The steel damage has since been fixed, but the remaining work to be done has been to get the trailer sandblasted and painted. Before I left last weekend for the lake, I took all the electrical and wiring off of the trailer, took off any interchangeable parts (such as the hand crank wench) and dropped it off to get painted and sandblasted. Monday morning I went back to pick it up and it now looks like a brand new trailer, painted black, with no rust at all except the wheel bolts. Now the work begins. Over the next three days I spent a total of 16 hours working on the trailer to bring it back up to a working state. The next weekend was my last weekend at the lake and I needed to have the trailer ready to pull the boat out of the water. After I picked up the trailer, I made myself a list of parts that I needed to put everything back together. This included 2 x 8 foot boards, carpet, stainless steel hardware to hold the wood onto the steel frame, new wire for the lights, black spray-paint, new wheel bolts and I’m sure a few more things I’m just not thinking of right now. I first went to Kragen in Los Gatos to pick up some new wheel bolts, some trailer electrical wire, a new connector to connect the lights from the trailer to the car. They didn’t have the bolts I needed or the wire in long enough lengths, so I just picked up the connector. Previously we had a little 4 pin adapter on the trailer, then a converter to connect it to the round 9 pin connector on the car. The adapter I picked up was a screw on connector of the 9 pin variety to directly hook onto the wires on the trailer so I no longer need the adapter. Next I went to Ace Hardware in Los Gatos, just to see if they had the wood boards that I needed. I was instructed to pick up some 8 foot lengths of pressure treated 6” wide boards. These boards are to mount directly to the steel frame and then get covered with carpet to actually hold the boat on the trailer. After Ace didn’t have the type of boards I needed, I went to Home Depot. It took me a little while to find the exact type of boards to get, but I found them, and luckily too, since they only had like 6 boards the length that I needed. At Home Depot I also picked up the carpet that I needed, with some glue to hold it on the boards. I looked for the bolts that I needed, but apparently nobody carries a selection of Stainless Steel hardware (nuts and bolds etc). Next I went to West Marine to look for my stainless steel hardware. They had quite the opposite effect, only carrying stainless steel hardware. I found what I needed and went home to start putting it together.
Cutting and putting this stuff all together took way longer than I expected. I already spent about 5 hours shopping for parts at a variety of places, and now the rest of the day was to be spent putting it all together. I had to counter sink the washer and bolt heads into the boards and mount them on the trailer before I could cover it with carpet. One issue I ran into was one stupid lock-nut that worked too well. I put the holes in the boards first, and hooked up the hardware to make sure it would fit, then I would counter bore the hole for a flat finnish. Well one of the bolts wouldn’t unscrew. First it broke my socket wrench adapter, the one that lets you put a smaller socket on a larger wrench, it just snapped. I found another socket that would fit directly on the wrench, tried to unscrew it, and boom, the bolt snapped in half. Back to West Marine again to buy more hardware. By the end of the evening I successfully connected the wooden boards to the trailer. No carpet, no electrical. The next day I put the first layer of carpet on the boards, and started to work on the electrical. It was a pain to cut the carpet to the right size, but I figured it out after a bit of trying. I ended up using the old carpet as a template for cutting the new. It took longer than expected to staple the carpet on the underside, and stretch it to fit evenly across the whole thing. And I had to do the process twice, as expected the second one was much easier.
Wiring the electrical was a breeze without the boat on the trailer. I had all new wire to use, and I recently already rewired it after the welding work on the trailer was done, so I was quite familiar with the process. After the electrical was done the only thing left to do was connect the riser that holds the front rubber bumper and the winch to pull the boat up onto the trailer. Another issue came up. Since the trailer was painted, I had no idea where exactly, closer to the car or closer to the boat, to mount the thing. Luckily i got it right on the dot, and didn’t have to mess with it at the lake. when all was said and done, it took me about sixteen hours over three days to complete the trailer. This would not have been possible if i was still working full time. I do enjoy my free time now.

