By Rich

Typically when we think of internet we think in terms of performance – ie, whether the internet slows down if too many people are actively online in the house, or whether it is just slow in general. Drawing a parallel between data and water, the concept of internet performance is how much ‘flow’ capacity we have through our data ‘hose’ providing internet. When using a cell phone provider for internet aboard a boat we have an additional concern: how much total data we download within a given month. Many cellular data plans for either dedicated wifi hot spots or tethering via a cell phone (in my case, Sprint offers only the latter via my iPhone) have caps on the total data downloaded within a month before punishing surcharges set in.

Continue reading Learnings, Tips & Tricks: The Internet Aboard →

By Rich

Step 1: Make sure you fill the tanks all the way. I’m only partially kidding. Sabre’s documentation on the care and feeding of this boat is excellent, but one has to read the documentation to benefit from it. Continue reading Learnings, Tips & Tricks: Fresh Water →

By Rich

Step 1: Make sure your House batteries haven’t gone bad. I’m only partially kidding. Coming off of an adult life spent almost entirely racing instead of cruising aboard sailboats, we knew we’d have a lot to learn about topics such as power consumption when living aboard.  Watching the pace at which our batteries drained during last year’s three-day weekends caused us to go into a spasm of power conservation modifications over the winter. Happily, this season we learned that the problem wasn’t excessive consumption on our part, it was worn-out batteries. That meant that we took a series of steps to cut our consumption that basically have us ready for the zombie apocalypse now that we have new batteries. One side note: the consumption figures sited below are for Rich living and working full time alone on the boat. Obviously consumption may rise when we are actively cruising with guests, but in those scenarios we will be running the motor more regularly so preservation of the battery charge becomes much less of a concern in general.

Continue reading Learnings, Tips & Tricks: Electrical Power Consumption →