We have been cruising full time for two years with a “Receive Only” unit and it’s time to upgrade.
Our setup from Vesper arrived today and I can’t wait to get it installed and setup!
Adventures on Boats
I have taken over managing a new website and I wanted to share it with you all here!
Yes, this does mean extra work for me, but I do enjoy writing and creating content. My job has transitioned from being a dentist on land to be a YouTuber and Blogger at anchor. The joys of this shift in profession is it lets me work from anywhere which means we are free to journey the world by sail and explore all sorts of new lands.
Doing so with our electric motor means that we have no fuel costs and we do a great job at keeping our own costs down, meaning that the meager income we make from all our creative outlets is enough to fund our travels and keep us going!
Adventures on Boats is a website that helps people get through all the stages of Boating.
There is a wonderful section that is geared towards someone who doesn’t have a boat yet. Then the next phase will be once you have a boat and need to learn how to do everything on it. The last section is for those who want to shove off from their ties to land and venture off on a cruising adventure.
Rigging Doctor is more focused on living on a sailboat and synthetic standing rigging, while Adventures on Boats is more focused on the journeys and travels that you can have on your sailboat.
Eating Limpets for FREE!
Cruising allows you to visit incredible places for free, which means you can travel the world on a very small budget. One thing that even poor cruisers like to do is eat, especially eat delicious meals!
Limpets are small snails that live on hard rocks in the tidal zone. Limpets are also delicious and expensive!
Mainland Portugal is blessed with sandy beaches that contain large rocks that are encrusted with limpets. Do check with local fishing laws to make sure you are not fishing illegally! In Portugal, you can fish for shellfish between certain hours of the day, around from 10am to 2pm where we are right now, and this time happens to coincide with their low tide; and they have a 12 foot tide!
At low tide, you simply stroll out on the sandy beach and walk over to one of these large rocks. On the rock, you will find all of these limpets clutching to the stone as they await the return of the incoming tide.
To remove a limpet, you can either strike it with a stone at a low angle or pry it off with a knife. You get one try at it and you have to do it fast otherwise they will express water and clamp down onto the rock so tightly that you can not remove it without breaking the shell! If you fail, try the next one.
Keep them in a bucket of water while you fish and change the water frequently to keep them alive. You can add extra salt to the water to encourage them to expel any sand that might be in them.
Once you have all you want to eat, simply set them alive and on a tray shell down and put a lot of garlic butter on each one. The butter will keep them tender while they grill. You want to grill them just to the point where they pop off their shell, any more and they will get rubbery.
On my first time, I over cooked them and some were like rubber bands while the ones that got less fire time were AMAZING! The best part of this meal is that it is free! You can comb the beach at low tide and spend the rest of the day preparing your delicious treat for later.
Laundry Day
Most marinas offer laundry facilities. You usually have to pay for each load of wash, and then pay again for each load of drying. Some marinas have had very inexpensive facilities so doing laundry is easy and affordable! Other places are outstandingly overpriced!
In the states, we found that laundry varied from Free, to $2.00 per load of wash, and usually the same price for the dryer.
Bermuda was more expensive, at closer to $5 per load, but then again, everything was much more expensive.
The Azores have been very inexpensive to live and moor in, with everything costing about 10% of the price in the United States. This holds true for almost everything, except for laundry! In the marina, laundry was €5 per load of wash, and again €5 per load of dryer.
The problem was, the dryer didn’t really work well and we thought that the unit must not be functioning properly.
Then we made our way to mainland Portugal and found that the wash is €3.50 per load, and the dryer is again, €3.50 per load. Once again, the dryer just doesn’t do its job! We aren’t sure yet, but we feel that this might be due to two factors.
Dryers consume a lot of energy and in Portugal, people are really concerned about energy usage. To make dryers consume less energy, they also seem to just work less well.
No one uses dryers because hanging clothes on a line dries they with no energy usage at all!
We decided to get with the program and setup our laundry lines on the deck. I tie the clothes lines to the rigging and we clip everything in place. Laundry done in the morning will be dry by the early afternoon and ready to be put away well before that evening. Best of all, hanging the laundry out to dry cuts the laundry bill in half!
Which Keel is Best?
The two extremes of keel designs are Fin and Full. Fin keels are optimized for performance while Full keels are optimized for durability. Between these two categories are an endless spectrum of variations and in this video, we look at the extremes and some of the common middle grounds that boat designers have come to rest.
