Today came with an unexpected amount of progress on Gandalf! Dad, apparently, woke up with a bug in his ear about it, and so he provided the motivation I was missing to just Get To Work. Together, we pulled out the entire port bunk and the shelf behind it, cut, pried, and unscrewed the v-berth locker from the main cabin bulkhead, and worked the ( Read more... )

The day the hummingbird attacked us on the island, I had been whistling. I was thirteen, with long skinny legs and cut-off shorts, harper-blue leather hiking boots, and a tie-dye t-shirt, and I was hiking along a narrow sandstone bluff whistling the finale from the Firebird Suite. My dad, puffing behind me, kept laughing, and every time I turned ( Read more... )

Finally, I have made tangible progress on Gandalf!

( Progress! Warning, this is tedious to everyone but me, and includes unpleasant comparisons of chocolatey beverages to other things. But there are a few photos. )

This list is by no means complete, and will continue to evolve.

( In no particular order: )

So, April 30th, I happened to be checking my bank account and browsing craigslist at the same time. "Huh," I said to myself, seeing the price of the most recent listing in one window, and my balance in the other. "These numbers just about match." And then I saw what that price was attached to.

A 1974 Albin Vega 27.

A sturdy little blue-water boat ( Read more... )