Huntington with Phil, Joel and Cory

tomicles — Sun, 21 Aug 2005 06:50:27 +0000

Sometimes it is hard to find people to come up to Huntington with me. Not to mention that I usually ask people last minute when people’s plans change and they cant make it. This weekend I planned on meeting Joel and his girlfriend Cory up at the lake on Saturday after they went to the Coldplay concert, and I invited Jenn to come up with me, but she couldn’t get out of work, so my friend Phil came with me. We went up Saturday morning, had an uneventful drive, and went sailing in the afternoon when we got there. Joel and Cory stayed at their friend’s house in Santa Cruz on Friday night and spent they morning with them, so they didn’t make it up to the lake until about dinner time. We had a good night playing some games on the boat and the next day, we had a great sail. It was the first time that any of them had been sailing, and they all had a great time. In the afternoon after we ate lunch at Roy’s Place at the end of the lake, we beached the boat between the two little islands to check out my little sculpture from last week, but it was gone. The rain had destroyed its sand based construction and the rocks fell into the water. It was about 3pm when we left the island to head home. It took about an hour to actually get going and on the road, and as always, there was a bit of slow traffic coming down the hill. Its a windy two lane road for about 70 miles of the trip and it really slows down the travel time. Its a lot of driving for me to go to the lake every weekend, especially at 400 miles per weekend, but being up there is worth it. the weather is nice, though very hot and lots of UV rays for getting a quick sunburn, but even if I couldn’t sail, its worth going up for one night.

Week of 8/15/2005

tomicles — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 06:47:28 +0000

This week I had a lot going on. For starters, I took the boat trailer to get painted and sandblasted in santa clara and went on a nice bikeride to the top of St. Joseph’s Hill where I saw a very nice sunset. I went up to Sausalito again to help out my friend Alfonso with some computer stuff, as well as worked a bit for Cybermanor. Later in the week I went to the Control4 Real Tour off highway 92 with Gordon from Cybermanor. This was a small demonstration of the Control4 system and how they will integrate into homes of the future for home control and automation. They presented some cool aspects of home automation that I just never thought of before, including some major safety features. Some of these safety features include shutting off central air if there is a fire to stop the spread of smoke, and the flashing of exterior lights in the event of a fire to help firefighters find the location, if for example the flames and/or smoke are not visible. The whole control4 system communicates via 3 methods. It will use Ethernet, 802.11, or Zigbee. Zigbee is the slowest but also the coolest of the three, and is only used for sending control commands, like switching a light on or off because it is quite slow on the throughput, but it is a meshed network, and with a range that isn’t that great, you just need to add more zigbee devices, such as dimmers or switches, to extend the network further in the home. they relay signals off of each other, know how to figure out the quickest path, and will correct the path if a part of the home looses power.

Huntington with Adam, Matt and Jeff

tomicles — Mon, 15 Aug 2005 06:43:33 +0000

On August 12-14th I went to Huntington with Adam Matt and Jeff (not LJ) and for the most part we had a great time. It seems that whenever I get together with adam somewhere new, we always seems to feel the need to build something. Last winter on our snowboarding trip in Truckee we ended up building an igloo, and this trip to huntington, we built a sand castle out of rocks and sand atop a large bolder that was about 6’ tall, standing in about 2 feet of water. One challenge was getting the wet submerged sand dry enough to hold its place and shape before we could use it. At first we were just picking it up, and throwing it on top, but then I went back to the boat to find some large containers to help with the collection, moving and drying of the sand. The castle made it through the night, but it didnt make it through the week. This weekend was also the first weekend I got to use my new PCMCIA EVDO card at the lake, and it worked way beyond my expectations, even with only 1x service. There were 3 powerbooks using the single shared internet connection, and it worked great, no issues, and we even were able to upload a bunch of pictures to flickr from the lake at around 18kb/sec.

