I’ll save the suspense: yesterday (January 2, 2022), Fran and I moved to the Florida Keys! We’re renting a place in Key Largo for all of January (thanks, Jim and Kathy!!!), and we’re scheduled to close on a house on Big Pine Key on the 28th of this month. We’re so excited!
Loyal Readers will recall that we recently sold the boat formerly known as Smartini (renamed “Vahevala” just last Saturday) and that we’re now hoping to do a lot of extended-stay land adventures. As to the title of this post, “Smartini” has always referred to Butch and Fran (Smith and Martini = Smartini) since long before there was a boat with that name, and will continue to refer to us. One day, we may buy a house and name it Smartini, but we are Smartini, and Smartini is us. Got it?
Anyway… with us being on the boat for five years, and my son (Fran’s step-son) Bennett being in college for those same five years, we haven’t been able to spend very much time with him for far too long. So we fixed that: we spent a month in New York City, where he recently graduated from college and now lives, so that we could get some quality time with him.
Continue reading “Smartini’s First Land Adventure: New York City”Not the boat named Smartini, but rather “Team Smartini” – Fran and Butch. See, two weeks ago today, we stepped off the boat named Smartini for the last time, leaving her in the very capable hands of her new owners, Linda and Brian Werder. They’ll be continuing The Big Adventure that we started five years ago; already they’ve gone way farther up the East Coast than the boat has ever been before, all the way to Urbana, VA, a little town on the Chesapeake Bay. They’ll stay there until the end of hurricane season, then head back to FL, then the Bahamas, and then wherever their adventuresome souls guide them. We wish them luck, and hope they enjoy living on Smartini as much as we did. They’ll be renaming the boat “Vahevala“, from the 1971 Loggins and Messina tune of the same name.
Continue reading “Smartini Runs Aground”May was with us for more than 5 years. This is a celebration of that time.
Me: “Bennett, what’s this black cat doing in the house?”
Bennett: “Oh, that’s May. You know, from Mom’s house. Since Mom sold the house, she can’t keep May anymore. She’ll only be here until we can find another home for her.”
Me: “Yeah, I know who May is. Well, I guess she can stay here until we find her a good home.”
And so began our five year relationship with the best kitty ever. (You may think you have, or have had, a good kitty, and I won’t argue. But May was the BEST kitty ever.) We never found another home for her, because, to be blunt, she HATED other animals, and everyone we knew who would love to have her already had at least one other pet. After a few months of trying – and a few months of her sitting on my lap for what seemed like hours every day – one day I said to Fran “Well, I don’t suppose it would be horrible to have her on the boat.”
Continue reading “May the Boat Cat”We’ve been wanting to visit Dominica for a long time – ever since we started planning this Big Adventure severeal years ago, and looking at the islands individually. Fran, in particular, has wanted to see it. A few weeks ago, we did, and we were not disappointed! I think it’s the most beautiful island we’ve visited – it’s so green and lush, the word “jungle” is always on your mind as you travel around. But the waterfalls – WOW WOW WOW!!! We walked / hiked / swam to seven, and every one was just gorgeous – and one was, for me, maybe the most beautiful natural feature I’ve ever seen, anywhere in the world. (Eric McKinley, I know you like hiking to waterfalls – you NEED to go to Dominica!)
Look at the attached map of the Eastern Caribbean, and you’ll see that Grenada (not Granada – that’s in Spain!) is almost as far south as you can go without hitting South America. Trinidad and Tobago are the very last islands before Venezuela, but because of security concerns, we decided to skip them. That means Grenada is likely the farthest south we’ll get on this Big Adventure, even if we finally make it down the coast in the Western Caribbean. For you map nerds, we saw 11 degrees, 59 minutes North as we came around the southern part of the island, and at that point, we were 1,443 nautical miles (1,659 “normal” miles) from Satellite Beach, our Florida home for the twelve years before departing. According to Smartini’s electronic charting system, we traveled about 3,920 miles to get there, so there has been a lot of side-tripping and revisiting favorite places along the way, but that was the whole point of the trip, after all.
We spent all of October in Grenada, then went to the US for 32 days to visit friends and family all over the country. We returned to Grenada for a little more than two weeks, before leaving there on Christmas Eve, beginning our long, slow trek back north. (We spent over a week in Bequia – it’s a favorite spot! – then a few days on St. Vincent, and now we’re exploring St. Lucia.)
