New Photo, and more to come!

This is Aimee. And she's freaking hot. Grrrrr....

This was taken at Anita's birthday party, which was a total riot. Pulled out my cameras and studio gear for the first time since....I can remember, and it was like riding a bike (with a bottle of scotch... : )




No, literally, I had a bottle of scotch, Johnnie Walker Red, to be exact...

Tomorrow the 4Runner leaves her birth at the 526 house, and will leave under her own power - a momentous day for me.

Peace yo, 6:00am here I come!

Danny

4Runner

I must be brief, as my deadline to 2359 Sunday is impending, but I'll say that my beast of a 5-year project (mostly just sitting) is coming alive once again, and it is a sexy monster. Here are a few pictures from the ol' iPhone, with more to come once I'm out of the garage on Sunday.

Cheers,

Danny

First Night's Sleep...

Last night was my first spent aboard Rafiki, and thankfully it was not the last. I brought one of the interior cushions back to the boat (the rest are still drying out) along with my sleeping bag and a pillow, and hoped for the best. Rain water leaks have almost been eradicated, and I did get one of the finicky interior lights to start working again, but my boat and I are still getting to know each other, and it is quite evident to me. For example, I found out the hard way that the kerosene lantern gets very hot, especially the brass piece that hovers an inch or so above the glass flue. Burning hot. Fingers under the raw water tap for 2 minutes hot. Also, I believe that my depth perception/vision might need to be analyzed again, as the port side settee/bunk is not actually as wide as it looks. In fact, it is approx. 3/4 the width of my body, from shoulder to shoulder, making the inevitable tumble to the floor an immediate issue. Heat is also something that will have to be considered in future sleepovers, as sometime during the night Mr. Heater decided that his life was not worth living, and silently slipped away from us in my sleep. Which made me cranky. And since I discovered that my propane system did not have a solenoid valve installed to secure the system from leakage, I did not attempt to turn the propane heater on either. So my 8:00am alarm was put on permanent snooze this morning when I realized that it was cold outside my 10-degreeF sleeping bag, and I resisted waking until 10am. Yay.

In other news, I'm still working on my 4Runner, as it must be out of Sue's garage by the 31st of the month, and I'm sure it will be. The new fuel tank is being made at Ballard Sheet Metal, I just did the finishing welds and painted my winch bumper, and on Monday I'll be building the rear bumper. After that, the new spring perches and bump-stops get installed, followed by e-brake, safety belts, headlights, interior electronics, and many other miscellaneous items. If anybody has garage or storage space where I could park my vehicles while in Mexico, Alaska, etc I'd love to pay you for it, as long as it's reasonable.

Well, today I'm off to Plain, WA to visit my Auntie Ann and Uncle Jim with Aimee - so pray/chant/sacrifice/put crystals on you head/do yoga poses so we can get some snow!

Cheers,

Danny

I'm on a boat!

It's dirty, smelly, rusty, leaky, engine-less, and old.

And I'm loving it.

On Monday it arrived at Delta Marine shipyard where Christian and I were waiting in the pouring rain, and within a few hours we had the boat in the water, mast rigged, sails on, and dodger up. Around 2pm we fired up the 15hp Honda outboard (for sale, if anyone is interested...) and took off down the Duwamish waterway to stir up chaos and confusion at every bridge we encountered along the way. After much gnashing of teeth (over the lack of sailing, on Christian's part), we pulled up to the Safari Explorer around 6pm (fully in the dark), much to my relief. We first saw this boat on the 20th of December, and until 6pm on Monday night (January 11th), I have not been mentally stable. : ) I spent hours upon hours, day after day, looking up individual expenditures that would be involved, talking with surveyors/yards/shippers/marinas/insurers/family/friends, and finally I got to look out my bedroom window and shout "That! That is MY boat out there!"

Now, a few days later, my boat no longer sits outside my window, but rather surrounded peacefully at 1900 Westlake Ave by 3 houseboats, a stone's throw away from the "Sleepless in Seattle" houseboat. On Tuesday morning Christian and I craned the old, dead Sabb (not Saab) 2-cylinder diesel out of the boat (quite seamlessly, and without incident) using the back-deck crane on the Explorer, then took the boat to her slip on Lake Union - but only after an hour or so of sailing to satiate Christian's appetite for heeling angle. : )

Since then I've removed the outboard, cleaned out the engine bed (yucky), emptied the lazerette/propane locker, removed four SUPER heavy 6-volt batteries from inside, stripped and washed all of the interior cushions, made two FULL Pimp Wagon loads to the storage unit (anchors, rode, sails, junk, etc), and have created a growing, glowing list of "Danny-do's" and "To Purchase" items. They say a boat is like a black hole you throw money into: I say suck it - I love this stuff! There are also other things that are said of men, ships, and the sea - but I know not of such things, but only of my own desire to drink of the lavish insanity that is "Cruising" and to never regret a thing.
So we'll see how that goes. : )

In other news, I've got until the last day of the month to get my 4Runner out and running! Which means I'm going to have to bust-balls (pardon my AYV - American Youth Vernacular) on that particular project starting...last week! On the list are welding a fuel cell, re-securing the wiring harnesses, fixing drive-line issues, installing the instrumentation and packing up all of my tools once she's done! Much of the interior electronics will be done once the truck is out of the garage, as time allows - but I'm sure my desire for good tunes will take care of that in a timely manner.

Also, I just signed Aimee and I up for our Open Water Diver Certification course at Seattle Scuba, which just happens to be located less than 100 yards from my boat's new slip! So yay for diving! In addition to dive training, I'll be taking a 4-day captain's license course in Portland, Oregon in February which will give me a green light for "legally" being the "Captain" on ANY of our ASC/ISD vessels.

