Madsu, Media

Madsu Speed

Our little sailboat is no speed demon. For one thing, Madsu is a few decades old and of fairly conservative design. She’s also a swing keel with not a lot of aerodynamics at play down at that end of things.
And with 7 weeks to wait for our new 150% genoa, we’re stuck with a tired 100% foresail.

All that said, we’ve had some really fun nights the last few days, playing with the inflow and/or outflows of Howe Sound – sometimes both over the course of an evening.

We use our handheld GPS in lieu of a knotmeter – here’s a shot of our respectful 5.2 knots on a beam reach heading towards Bowen Island. Fun.
Madsu at 5.2 knots

Media

Barter for Beer

Since we bought the sailboat I’ve been cruising Craigslist to pick up a few things – mostly extra PFD’s for guests and the odd bit gear.

It’s been my newest fun read – some of the ads are hilarious and some are downright brilliant.  Like this one in the barter section:

Date: 2007-06-14, 5:23PM PDT

I have 18 ice cold Molson Canadians that have been given to me because i gave them a dog crate. Now I’m a huge Canadian fan and i’m perfectly willing to sit down and drink them but my buddy(starting to wonder) wants to know what i can trade them for. So, any offers. Of course you must be of legal drinking age.

Once again, the power of the internet put to some good use.  I hope Molson guy posts an update to let us all know how he makes out.

Media

Smooching Cats

Dragon (on the right) lives across the street, but with impeccable timing, finds his way here just as the food bowl is being filled.

Apparently Ozzie doesn’t mind a bit.

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Now if we only got along this well with all our neighbours…

Media

Small is the new Big

We’ve jumped on the bandwagon. Small is it.

Our new (to us) sailboat is small – just 22 feet. That means less to maintain, tiny little winches even the kids can manage, and fewer $ paid for moorage.

Consequently, our new tender is the smallest Zodiak made – the C200. It’s just 6 feet long and can be pulled out of a bag and inflated in less than 5 minutes flat. Tired of rowing ? We push it along with a 2 hp Honda outboard. The fuel tank is a whopping 1 litres.

And we get to the marina and back in our tiny but mighty Yaris – a five-passenger five-speed ball of fun that seems to never need gas.

Media

NFB site wins CNMA

Beating out the multi-million dollar CBC news and the Ottawa Citizen (hmmm, there’s a joke in there somewhere) the NFB’s super cool Filmmaker-in-Residence site won a Canadian New Media award Monday night in Toronto.

A Vancouver film maker I know says he saw a demo of the site while in Toronto for the Hot Docs film festival, and the NFBer showing the site mentioned simply that it was done by ‘somebody from Vancouver’.

Those somebody’s are all vets of the now defunct (and much missed) CBC Radio 3 Magazine, which may explain why its sooooo damn hot, and proving once again that Vancouver harbours some of the best Flash brains around.

Congrats guys, you know who you are, and I for one am super proud of you work (again).

Media

Boats and Web Sites

I’ve been remiss in posting – busy launching a new web site and a new (old) sailboat.

The web site is for Capers Community Markets and should go went live today in the next couple of days.

The boat’s a lovely old Catalina 22 swing keel that’s currently on a trailer in the driveway as I clean up some of the electrical (well, all of it actually) in preparation for a summer on Georgia Straight.

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The interesting thing is Ozzie has taken a real liking to the little plastic boat. He’s been exploring every nook an cranny and climbs the step ladder to join me as I putter around below. He’s been quite attentive as Garnet explains all the “parts of a boat” to him.

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The boys and I have hatched a plan to take Ozzie out for a sail after we put the boat in the water next week.

Oh, and special thanks to the guys at Martin Marine in North Vancouver for the patience helping me figure out how to get the boat ship shape.

Next stop will be the chandlery to see if we can find a cat PFD. Safety First!

Oh (again). I you have a little six foot dinghy you’d like to sell, let me know.

Media

RSS Catch Up

A few days off the grid and suddenly I’m a bit behind in my reading. In my case, that means RSS feeds. Five days in Tofino results in just a few articles to catch up on…
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Ouch. Time to do some power skimming, that’s for sure.

Of the hundreds of feeds I subscribe to, the biggest output, not including wire services, was from a group of feeds at the International Herald Tribune.

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Media

Air Travel – 10 Bucks Goes a Long Way

1 Comment

I’m super impressed with WestJet. I wish they were paying me to say this, but they aren’t.

westjet

My two kids traveled on their own from Vancouver to Winnipeg to visit their cousins. They were treated like VIP’s on both legs, but you pretty much expect that (particularly since you’re paying extra for them to travel un-accompanied).

On the way back from Winnipeg, one of my guys left 10-dollars in cash in the seat pocket in front of him. He was pretty bummed hours after getting home when he remembered what he’d done.

Later that night, the phone rings, and it’s WestJet on the phone. They were calling to check to find out if we could identify the object left behind in the seat back pocket. Sure enough, they’d found the 10-dollar bill, and were calling to arrange to return it !

Unbelievably, their ads about pride of ownership seem to be true.

I’m now their biggest fan – way to go WestJet. Not only are you backing up your hype, you made a 12 year old very very happy.