We liked Grenada – Fran liked it A LOT! It’s the first island we’ve been to so far that’s green and lush and beautiful for its peaks (the tallest is 2,756 feet), rainforest, and waterfalls, and it’s covered with hundreds, maybe thousands, of species of tropical plants. Everywhere you look you see bamboo, bananas, papayas, coconuts, nutmeg, sugar cane, cocoa, mangos, and flowers of every color, shape and size. The people are mostly friendly to tourists, although tourism is only their fourth largest source of revenue. They make delicious chocolate on antique equipment, and rum (that tastes like paint thinner!) on ancient equipment. We did our first Hash while we were there (see “Hash House Harriers” – it’s a drinking club with a running problem) – they do one almost every Saturday, and have been doing it for over 30 years! We got to meet and hang out with a bunch of cool boat people (virtually all of them sailors, but we’ve grown fond of them). We got to spend time with two couples we’ve met along the way who we dearly love – Max and Whitey on Nutmeg, and Paul and Liz on Oneiro. And we finally got to have a visit from my almost-niece Abby, who dealt with all the vagaries that boat life could throw at her, from a dead main engine to missing a flight home, like the world-class traveler that she is.
So here’s Grenada, in pictures!
So that’s Grenada! We liked it – I hope you did, too!
This is my third and final post about using inexpensive microcontrollers to gather boat data and send it to Signal K. The first one was an overview, the second one detailed the hardware involved, and this one will detail the software.
There are two main bits of software involved – the Signal K Server, and what I’ll refer to as the Sensor Software. This post deals only with the Sensor Software – the software that is installed on the microcontroller to gather data from the sensors and then send it, over wifi, to the Signal K Server software. The Signal K Server software is most likely running on a Raspberry Pi, and you can read all about it on the Signal K website. For purposes of this post, I will simply assume you have the Signal K Server up and running, and that you did a standard installation of it.
Continue reading “DIY Sensors with Signal K Part 3 – The Software”(This post was originally published on the Signal K Blog site in August 2019. http://signalk.org/2019/08/20/sensors-part-2.html It was written as part of a 3-article series. I decided to post all three of them on the Smartini Life blog. If you’re not a bit of a nerd, this may not be your cup of tea.)
In a previous blog post, I wrote in general terms about using small, inexpensive microcontrollers to gather all kinds of data around your boat and make it available on your boat’s network through Signal K. In this post, I’m going to describe, in detail, the device I built and deployed on my boat to gather and report four temperatures from my main engine. I hope it’s detailed enough so that you could duplicate the project yourself. Don’t be intimidated by the idea of doing this yourself – this was only my second ever real microcontroller project – it’s not complicated.
In this post, I’ll detail the hardware aspect of the device, and will address the software details in the next post.
Continue reading “DIY Sensors with Signal K Part 2 – The Hardware”(This post was originally published on the Signal K Blog site in August 2019. http://signalk.org/2019/08/04/sensesp-sensors.html It was written as part of a 3-article series. The next one in the series is here: http://signalk.org/2019/08/20/sensors-part-2.html I decided to post all three of them on the Smartini Life blog. If you’re not a bit of a nerd, this may not be your cup of tea.)
When we bought our 14 year old trawler in 2016, I knew I wanted to improve the instrumentation. Not only the obvious things (chart plotter, radar, sonar, etc.), but also data about the engine that would alert me to a problem long before the engine started coming apart. At the Miami Boat Show, I stumbled across the Digital Yacht booth, where they were showing some equipment that used a new marine data standard called Signal K. It would let you see all the data from your boat’s data network (NMEA 0183 and 2000) on any smartphone, tablet, or computer screen, via wifi. “COOL!”, I thought!
Continue reading “DIY Sensors with Signal K”It’s often said among boaters that cruising is “fixing your boat in exotic places”. At times, it certainly feels that way. In August, while we were in Sint Maarten, we “hauled out” for 16 days to get a number of boat projects done, and this is the report of that haul out, and of the several other projects we’ve completed since then. My standard warning for all posts like this is that they’re probably not very interesting to many of you, and you won’t offend me by not reading them. (The original “Work, Work, Work” post, from early 2018, is here.)
Continue reading “Work, Work, Work II”When we left Florida on the Big Adventure on March 1, 2018, we were hoping to eventually make it to Grenada, which is one of the last islands in the Caribbean before South America. Yesterday, we made it!
