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Girl Mechanic + Fancy Nail Polish = Fail

18 March 2015

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Girl Mechanic + Fancy Nail Polish = Fail

Sometimes, nerve damage is like a superpower. Most of my left side has pretty minimal sensation, which is all kinds of awesome when you’re fighting off super villain assassination squads or, you know, if you happen to be in mild mannered alter ego mode, elbow deep in a diesel engine, trying to reach that one […]

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Can’t Tell If Anchor Dragging Or Just Weird Wind Direction…

11 March 2013

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Can’t Tell If Anchor Dragging Or Just Weird Wind Direction…

“Tamiko,” Steve called, from out on deck, “Need you to come up and take a look at this. Tell me what you think–we’ve got a little sailboat getting…pretty damn close.” Yesterday we decamped from the La Cruz marina and found a spot in the anchorage that’s fairly close to the breakwater, which is nice because […]

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Failed Attempt at Point Conception

6 September 2012

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            We haven’t talked much about our trip around Point Conception or our first failed attempt. We left Morro Bay for Port San Luis Obispo and had a fairly nice sail down. We arrived at night, as usual, but were able to navigate through the mooring fields and find the […]

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Getting the Shaft

4 January 2012

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Getting the Shaft

Diesels are not at all like their  gasoline brethren. A finely tuned gas-fed engine sort of purrs under its breath and hums high-pitched songs of far off places to the road beneath its wheels. A diesel is not so refined. They growl and jitter and the songs they sing are not captured by the ear […]

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More big progress!

17 July 2011

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More big progress!

Stove? YES! and an oven, wiiiith a broiler. Oh yes. Brownies. We haven’t had an oven for a year. This should be good. First I fixed the wiring, it had a pretty shoddy connection at the solenoid so I stripped back the wires and crimped on some waterproof self-sealing shrink tubing connectors. We still couldn’t […]

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Why do I feel like celebrating the fact that my box traveled nowhere in two weeks?

27 June 2011

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When we bought our “new” Perkins 4.108 engine, we knew up front that the fuel injection pump was leaking and needed to be rebuilt–that’s why we got a such a good price on the engine. The previous owner had been quoted $1000.00 to have it rebuilt by a marine outfit in the San Francisco Bay […]

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Work so I can go work

17 May 2011

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After working all last week and all weekend, we’re finally preparing to go to the boat so we can, you guessed it! Work. If you want to do something big like a circumnavigation you’ll need to work pretty hard at some point. Sailing around the world is harder than something like watching TV and ordering […]

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From Humble Beginnings

6 May 2011

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This is the story of my family’s long nautical tradition. When I was small, in the 60’s, my family made a trip to the Salton Sea. My dad was a bit of a partier and his boat was a classic P.O.S. It was a 16′ flat-bottomed lake boat with a big V-8 and a direct […]

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