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DIY autopilot for sailboat – Part one
Instead of buying a complete autopilot our plan is to do a DIY autopilot for our sailboat. The reason is to save money and also because it is a bit fun. Both of us has pretty good knowledge about the general theory for autopilots, control theory which we both has read a course in university about. Thomas has also studied, and currently works with electronics design and Petra is a software developer. So, we both have some background knowledge about this stuff. But if you are interested in learning about this stuff and to spend time on it, it should be possible even without education, the internet is full of…
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Plans for 2020
Today, on New Year’s Eve, it is 200 days left until our planned departure date, when we will set sail towards the Caribbean. During 2019 we did a lot of renovation and set sails for the first time and sailed around in the archipelago. We got to know our boat and made it more livable again after a lot of years abandoned. But this post is not about what we have done, it is about what we have left to do before we leave. Winter months During the coldest months we will focus on: finishing the interior inside the boat finish the electricity (some lamps left etc) get a solution…
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First mahogany lists in position
It’s been a couple of days since our last update here, but we blame Christmas holidays for that. We have spent some time working on the boat as well but also taking some time off to spend with our families. One thing we have done during Christmas is to set up the first mahogany lists in the guest cabin. We painted the vertical plywood strips black in case of gaps between the mahogany lists. The black material behind the mahogany is an insulation material called Armaflex, which we use both as a support for the lists and extra insulation. We also moved the boat to a protected winter harbor for…
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DIY autopilot for sailboat – Part one
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New inlet socket for 230V & leakages
In this blog post we will share some of our work from last weekend; continuing with our 230V system and also uncovering more leakages on our sailboat as we remove more styrofoam. Since there was no rain for a couple of hours this weekend we managed to do some outside work, which was to add a new, fine inlet socket for the 230V system. The connection towards land was earlier just a hole into one of lockers in the cockpit. The hole was on the outside of the cockpit which didn’t we thought didn’t feel so safe. So we took a piece of teak and made it look nice and…
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Buying our cruising sailboat
We thought that we would share some thoughts about buying our cruising sailboat. In December 2 years ago we went to look at our first cruising sailboat. We want to share our thoughts we had before buying the boat, what features we looked at and things we would prioritize differently if we would buy a boat today, 1 year after a lot of renovation. When we first looked at boats we had no experience of Bluewater Crusing, but a lot of knowledge about renovating boats. This blogpost is written after spending 1,5 years of renovating the boat and this is something that might look a bit different after actually done…