Oh, and if anyone happens to have boat stuff they don't want, like:
-An inboard 20-30hp diesel engine, with either standard or V-drive transmission
-Large 12v solar panels, Furuno 1715 radar, Isotemp Square hot water heater, or a 12v marine refrigeration system
-Electric windlass with manual over-ride and chain/rode gypsy
-Interior lights, especially LED's, and a 30amp galvanic isolator
-A dripless shaft seal, cutless bearing, Spurs, 1" stainless shaft and a 3-blade Autoprop
-A spinaker that is sized for a boat my size-ish (34') with a dousing sock
-Flares, nice life jackets, Splash-zone
-A wooden ship replica.......actually, no, really, seriously....I don't want one...please.....no....keep it away...

Feel free to let me know! I'm on the prowl, and the boater's swap meet is only a couple months away (and I might miss it when I'm in Baja! nooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! )

So now for some pictures...if I can get them off my darn iPhone.

Cheers,

Danny

A New Chapter Begins: S/V Rafiki, ALSO: Road Trip 2009!

December 29th, 2009, at roughly 2:00PM Pacific time, in Monterey Bay, California is when and where I made my first boat purchase. One of many big days in my life, this was simply a step in a direction I've been talking about for far too long, but with no action to back it up. Of course, being as anal and picky as I am, it really is no surprise that it took me this long to finally "pull the trigger" as my friend Greg put it, and commit myself to one particular vessel. For the past three years or so I've been looking at a variety of boats, mostly old, thick-hulled, full-keeled fiberglass boats ranging from 1959 to the mid 1980's. But it has been just in this last year that I've turned my sights towards metal boats, both aluminum and steel (the titanium, stainless, and uranium boats were just too expensive), and in that realm I feel far more comfortable. In the past 5+ years I've been working at American Safari Cruises, all of my experience has been on metal boats, and that has definitely been a factor in selecting a metal boat as my own. But prior to working at ASC I was a wee student in high school, taking community college courses at Everett CC to complete my HS diploma. However, since I spent much of my high school years at a private school, and just so happened to be a bit of a nerd, I had 90% of my required classes completed before I started my senior year. So I took the gracious State of Washington's Running Start $$$ and took 25 credits of welding/metalworking, spending an average of 30-40hrs per week running beads and playing o/a and plasma torches. It was there that I really grew to appreciate the many applications of metal working, and became comfortable with a medium of construction typically reserved for larger vessels.

Anywho, all of this leads up to the fact that I decided to buy a steel boat (aluminum is just too rare in this part of the world, and too expensive for the ones that are over here) and make her mine. The currently named "Happy Farmer" is a 1984 Bruce Roberts design steel solent-rigged cutter, double hard-chine with fin keel and full skeg-hung rudder (tiller steering). She came with an Aries windvane (with rebuild kit), New Profurl rollerfurling, 4 Lewmar self-tailing winches, linear-drive electric autopilot (it also has a cheep-o Simrad tillerpilot as well), a Garmin color chartplotter with depthsounder and external Miltech AIS system, a Dickenson propane cabin heater, a propane stove with oven, an 18hp 2-cylinder Saab diesel with variable-pitch prop (it is currently dead - head issues: I'll probably yank the whole system for a new, standard setup), a crappy head that needs replacement, a two-basin deep sink with fresh and salt water, and a bunch of other stuff. I don't really have any great interior photos right now, but the few I've posted above are from the haul out and survey I had done on the 29th. She has some work that needs to be done, and it's going to take some $$ to get her to my liking, but I believe it is a good base to start at, and I like it. It's a tank. I plan on building a hard dodger/pilothouse hybrid for it as the overhead is a bit low for my liking in the galley area (about 5'9"), adding hot/cold pressure water and shower, slap on a radar, and a fair number of smaller projects throughout it's rebuild.

Moving on...

Aimee and I just got back from a two-week roadtrip to California, rounding out the odometer at approx 3,250 miles driven. Christian started off the trip with me from Seattle and we did some camping and sailing on the way down to the Santa Barbara area.... Christian even managed to convince some boat folks on the dock in Sausalito that they needed us as crew for a day sail under the Golden Gate Bridge, and we managed to run around around 8:00pm on our way back in - a great little adventure all in all. Once we got to my Mom's place in Carpenteria, Christian met up with his family for a surfing trip, and Aimee flew in from Seattle and we began our part f the trip together. We did the San Diego Zoo (AWESOME!), Disney Land (also, AWESOME!), the Monterey Bay Aquarium (AWE....not really that mind blowing, but they do have big tanks), visited my Mom in Carpinteria, visited friends in Chula Vista and family in Carlsbad, hostel'ed it up in San Francisco for two days (had two wonderful nights out with my lady), and just yesterday we stopped in Portland to hang out with a friend - and now we're back home, and exhausted. We nearly killed each other a couple times, we both were sick for some portion of the trip, and the food wasn't always the best - but we survived, learned more about each other, and I bought a boat! Whee!

So January brings about a bunch of work: finishing my 4Runner, having Rafiki shipped up to Fisherman's terminal, scheduling my captain's license classes, taking Basic Safety Training (and other STCW crap if I have the time/money), buying my ticket down to Baja for early March, working on the WAV/WND, and perhaps making some time to play with the ol' photography stuff. Plus all the little things I'm forgetting.

So that is all for now: more to come when Rafiki arrives.

Cheers,

Danny