Recent content by Kalia

In the 2022 edition of the Golden Globe singlehanded around the world race, French professional sailor Damien Guillou experienced three separate failures of his Hydrovane on the leg from France to South Africa. This link contains a detailed explanation of what went wrong the first two times...

Four days into a 21 day passage from Kauai to San Francisco, my wife and I were having breakfast in our cockpit when we encountered our first ship. I had set a five mile alarm ring on our AIS and it dutifully announced a 700 foot bulk carrier approaching our position. The CPA (Closest Point of...

The Outlaw Ocean – Journeys Across The Last Untamed Frontier Ian Urbina Alfred A. Knopf 2021 (From the book cover) “There are few remaining frontiers on our planet. Perhaps the wildest, and least understood, are the world’s oceans: too big to police, and under no clear international authority...

On busy San Francisco Bay, I consider AIS for a small recreational vessel to be an always on essential safety feature. Case in point: crossing the shipping channel between Angel Island and Richmond in dense fog (as in, no visibility beyond the bow of your boat), the ability to announce your...

- It looks like NMEA 2000 also supplies power? So maybe only the splitter (which has no NMEA) requires power, and the VHF, Vesper8000 get it from the backbone? Or is that a bad idea (I assume I _absolutely do not_ want to be powering these things twice, once through red/black 12V wires and once...

Good article about the multiple refits and some neat photos. Clearly, money is no limitation here. Ron Holland was in the Bay Area a decade ago (or so) and gave a presentation about the boat at a local yacht club. What impressed me was the fact that at 290' high the boat cannot enter the San...

From 2005 Yachting World report regarding extensive damage to Mirabella 5 and return to the yard for repairs soon after initial launch: "Disturbing questions of procedure aboard large sailing yachts and the way the weight for anchors is calculated are highlighted in a critical official report...

On my E-342, when corrosion caused these screws to fail, I replaced both screws holding the two mast track sections together. I had someone winch me part way up the mast in a bosun's chair and I drilled and tapped a new hole just above the embedded remaining section of the original machine...

My Vesper 8000 is on a bulkhead within 8" of the fixed mount VHF. No issues with this proximity in the past year of use. The woven sliding cabinet door fronts on the E34-2 are semi transparent so I can see the reassuring green light from the Vesper unit through them. This basically means that...

I like the format of Christian's response: first about how the boat feels and only secondarily about the wind speed. My boat came without a wind speed indicator. It's been on my to do list for a year. However, I discovered that it's not really necessary to have one. Far better to arrive at...

Neil (member N.A.) and I went out on SF Bay to demo Kalia's Monitor wind vane yesterday. Blustery 15 – 20 knot winds typical of August in this part of the world. Upon initially deploying the Monitor paddle just outside of the Richardson Bay channel, a coupling between the air vane and the shaft...

Lost in the discussion of windvanes vs. autopilots is the pure pleasure of sailing without electronic assistance. I sail Kalia singlehanded on San Francisco bay and its coastal waters with a Monitor windvane and a Raymarine wheel pilot. There are very few days where the windvane does not play...