SV Cascadia

  Galley range alcove, looking port, October 2018.  Minus the range. Doesn't clean up half badly. Getting rid of the old fridge and freezer. There was at least 12 inches of foam on all sides.  One box down, one to go. Crappy galley sink removal, October 2021. Rotted countertop removal. Looking aft into the former galley, May 2022. Cleaning the galley bilge, looking starboard, August 2022. Fairing. That is as clean as the bilge and hull would get.  Almost finished painting, May 2023

Spring arrives and thoughts drift to fresh produce, less clothing, and all things fecundity. Emily and I get into food themes, and we keep making variations on that theme. Like tacos (every food delivered in a taco). Curries. Thai. Indian. Maki/temaki (every food delivered in a roll or handroll). Bánh Cuốn (every food... you get the idea). We also get into seasonal salads and tend to crack out on one salad any given summer. I'm calling it now: the 2023 Salad of the Summer is Thai Peanut Sauce Slaw. For me (Wayne), what makes any given recipe a daily driver is its ability to adapt to what one has on hand. This is not a recipe, per se , but rather a guideline to leverage what is available. This is one of those guidelines. If you think it fits in a salad or slaw, it goes in here. Apologies for anyone looking for an actual peanut sauce. I always bullshitspiration my way through a peanut sauce. And I am always happy. The DuckDuck will deliver you more peanut sauce recipes than you...

 Chapter 1 of Bikes and Boats, Better Together is here . Cargo bike hauling a cargo bike. We pared down our bicycle selections to just one cargo hauling bike for a wide range of reasons. A cargo bike is a lot like a bicycle saddle: one size does not fit all, and what worked perfectly in the past might not fit so well when things change. We replaced two cargo bikes with one electric-assist Hase Pino tandem. This is the second semi-recumbent tandem we have owned.  Bilenky Viewpoint custom semi-recumbent tandem The Bilenky no longer fit our needs at the time, but we really should not have sold it. Despite this repeated lesson, Wayne still tends to purge things the moment their usefulness isn't immediately apparent. We also would probably never go with another fully custom build: custom bike, custom problems. This issue applies to just about any mechanical thing, not just bikes from Bilenky. We combined the Hase Pino with a Surly Bill longbed trailer . Now, we can haul things that...

  Sanding and fairing, fairing and sanding... We're finally starting to put things back into the boat! Well, it's fairing compound to make the surfaces sealed and smooth. Fairing compound is a thing , right?  The inside of the hull is unsealed fiberglass, which tends to shed glass fibers and absorb liquids that land on it. In addition to the lack of interior coating, there are a lot superficial voids in the layup (think: nooks and crannies of your favorite English muffin) and globs of polyester resin from the original construction. We removed the 40 years of funk from the hull interior with a combination of TotalBoat EcoSolve, denatured alcohol, and copious elbow grease. The left test section was faired; the middle and right sections were not. We did a test with fairing, then high-build primer, and compared that with just high-build primer. Maybe we could get away with less work (HAHAHAHA!). The picture above kind of shows the difference. The area that was faired is way less ...

  Almost all of the furniture is out of the saloon. All of the fuel and water tankage has been removed. We will be replacing the rotten water tanks. After we clean 43 years of schmoo out of the bilge. Then we fair and paint the hull and bilge. We will replace the old stainless steel water tanks with flexible tanks. Why flexible tanks? So that we don't have to tear apart the boat again if a tank fails. Like a NYC street when it rains, the schmutz in the bilge makes a muddy paste when cleaner touches it. The experience is just as disgusting as it sounds. "Why does the picture of your saloon look weird?" It's a 3D model built up from many photographs ( photogrammetry ). If you care to install Blender  (it's free, open source software), I'll send you the model so you can "walk" through the boat for yourself. Also, if you own a Formosa 46, the model may be useful for your own design work. Ultimately, the entire boat will be modeled in Blender and Invento...

Original galley: too small, inefficient use of space Kill all the foam! We decided last year that we wanted to move and expand the galley. We also planned to replace the existing wiring and plumbing throughout the boat, so we knew all of the current infrastructure had to go. Over the summer, Emily started hacking away at the galley, removing a pickup truck load of foam insulation from the old refrigeration compartments. So much foam! 8 layers of 2" thick foam under each refrigeration box and 2-6 layers on each side. Forty years of water damage had worked some evil on the plywood sink surround, but the cabinet face and drawers were still solid. The drawback to all that hardwood cabinetry? It was built to stay there forever, solidly glued and nailed, thus no small feat to extract.  Previous owner covered the water damaged wood backsplash with plastic laminate. The cabin sole is 3/8" of teak and holly, glued onto 3/8" of marine plywood, which is in turn glued onto the floo...