Cotter Pin Leg Experiment

In one of our videos, the amount I spread the legs of a cotter pin was brought into question. I spread the legs 15 degrees because that is what I learned when I was reading about rigging.
The rationale behind it is the cotter pin legs need to be spread enough to hold the pin in place. The more you spread the legs, the more the legs will be able to hold the pin in place; but the more strained the metal will be and that could lead to the leg breaking and failing to retain the cotter pin!

The two schools of thought are: 15 degrees or wrap the legs around so they come back and touch the head.

Which is better? Which is stronger? How much is the metal stressed in the process of bending?

I set out and tested this very question and will be making a video about it shortly, I just wanted to let you guys know about this project I’m working on!

Some quick results:

Test 1: 15* 487 cycles, 90* 44 cycles

Test 2: 15* 545 cycles, 90* 85 cycles

There is a bit of spread between the two tests, but the results are pretty consistent that spreading the legs 15* hardly strains the metal while bending the legs 90* is 10 times more stressful to the cotter pin!

Getting Ready to Return to the Boat

We flew home to visit our family over Christmas, but now the time is coming for us to return to the boat.

We, as usual, are flying with many weird items that we feel are important that we transport.

These items are:

1. New Dodger

2. Replacement Electric Motor

3. Replacement Electric Motor Controller

4. Wet Suits

5. SCUBA gear

6. All our Camera Equipment

Some of these items are necessary to repair or replace our gear on the boat, and some of these items are the result of Christmas Gifts!

Either way, now we have all this large and odd cargo that we need to get into our suitcases so we can take it back to the boat.

At the beginning of our trips to the States to visit family, the end of the trip always seems so far away and so dreaded. We enjoy seeing everyone and visiting with old friends. Then time passes and we seem to get a hankering to get on a plane and fly back to the boat. This itchy feeling that we have spent enough time here and we need to get on the move again overcomes me and drives me to go.

I wonder if this is a result of knowing that the visit is coming to an end or if I just am used to always being on the move. In our sailing lives, we get somewhere and enjoy that place deeply. Then one day, we wake up and are ready to go, so we raise anchor and leave!

I wonder if when we finally sail back to the states, will that feeling still exist in me? Will I settle down somewhere only to get that hankering to go again? Will I then feel stuck or trapped?

GoPro Media Mod

YouTube has become our main income source while cruising. It has afforded us the ability to go cruising and stay cruising! When we left the marina for the first time, we had a few months budget saved up in the boat. As time went by, we slowly spent that money for necessities like food and for fun things like excursions on shore. This meant that our cruising kitty started to get a little thin as we weren’t working our old jobs anymore!

Our YouTube videos started to grow in popularity and this began paying us a very meager income. At first, we were earning around $100 per month. This might sound like nothing, but our monthly budget was only $500; meaning that our earnings from YouTube accounted for 1/5th of our monthly budget! Suddenly, that $100 became a chunk of money to us.

We worked on improving the videos, slowly learning what works and what doesn’t, as well as learning how to edit better and tell our story. With time, our channel grew larger and larger until it reached it’s current state of 16k subscribers. Still very small, but much larger than it was when we started!

It seemed that the videos had gotten as good as our equipment would allow them to get. We can edit all we want but when we are editing bad footage with bad sound, the end result is a bad episode. We were now earning enough money from YouTube that we decided to upgrade our equipment, and this included a new camera.

Our original vlogging camera was a GoPro Hero 5, which we have used everyday for the past 4 years! It is an incredible camera and a true workhorse! We upgraded to the GoPro Hero 8 and splurged for the Media Mod.

The Media Mod gives the GoPro better sound by using a better microphone on the camera. It also gives you the ability to connect an external microphone as well, giving you much more control over the sound you will collect. You are more likely to enjoy a bad video with great sound than you are to enjoy a great video with bad sound. Improving the sound quality is very important and we have high hopes for great sound with the Media Mod.

From my initial and very limited testing, it actually gives better sound than our Rode VidMicro! I am very excited to see how this little guy will play out in our future and to see the increase in video quality that we can create with these better tools!

Dog-bone Dyneema Soft Shackle

Want to replace your steel standing rigging with synthetic standing rigging? Easy!

Simply swap out your steel stays for Dyneema stays.

Now all you have to do is swap out all of your bronze hanks that will chafe on the synthetic stay with soft hanks. These with dog bones are very secure and incredibly easy to operate!

Sailing around the Southern Tip of Portugal

Sail along with us as we round the southern tip of Portugal where we come across the sink-hole laden coast of Algarve, Portugal!