Sea Heather came equipped with fairly decent sails: Mainsail, Staysail, Jib, Genoa, and Asymmetrical Spinnaker. They are a little dirty, but have no tears, and because the previous owners had not put the sails up in 8 years, the sails have not been exposed to damaging UV radiation. She has a nice roller furling jib. The mainsail is equipped with a simple lazy-jack that contains the sail quite nicely while lowing. Immediately after buying Sea Heather we replaced all the running rigging with New England Ropes line because the original stuff was deteriorating badly. New England Ropes seems like decent enough stuff, not too expensive, but we'll give it some time and see what happens. We installed a boom-vang, renewed some of the blocks with slightly larger ones to support the "offshore-cruising" goal. Generally, we feel pretty good about the rigging now.
Future plans: Fair-leading the halyards and other mast-lead lines back to the cockpit, adding a roller-furler to the staysail, and possibly (if we win the lottery) replacing the jib winches with self-tailers. That's really about it. We like things simple.
Ground Tackle:
We recently replaced our windlass with a ProSeries 1000 by Lewmar, and our chain with 5/16 HT to match the windlass gypsy. To read about the installation click here: Windlass Installation
Sea Heather was equipped with 300 ft of 5/16in Proof Coil galvanized chain and a plow anchor as a primary fed through a manual windlass. The backup/second anchor is still an aluminum fortress with 200 ft of nylon rode and 10ft of chain because it stows nicely. Paul has a few things to say about the old manual windlass, but we're trying to keep this website clean.
Future plans: Hope the new Lewmar keeps working
The Dingy:
The beloved dingy, (originally hated by Paul) has won our hearts. It is an 8ft bomb-proof fiberglass dingy
that stows fairly well under the boom. Paul recently broke down and purchased a Honda 4-Stroke 2 hp engine
for it and has loved it ever since. It's perfect for dropping crab pots, taking the dogs ashore,
painting the stripe, and varnishing the teak rails. It is now slightly blue because Paul isn't quite as good
at keeping the paint on his brush as Saesha.
Future plans: Paint the dingy Blue.
Navigation:
Sea Heather is now equipped with a state-of-the-art Global Position System unrivaled by anything under $300!
It took Paul many moons of research to discover that it was totally unnecessary to purchase an $800 chart
display system. All you need is a laptop computer, a USB GPS, and one of the many software packages available.
The software you pick will ultimately drive the price, but if you go to the NOAA web site www.noaa.gov,
and follow the links to Navigation and Electronic Navigation Charts you will discover a gold mine of 100s
of USCG approved electronic navigation charts and now every paper chart has been scanned into a raster format. All for FREE! The problem is that industry doesn't support these for the
most part (probably because they want to be able to sell 20 chart packages at $250 a pop!).
Fugawi (www.fugawi.com) has, however, decided that they will support the ENC charts and the raster charts.
So for $200 you can have software with hundreds of approved charts that are constantly being updated
by NOAA. Then all you need is a USB GPS. They come in all sorts of sizes and prices. The one Sea Heather
uses was $80 and is not "marine grade" so it's mounted with a little piece of Velcro to the inside of the
cabin window (it has never had a problem getting a fix, and usually tracks 6 or 7 satellites).
Then the laptop is mounted on a swiveling Wal-Mart special TV mount above the chart table to keep it secure and out of the way. The laptop power is supplied by a DC to DC converter that eliminates the need to run the inverter all the time. Also, the laptop comes with it's very own built in backup battery incase the boats batteries die or something. It works great!
The backup is a hand held Garmin Gecko GPS.
The backup to the backup is an ancient Loran-C receiver that seems to work just fine.
And the backup's backup's backup is a sextant that I only vaguely know how to use.
Future plans: None really, except to beg Fugawi to send us the new version of the software seeing as how they updated it right after we bought it!
Entertainment System:
A simple Sony stereo that accepts an input from the laptop with nice Bose 161 and 151 speakers.
The laptop can also play DVDs.
Future plans: Projector and a screen, or a big(ish) flat screen TV for movies! Probably a pipe dream.
Knot Meter:
We still use the one that came with the boat. Works well, but the paddle wheel gets clogged easily
with marine growth and requires constant cleaning. If anyone has any suggestions,
please click on the comments link and let us know…
Radio:
Sea Heather is equipped with a Quest+ Standard Horizon with a remote mic mounted in the cockpit.
This was a fantastic addition eliminating the problem of having to run down to the chart table to make a call.
Also the new radio came with a display that wasn't cracked like the one it replaced.
It is DSC ready as well, but neither of us knows how to use that function, and probably never will.
Electrical:
The goal here is to create a system that is completely self sustaining "off the grid" with a minimum amount
of engine time (it's a sailboat remember?). So Sea Heather is equipped with two banks of batteries.
One starting battery and one bank of three deep cycle batteries for the house.