Weekends at Huntington (1st weekend)

tomicles — Mon, 18 Jul 2005 06:38:30 +0000

As the summer progressed, I decided that I wanted to spend a bunch of time 200 miles away at Huntington Lake on my boat. On Saturday the 16th of July, LGJeff and I, along with Paul went up to Huntington with the boat. after the four and a half hour drive with the boat up to 7000’ in the sierras, I was very frustrated to find how many people were there. It seemed like the place had been ‘discovered’ but I’ve since learned that there was just a massive regatta that weekend. The Fresno County Sheriffs were jack asses. We had the big 23’ boat, and stopped near the launch ramp to rig it and then launch it, and they came up and said “you cant rig here, it says no parking.” Well, there was NOWHERE else to rig the boat or park the trailer. After much frustration I just launched the boat with the mast down. Jeff watched the boat at the dock while Peter and I dealt with the car and the trailer. We ended up having to disconnect the trailer, leave it at one part of the parking lot, and park the car in another space. Not only could I not rig the boat on the trailer, the water was too choppy to rig it at the launch ramp. So we had to motor the boat over to Rancharia Marina with the mast down, and there the water was calm enough to raise the mast. Paul filmed while Jeff and I raised the mast. I think this is the only video i have of the mast being raised. I also got a lot of other good videos while we were there, I borrowed Amanda’s video camera and used it for a few weekends at the lake. We had a good weekend sailing and hanging out, playing liars dice. it costs too much to take the expedition there though with the boat ($125 round trip) for gas. on the way back we brought home the trailer, to be repaired. we made it almost all the way home, to about 85 and 101, and paul said that the trailer was dragging something. I pulled over, and the carpeted wooden runners that actually touch the boat, had vibrated loose. I ripped them off, threw them in the car and we were on our way.

boating in the rain

tomicles — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 05:44:27 +0000

UPDATE: Pics are Here

so for the most part I had a great weekend. I guess it seemed to start on thursday night, because I went driving with LGJeff. We went up highway 9 and came down woodside road. Once we got to the top of highway 9 the road was super foggy, and it wasnt so fun as it was hard to see. We stopped at the big lookout point down skyline, because we noticed that they had changed something about it. The sidewalk and railway and curb were completely gone. It was possible to just drive down the hill, which was a little freaky. After a short pee-break for Jeff we got back on the road and headed down the hill. I then went over to his house and we watched that night’s O.C. from his TiVo.

The next morning, my alarm didnt weak me up. Luckly my dad came to check up on me around 8:20am and woke me up. I didnt actually get to work until 9:05 when I’m supposed to be there at 8:30am. I completely missed a tech meeting confrence call since I was late, but I made up for the time with lots of billable hours for the company for the rest of the day. I ended up going to Pleasant Hill, and spending most of the day there. I must say that friday was one of the first times I had planned out a set of tasks to complete an objective for a customer’s computer problem, and nothing went wrong. In fact, everything was perfect. Im not saying I mess up a lot, rather when replacing a broken IDE disk with a ultra 320 scsi raid controller and a pair of 36gb scsi disks in a mirror configuration, stuff usually will go wrong. Instead, I installed the scsi equipment, installed the software for it on the os, still running on the IDE disk. Booted to a Ghost floppy with scsi support, and copied disk-to-disk from the IDE to the Scsi raid. Presto bingo! everything worked perfect. I unplugged the broken IDE disk and there was no headache or any issues of any kind, it just worked. Anyways, it was about 7:30 on fiday night by the time I got home, and I didnt really want to do anything. I did go however and check out Brian’s new apartment in Mountain View.

Saturday morning, I slept until noon. My dad and I then drove up to the lake to check things out, and see if it would be a good day for sailing. It was not that windy, but there were lots of things we needed to check out on the boat to make sure it was still in good working condition before we invited anyone to come with us sailing, so we went back home, and started cleaning up the boat to go sailing. I spent about 1.5 – 2 hours scrubbing the tree crap off the side and deck of the boat to make it at least somewhat presentable. I think to do the job right, I need to find a pressure washer, because some of the dirt just wont come out by rubbing it and spraying with the hose. After the boat was all cleaned out, we backed the car down the hill and got ready to leave. Our first issue arose when we realized the pivot wheel crank was broken, and we couldnt lift the boat onto the trailer ball of the Expedition. We ended up using the car’s jack to lift it up high enough to back the car under it. Once this was done we were set. We drove up to the lake, rigged the boat and had a great day. Nothing really went wrong, and we left the boat in the street at the end of the day in front of our house so it would be easier to sail on sunday. After the sail on saturday afternoon, I convinced Genoa to come down so I could fix her computer, and so we could go out and drink. The plan was to then go sailing on sunday too. As for the drinking part, we ended up going to safeway and hanging out at the house instead. And her computer was a mess, however it was very fast. It is a Dell Dimenssion 8300, 3.0ghz with 1gb ram and sata disks. The main problem with this system is that 6 people use it, and with that comes problems. The system hadnt had SP2 installed yet as they are on dialup, and no patches at all, windows nor norton. I plugged her system into a seperate network on my firewall so it wouldnt infect any of the other systems at my house, and started to repair it. I didnt quite finnish it by the time she had to leave on sunday evening, but it was much better than when she brought it to me.

