Friday Harbor to Comox, BC with the Justis boys

I'm just back from a trip so wonderful it certainly surpasses any attempt to render it in words. My close friend Cleve and his two boys Galen (5) and Daniel (3) joined me and my two boys for a week of voyaging north into Canada. It was a men's trip. Or, given the age of the men, a boys trip. Our wives thought we were crazy to go on an extended boat trip with four boys under the age of 8, but Cleve and I are the sorts that value adventure together so highly and for our boys that we'll pay just about any price.

The trip took us from our home port here in Friday Harbor to Comox, BC on Vancouver Island, via the Gulf Islands and Lasqueti Island in the Straits of Georgia. Besides being an incredibly good time of swimming and playing with our boys, it included some of the finest and most enjoyable sailing I have ever experienced.

New Poly-Planar speakers

I finally got around to replacing my ancient cockpit speakers. The covers had fully decomposed in the UV and the sound was bad. I replaced them with some new Poly Planar speakers that are beautiful and have great sound. Their construction is also nicer in that they have a SS screen and the speaker material is not styrofoam, as it was in the old ones. Now my music sounds lovely and the cockpit isn't marred by nasty looking speakers.

Solent Stay Installation

Where to begin?

I've been putting off writing this post until I had some measure of conclusion to what has been a fascinating and difficult process. As boat projects have gone, the design and installation of a solent stay on Aeolus has been the most technically difficult and, in some ways, the most physically demanding of all the numerous projects I've done thus far. This first picture is the view from where I spent most of my day today: at the top of the mast. Actually, this is looking toward my daily dinghy commute from my neighbor's dock to Aeolus. Not a bad way to get to a boat eh?

I'll start at the beginning, as my own search for information on solent stays only turned up one or perhaps two things on the web that were of any use. To honor the original intent of this blog, I will do my best to make this entry useful to others.