Then she has an Air-X Marine wind generator mounted to the A-frame.
The wind generator puts out a huge amount of power (up to 35 Amps or so) as long as the wind is blowing HARD.
What happens when it isn't (i.e. most of the time)? Well, the batteries die of course!
The Yanmar 3-cylinder engine still has the stock 55 Amp alternator which is really not quite big enough,
but it works.
She also has a 1000 Watt inverter in case we need to run power tools or use the microwave while underway
(yeah, right!). Finally we recently installed one 125W Kyocera Solar Panel with a 30Amp ProStar charge controller. Click here to find out more:
Future plans: Not much to add here. We'll see how the solar panels do.
Radar:
We have a Furuno 1623. Simple, cheap, yet effective.
Future plans: Maybe someday Fugawi will update their software to accept a Radar input so we can display the radar info on our computer as well… but until then this will have to do. The screen sits in the panel over the chart table.
Depth Sounder:
Sea Heather's current depth sounder sucks. Maybe this is because of operator error, but the thing
constantly goes on the blink (literally) and its accuracy is questionable.
Future plans: We also have an old fish finder that Paul plans to install sometime in the next decade when he figures out where to put the transducer.
Aeries Wind-Vane Steering Gear:
This portion of the website will be updated when Paul and Saesha figure out how to use the darn thing.
Future plans: Figure out how to use the darn thing.
Engine:
Sea Heather was re-engined in 1994 with a Yanmar 3-Cylinder 34 hp diesel. It's in perfect condition.
Another piece of dumb luck (see "The Boat" link to the left for explanation). We never really new how
important it was to have a high quality well maintained engine!
Future plans:
Baby the engine because if it breaks we'll have to sell the boat!
Maybe get a bigger alternator.
The Head:
Sea Heather was equipped with a decent hand flush toilet and a 100 gal (?) holding tank when we
purchased her. Of course the holding tank was not in fact connected to the toilet (or anything else for that
matter). So Paul did some research and decided the simplest and most fool-proof method to pipe the system
was to run the toilet directly (and only) to the holding tank. Then the holding tank goes out to a 3-way
valve to either the deck fitting or the macerator pump (also installed by Paul), then from the macerator
overboard. Simple, right? In this case it actually wasn't too bad except of course that every fitting
in the whole system required a different size tube.
It came from the toilet…
One night as they nodded nearly napping suddenly there came a gurgle!
Saesha poked Paul and said "What was that?!" Paul, as usual, said "Nothing, go back to bed."
A few minutes later it gurgled again and Paul turned to Saesha who was sound asleep and poked her and said
"What was that?!" So she groaned and smacked him. Paul got out of bed and wandered into the head from where
the funny noise emanated, turned on the light, and to his horror saw that the toilet was filled to the brim
with the unmentionable while it gurgled noxious air and threatened to overflow!!!
So he did the obvious and pumped the hell out of it to get it to go down. Whew! That was close! He thought and climbed back into bed. Ten minutes later he awoke again to Saesha poking him saying "Paul! What was that?!" He slowly rolled out of bed again to go investigate. This time, however, the toilet was thankfully not overflowing, but seemed content to gurgle incessantly for attention. Paul watched it for a while, then climbed back into bed while Saesha put earplugs in her ears. The next day they pondered what had happened and came to the conclusion that the holding tank must be full, so they sailed Sea Heather over to the pump-out station and did the deed.
Three days later… "Gurgle… gurgle… gurgle!" There's no way we filled that tank in three days! They both thought to themselves. "What is going on!" Finally Paul had an epiphany. If the tank isn't full, and it's bubbling back out of the toilet something is creating pressure, and if something is creating pressure the tank must not be venting! Engineers are so smart! So Paul found the vent on the tank and followed a garden hose from the tank located under the V-berth, under the main cabin, all the way to the transom! Well there's the problem! The tank couldn't vent because the garden hose was clogged with water or whatever and couldn't drain because the lowest point of the 25ft vent was lower than the tank.
The simple solution was to cut the hose and run it with no low points to the port bow as high up on the freeboard as possible. That way it doesn't collect water. Done. Problem solved. No more gurgle. Future plans: Maybe a treatment system at some point… but probably not.
The Kitchenette:
Propane three burner stove with a little oven. Cold machine conversion unit in the ice box with the
compressor in the engine room against the recommendation of the user manual (not much choice really).
Two 50 Gallon water stainless steel water tanks centerline beneath the sole of the main cabin with pressure
provided from a Jabsco 4.5 gallon/min pump with a 1 liter accumulator located under the sink, and a 6 AC water heater.
We recently piped the engine coolant through the water heater. Click here for details on that simple project: Engine Heat for the Water Heater
Future plans: A new stove (the current one works fine, but is slow to heat and is pretty ugly). Replace the faucet with a nice new brass one. Replace the sink with a nice new one.