Kotona

Pickwick Lake is the last of the Alabama portion of the Tennessee River, on its western end. It’s a lake that we’re unfamiliar with, but it will be our new cruising grounds for the next few months at least. We’ve been here a couple of weeks now, but the weather hasn’t cooperated with our...

The Fourth of July has come and gone. For many, it seems to mark the middle of summer. Of course in the southern states, summer weather lasts well into September. But from the level of boating activity at Joe Wheeler State Park, the morning of July 5, you might have thought summer was over. We...

was one of my favorite lines from Babylon 5, one of my favorite science fiction shows. It set the tone for something new, something different, without letting on how that something would turn out. It was just a beginning, but things were now set in motion, and something (or many things) was...

Every boat is a compromise, but a boat you're going to live on for perhaps a couple of years at a time, needs to feel like home. Fortunately for us, our E31, inspired those feelings early on. Still, as we prepare her systems for our planned retirement cruise, we've made a few little changes to...

One of the biggest joys of boat ownership is when you start a project thinking “well this won’t take long”, only to be reminded “Dude, what is wrong with you? This is a BOAT!” So it was with our plumbing. It started as “the toilet doesn’t work”. Well, that wasn’t really a problem; we wanted to...

One of the endearing things about our E31, is the number of quirky but very useful things that we’ve found as we get to know her. Like the bronze rods that extend from the cabin, under the cockpit, and fit through holes in the side of the lids of the cockpit lockers, locking them securely...

You know that saying “A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step”? It’s on all sorts of motivational swag. It’s not wrong, of course, but it’s a bit incomplete. ‘Cause regardless of the length of the journey, the first step isn’t enough. You gotta keep moving to get where you’re going...

As one whose profession required quite a bit of travel, I never really had a problem sleeping in a new place. There were times when I had a different hotel room every other night, before flying back home late Friday, to start again on Monday. But being retired from that for a couple of years...

Warning: Anthropomorphizing and metaphors ahead. Continue at your own risk. You’ve been warned. On my first visit to the boat that would come to be named Kotona, it wasn’t the lines, or the styling, or the gear that got me. Those were all great, but it wasn’t that, or really anything else...