July 9/2024: I cannot pretend otherwise. My brand-new 2017 Boreal 47, Lunacy, overall winner of Cruising World’s Boat of the Year rumpus of 2018, ain’t so brand new anymore. Maintenance is inevitable… and more and more frequent these days. Case in point: the aft daggerboard control lines. I had, of course, noticed they were looking...
June 25/2024: It’s not often I become an “early adopter” of anything, much less navigation electronics. But this is a bit of kit I was seriously curious about. I’ve never been a fan of having a chartplotter permanently mounted in a cockpit, for various reasons, but mostly because I’d rather focus on what’s around me...
July 5/2023: This was the scene last week off Chandler Cove, on the bar between Great Chebeague and Little Chebeague Islands just north of Portland, after I intentionally grounded Lunacy to give her bottom a scrub and check on her prop zinc. This bar is quite close to my mooring behind Maine Yacht Center, with...
Oct. 4/2021: One thing I needed to take care of on Lunacy this past month was replacing the propeller zinc, the one anode on the boat that degrades fastest. I first tried doing this in the water, diving on the prop while Lunacy lay on her mooring in Portland, in what I call the lagoon...
June 28/2021: For the first time since we acquired her in 2017 Lunacy spent the past winter on the hard in storage rather than floating about somewhere warm. This was primarily a function of the pandemic, which made a Caribbean venture problematic, but also it was about time to catch breath and focus on making...
Feb. 20/2020: I mentioned earlier this problem I’ve been having with the Refleks drip-pot diesel heater on Lunacy. Having left the boat here in Brunswick, Georgia, last fall with the heater still non-operational I returned back in December for a few days to have another crack at fixing it. You’ll recall I replaced the regulator,...
Jan. 30/2020: Anyone who has ever tried to fix anything on a boat knows full well that the hardest part normally isn’t the actual fixing itself, but the gathering of the tools and parts and other bits and pieces required to perpetrate the fixing. Metaphorically, it’s something on the order of wanting the nail to...
Nov. 9/2019: During the early summer, you’ll recall, we dealt with two big maintenance items: Lunacy’s wobbly rudder and her “ovalized” autopilot/steering quadrant connection. Another adventure, not previously mentioned, was replacing the turbocharger on my 55hp Nanni diesel, as it had seized up solid through lack of proper exercise. There were two lessons learned in...
We sailed over to Popham Beach for the holiday, as has been our habit the last several years, to visit friends and family, but first there was the rudder to attend to. Or rather the steering system, as there were other problems the crew at Maine Yacht Center discovered when they took everything apart and...
The current (November 2013) issue of Yachting World contains a nice feature story I wrote about all the sailing I did on Lunacy last winter in the Spanish Virgin Islands. The theory, of course, is that this will inspire people to sail there this winter. When preparing the story, I therefore made a point of...