On sunday, I woke up around 10:30 and worked on Genoa’s computer until she woke up around 11:30. We went to West Marine to buy a new pivot wheel for the trailer before loading up to go sail. All was good, we went to the lake and rigged the boat. Keep in mide too that it was just Genoa and I, my dad couldnt come. We got the boat all rigged up and it started to rain. I had a little chat with one of the rangers named Mike, and he said all was good, and that I could even use the gas engine if I needed to because of the rough weather conditions. He also said he would put in a work order to have a tree crew come out and trim the trees over the launch ramp so my mast wouldnt hit them as I back down the hill. We had a good sail. It wasnt a very long one because we got very wet and cold pretty quickly. There was another sailboat on the lake too, so aparetnly we were not the only crazies sailing in the storm. I mean c’mon, the wind is best then. Or at least I thought. The wind was not relly gusty, instead it sort of came in waves, of constant strong wind, then nothing for 15 mins or so. Our adventure really began when we started to pack up the boat to go home. We were both very cold and wet, and just wanted to get home to warm up. The sails came down and I motored into the dock area, tied down the boat and went to get the trailer. I backed down the hill, and pulled the boat onto the trailer. I was standing on the trailer where it connects to the car, and as I was cranking the boat up securly, I felt a crack. The trailer just under the winch snapped, and was barely hanging on to the car at all. This was very bad news because now I cant get the boat out of the water. I quickly pulled the trailer back up to the parking lot and came down to secure the boat to the dock. The trailer was totaled, and its a really good thing it broke on the lake, instead of the freeway. It broke in a spot where if it had been on the freeway, the boat would have disconnected completely from the car, because it broke behind the safety chain. A major accident would have resulted and would have most likely caused some major injuries. I dont really want to think about that anymore, but I cant seem to get it out of my mind. Genoa and I then sat in the car for about 20 mins with the heater on full blast while we tried to get ahold of someone from the parks service to come help us figure out what to do. Genoa called her fire capitan at the loma prieta fire station she works at, and he sent out a dispatch for someone to come help us. Mike came along eventually and helped us out. The boat had to stay on the lake. There really was no getting around that, since it would be near impossible to fix or find a new trailer on a sunday afternoon. So as a result we had to secure the boat where it was, but where it was turned out to be a very bad place. It was tied up to the main launch dock, and a few days before, as the lake filled up very rapidly, the anchor line for the dock broke, and made it such that the dock could swing around to the shore if the lake filled up at all. So Mike told us to motor the boat over to the rowing club’s dock to see if we could tie it up for the night there. As we got there, i remembered and saw that there are no cleats on the rowing club’s dock, since they have no use for them and they just get in the way. We ended up dropping anchor near the dock there, and motoring into a little cove right by their dock, and then tied up the front of the boat to some trees, as the anchor held the rear of the boat out the back. I locked up the boat, and we left it there. The ranger Mike then took us over to our car, and we locked up the trailer. Our adventure was now done for the day, and we finally were able to come home and get warm. Mike was a big help and he seemed to think it was fun, he also got to use his big bolt cutters to cut the safety chain off the trailer so it could be used elsewhere to lock up the trailer in the parking lot. After I got home and took a shower, I was just out of it. I could barely move. I think I was too cold for too long and it just really got to me. But instead of going to sleep super early at like 8:45 I stayed up till 9:45 to write this long blog post that people may not even read. I know I dont always read these uber long blog posts that others post. Anyways, I’m going to collapse now, LATE.

oh, Ill take some pictures of what happened tomorrow morning when I go to check on the boat before work. Check back soon for photos.