We spent two months in St. Martin (French) / Sint Maarten (Dutch), where we hauled Smartini out of the water for 16 days and completed a lot of projects. (That will be the subject of another post.) But by the middle of September, we were getting tired of worrying about the next Tropical Wave spinning off the coast of Africa – was it going to come our way? Would it develop into a Tropical Storm, or a hurricane, and would it visit St. M? Would we be in a safe enough place to avoid damage? We decided to get while the gettin’ was good, and a forecast of calm weather for a week or more was all we needed.
Continue reading “We Made it to Grenada!”A quick tropical storm update for those following along at home: Dorian is passing by Sint Maarten as close as it’s going to get as I type this – about 90 nautical miles (104 regular miles). Winnie the Pooh would describe today as “blustery”, which you can see in the picture. Unless the storm takes a radical right turn in the next few hours, we’ll come through it unscathed.
We’re “on the hard” right now – hauled out in a boat yard, for some routine under-the-waterline maintenance. Today marks two weeks since the haul out, and if the weather today doesn’t hinder the bottom painters’ progress, we’ll be back in the water tomorrow. We finally got smart and decided not to stay on Smartini during the haul out – airbnb to the rescue! It’s nice to get away from the boat each day after 6 – 8 hours of sweaty dirty work and have a nice pool to cool off in, then a real shower to get clean in, and air conditioning to sleep in. May is diggin’ it, for sure.
Our friends Max and Whitey, who run charters on a big sailing catamaran (Nutmeg), took the boat to the Southern Caribbean (St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Grenada) for hurricane season. They’ve done some dashing around down there to dodge Dorian over the last few days.
Our friends Jim and Kathy Booth, who have a sail cat (Moondance) at their home in Palm Coast, FL, are now in the bullseye of Dorian’s projected path.
Our friends Beth and Pat Winkler, who have a trawler (Olaf) and spend their summers on it in Maine, are currently watching Tropical Storm Erin, hoping it doesn’t veer west and whack them.
Hmmm….. maybe the smartest hurricane plan is to stay right in the middle of the Caribbean Islands, and just cross all fingers and toes! So far, it’s working for Smartini.
Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about! This was from yesterday (Saturday) at 2:00 p.m.
Upper-level winds are then expected to become unfavorable for further development early next week.
At 8:00 this morning, even better!
…forecast to become less conducive during the next couple of days, and significant development of this system is not anticipated.
I think we can call this one, folks. The chances of this system reversing its shrinking trend and becoming something that will be a problem for us are tiny. I won’t be surprised to see it disappear from the NHC outlook by this time tomorrow.
I hope my series of posts over the last few days have demonstrated what we go through each and every time a tropical disturbance starts to develop off the coast of Africa. We become fixated on these 4-times-daily reports from the National Hurricane Center. We start thinking about moving the boat hundreds of miles to the south – a journey we would not undertake lightly. We weigh all the options, and discuss all the scenarios, multiple times every day, for several days.
This one is going to end happily (with 99.95% certainty). Not all of them do. Our friends Maxine and Whitey have lost two or three boats to hurricanes over the last 3 decades. Our friend Robert lost one in 2017. The lagoon in St. Martin / Sint Maarten is littered with reminders of how serious this needs to be taken. Over the next few days, we’ll discuss, yet again, the wisdom of even being here at this time. Should we take the next nice weather window and head for Grenada? Or maybe at least part of the way there, to Martinique? Or should we look at the long history of the lagoon here as an excellent hurricane hole, and just stay put? Hurricane Irma was a monster storm, in both size and intensity. If the Saffir-Simpson scale went higher than Category 5, Irma would have been a SEVEN when it came through here! It’s incredibly unlikely for something like that to happen again such a short time later.
Decisions, decisions. But for now, the only decision is Bloody Mary or Mimosa with breakfast!
When you get the updated NHC report on “your” tropical disturbance, you’re usually hoping for some change – a new forecasted path that takes it farther away from you, or a downgrade in the winds, or the rare and beautiful “it’s just going to fizzle out” forecast. You’ve waited 6 long hours since the last update – you want an UPDATE! But the 2:00 p.m. update yesterday gave no such satisfaction. The image was virtually the same as 6 hours before. (See below.)
(This post was supposed to come out yesterday – August 1 – at this time. Sorry! You’re going to get an update in just a little bit.)
Yes, it’s the title of a Jimmy Buffet song. But it’s also a good title for this blog post, which will describe what it’s like on Smartini when a Tropical Storm / Hurricane is brewing out in the Atlantic and headed our way. Rather than my normal style of waiting until something is over to write about it, I’m going to do this one each day, to try to convey a sense of the process we go through each time the National Hurricane Center posts an image that looks like this:
