Category Archives: Reviews

Recommendation – Tipke fold-it cart

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Tipke Fold-it cart

Moving stuff

Cruising is not going on a cruise. Cruising is definitely more work than that, and a lot of that work is about hauling the freight, schlepping your stuff, getting the groceries, and so forth. We use the fold-it aluminum cart. This has been a great help hauling 4 batteries at a time, huge loads of laundry, provisions for a month. In this picture we checked into a hotel while our boat was in the yard. Here we are moving our stuff, back to the boat, all in one load, no taxi. The large wheels and sturdy construction let us easily move our stuff a half mile back to the boat. The cart takes seconds to fold or unfold and stores in a small flat package. The folded handle is designed to keep the cart in the folded position making a package that weighs only 33 lbs and is 41 inches long, 9.5 inches thick and 23 inches high. We love this cart and it has held up well over the past 4 years. An airless tire option is available although we top our regular tires off about twice a year.
If you’re not a boater this would make a great garden cart or use it to walk to the grocery store. Please support our blog and buy your cart here…

 

Recommendation – Skyroam….. bandwidth for the traveler.

7 Replies

Ok, we are cruisers, and we are supposed to be watching the clouds, catching fish, using the sup board or enjoying a sundowner. Truth is, we are bandwidth hogs. We need to order stuff, get YouTube videos about how to fix stuff, figure out the weather, follow the news, check our investments, and keep up with our friends. And then there is the blog with all its photos. Of course after dinner, we wouldn’t mind streaming a video on Netflix. Catching some NPR on Sunday morning from our home town feels kind of cozy. We want bandwidth.

What we used to do:
T-mobile’s international plan came highly recommended so we gave them the extra $50 per month. 4 lines came to about $170 per month. We would use our hotspots and things seemed to go swimmingly but after about 4 months we got a sweet text from T-mobile telling us that roaming was actually a privilege (despite the fact that we were giving up $50 per month) and they were canceling the offending lines in 30 days.

We also had a Wirie antenna. This is a router and external antenna. This worked pretty well and gave you the option of connecting to a local wifi hot spot or a 4g cellular tower using a sim card. One of our T-Mobile lines was this sim card. Unfortunately, most Wi-Fi hotspots are secured and their antennas are indoors making reception difficult. And the sim card became part of our T-Mobile problem. Just learned wirie is out of business, too bad it was a good product.

So this year we are on to plan B:
We parked our phone numbers with Google voice. Twenty dollars to transfer the number, then free, and while this does not allow international VOIP calls, our friends and family can text or leave a message on the same old number and we will be notified by email and through the voice app. While in the US we can forward to the sim we are using at the moment.

We use a local telephone sim card in our unlocked phones. Here in Mexico we get most of a month for about 200 pesos, 12 dollars for each of us. enough voice and casual data for us when we are away from the boat.

Enter the sky roam. This is a little hockey puck. Designed for frequent business travelers. You basically plug it in, or it will run on batteries for most of 24 hours 6000mah. The batteries can actually be used to recharge your cell phone if desired.  We don’t do that. Turn it on for the first time and go to the website where you need to buy some time. The charge is $9.95 per day, or $99 per month. We do the $99 making our total Cell Bill roughly $124 per month a $35 savings. Once its turned on, and provided you have purchased some time, The little light on top of the gizmo swirls for about 1 minute and finally you see a white ring on top of the device. The swirling means its busy picking out the best cellular signal to latch on to. You don’t care what carrier, the gizmo does it all. There is no need to buy a sim card. When the swirling stops, you connect the same way you would to any wi-fi, the password is on the bottom of the gizmo. You are ready to go for up to 5 devices. We often stream a couple of hours of Netflix with no problems. When we travel, the Skyroam is better than most hotels, and all Marinas.  Marina Wi-Fi is always in the brochure and is universally abysmal. And while we don’t do it, its easy to carry this hot spot with you.

We plan to try VOIP using a new app called Line.

 

Recommendation – Ocean Signal MOB1

6 Replies

I don’t think we find anything as worrisome as the idea of a man overboard.  Since we often sail with just two on board, one of us is always on watch, while the other needs to try and sleep in order to stay useful. For me, the idea of waking up to find that Lisa had disappeared in the last few hours is truly horrifying.  So, we take measures to keep that from happening.  We wear life jackets underway. We use a harness at night staying physically attached to the boat even in the lightest conditions.  We agree to wake the off watch before doing anything on the foredeck.  We do our utmost to contain this risk.

The icing on our cake of man overboard protection is the Ocean Signal MOB1 device.  This compact unit is installed on our life jackets and is automatically triggered when a life jacket is deployed.

DSC (Digital Selective Calling) is an alarm system that lets a radio user  “ring” a specific radio using the radio’s MMSI number.  Like a telephone number, the MMSI number allows another user to contact a specific vessel in the area.  The MOB1 uses this system to “ring” ALL the radios in the area, so that not only our boat, but every other boat in the area gets an alarm that says MOB. This happens seconds after the person hits the water. On Footloose, our ICOM M506 marine VHF rings loudly enough to wake the off watch.

AIS is another electronic system that is normally used to identify other vessels by showing them on your chart plotter.  In about one minute after entering the water the MOB locates itself using GPS and begins to send an AIS signal to all chart plotters in the vicinity that are equipped with AIS.  This places a return on the chart that says Man Overboard, and marks the exact position of the device/person on the chart.

Our average cruising speed is about 7 knots which translates to 12 feet per second, so in only one minute our boat has moved about 700 feet.  While the standard procedure for man overboard is for the crew to keep one set of eyes on the person in the water, for a couple cruising there is no way that can happen as the person on the boat needs to get the boat stopped and turned around. The MOB1 acts as the additional watch stander, allowing the driver, even when they can’t see their partner in the water, to maneuver the boat to the position marked on the chart by the MOB1. When they are close enough (GPS accuracy is well under 100 feet),  they should be able to see the person or the flashing beacon on the MOB1 if it is night time.

On Footloose, we carry six inflatable life jackets with harnesses and installed MOB1 devices, which we test once every 6 months.

Here is a video we prepared for crew training that demonstrates how the MOB1 works, and yes, it was made before we changed to the ICOM.

**To sleep better off watch, click link below video to order and support our blog!

 

Recommendation – Fujinon Techno-Stabi

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Fujinon Techno-Stabi

When you are preparing to cruise you buy a lot of things that you hope will make cruising safer and more enjoyable.  On Footloose no single item has had a greater impact than the addition of these stabilized Fujinon Techno-Stabi binoculars. Being able to see where you are is obviously important for navigation, but good binoculars also help with identifying other boats, exploring shore features, and watching the wildlife and birds that abound in the cruising life. Using binoculars from the deck of a moving sailboat can be challenging; the stabilizing feature of these binoculars makes it much easier.

Binoculars usually carry a marking with 7 x 50 being a common boating pair of binoculars. The first number refers to the power of the lenses, and most agree that the 7 or 8 power is as much as anyone can hand-hold on a small boat. The power refers to the degree of magnification.  8 power means that the object seems to be 8 times larger or at 1/8th the distance when compared to your bare eyes. The second number, usually between about 15 and 50, refers to the size of the objective (front) lens of the binocular. The bigger the number the better the low light performance (light gathering) ability of the unit.  While larger objective lenses are available they make the binoculars too heavy to hand hold for any period of time.Binoculars with larger objectives are usually tripod mounted for bird watching or astronomy.

The Techno-Stabi binoculars add the feature of stabilization, which is a big deal.  All of a sudden you can hand hold the binoculars with much higher magnification.  Our Techno-Stabi’s are 14 x 40.  After using 7 x 50 binoculars the change is nothing short of remarkable.  Guests and crew are fascinated by the magnification.  What color is that birds eye anyway?  If you are an optical geek, you might notice that because of the additional optical elements needed for stabilization, these binoculars may not be quite as bright or quite as sharp as say a high-end pair of Steiner Commanders, but the stable image takes you from seeing a dot with your bare eye or a buoy with the Steiners to seeing the sleeping sea lion on the buoy with the Techno-Stabi’s.

After 2 years of almost continuous use, we cannot recommend this product highly enough.  An amazing help entering the harbor or avoiding traffic, plus lots of fun for looking at wild life.  Push a button to power on, again to stabilize. Another to turn off.  They are robustly constructed, armored, and use four AA batteries about once every 6 months. 

Eye cups fold for use over eyewear
Controls

Don’t you want some for your boat?  Do us a favor and help support our blog by clicking the link below:

 

Moving Stuff… The Malone HandiRack

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Recently we decided we should unload our boat, as we were just plain carrying too much “stuff”. You’ve all seen the George Carlin bit “Stuff” right?  When you are leaving to go cruising you are not quite sure what will be important, so we spent a few hours going through every storage space in the boat and removing the things we don’t use or need. All told, we were able to remove 902 lbs from the boat, yup we weighed it as it left. Turns out our boat is more sensitive to excess “stuff” than our house was and I wanted a sense of the performance change a 1000 lbs buys you. Lucky for us, friends James and Deena will be transporting our “stuff”, in their RV to north of the border. But first we had to get the “stuff” to their RV in Guaymas, 750 miles away.

The Hobie Mirage Adventure IslandOne of the larger things we were trying to get rid of was our Hobie Mirage Adventure Island Kayak. We enjoy sailing it but we just didn’t use it enough because it was a little too much work to rig and launch from the deck of Footloose. This single item was responsible for 250 lbs of weight and would also give us the advantage of a less cluttered deck. But how to transport this beast?

A local company in Bucerias (which we recommend) was the Gecko Agency. They have all kinds of vehicles with roof racks and such and specialize in catering to the windsurfer market. People who fly in and want to experience surfing at remote beach breaks in and around Banderas Bay. They were pretty adamant that their vehicles needed to stay in Banderas Bay. As a local company, they had no way to support a vehicle that was out of the area if something went wrong.  We decided that the kayak might or might not go, but we would continue to pack and remove as much “stuff” as possible. Anyway we kept calling, looking for a trailer or something.  We found a cab company willing to do it but we needed to provide a roof rack, couldn’t get that figured out, but we developed a pretty big pile of stuff ready to go.

Finally we give up. The kayak will stay on the boat, but one more call to Gecko just in case we can talk them into an exception… No NO and NO.” It’s the one rule we never break”, gotta be able to support the vehicle…… But we do have these inflatable roof racks…. Whaat? How can that be. Yah, look em up. The Malone HandiRack attaches with straps that pass through the door openings and the passenger portion of the vehicle. The soft inflatable bladders don’t slide around and they distribute the load over the roof to prevent dents. They should not be inflated super hard. But should be sort of soft to maximize the surface area, and also to allow for increasing pressure in the hot sun.

Rental day arrives, we get a fabulous, sparkling, brand new, 3000 miles, totally shiny and perfect suburban.. Argh, why not a two-year old almost outta here rental full of nicks and dings? We load it up with our boxes plus two old anchors, and head over to Gecko to check out those racks. We go for it. But take four instead of two because it’s a big load and 750 miles. I really, really, really hope these don’t mess up that vehicle… We get a couple of cruising buddies, George and Kurt, and load up the kayak in the sweltering heat.

20180522-cellWe drive the loaded beast to Los Mochis and then Guaymas. Nervously easing her over each speed bump… Mexico loves speed bumps..Topes. They are somewhat random in nature and not always marked. The roof makes a kind of “crunkling” noise if you hit them too fast……

Finally we unload. No marks, no dents. We love the Malone HandiRack, and while it it would not be our first choice for what we did…. A solid roof rack would be much better. We think the Malone HandiRack would be great for someone that wants to use their Accord to take a SUP board to the lake, or pick up a new ladder or a couple of 2x4s from home depot.

If you think the HandiRack might be for you. You can buy one here, and help support our Blog.

Lisa will share more about our road trip in an upcoming blog, while I focus on making some recommendations of products we really like. Thanks for your support!