Sailing from Berkeley to Hawaii in a 19ft Sailboat

> Very cool! More info on an equally charming old website here, including a remarkable letter from his wife: http://josephoster.com/billsvoyage/index.html

That letter from his wife, Naomi, contains a link to her website[1], which is itself fascinating. Its About page contains the following, which made me think her particular brand of value-add in the world is of the kind that will survive:

> I fill-in the details of the couple in each Ketubah by hand, with ink and pen, as Jewish scribes have done for thousands of years. Nowadays, most Ketubah artists use fonts and fill-in the texts by computer rather than by hand, because many have not studied calligraphy, an art which takes much time and practice to master. I, personally, like writing the details by hand, though it is not easy work, because it is traditional, and because it connects me in a personal way with my clients and my prints.

[1] https://www.ketubotbynaomi.com/

I lived on a catamaran around 2000 onwards as a kid. Solar panels were surprisingly widespread, particularly on multis with outboards (and therefore limited ability to make power through alternators). Obviously the $/W sucked, but people also didn't have as many power draws. One big drawback was older generations of solar panel had terrible performance in partial shading. A stay or rope shadow passing over the panel was a big issue because of fewer bypass diodes, simpler battery chargers, and so on. That sort of thing is a bigger issue for a yacht with less clear space for panels.

So there were a lot of diesel powered yachts generating power throughout the day. Something that was pretty common back then as an adjunct (and much rarer now) were small wind generators. Seemingly you could choose between noise and power output because the fancier ones made a racket and the quieter ones always seemed to be on boats idling their engines all the time anyway. When we entered anchorages, we'd make sure to avoid being near the loud ones. I can't imagine what it would have been like living with one.

Hydrogenerators weren't very common (they're a bit more common now) but my dad was given an old 12V tape drive motor by a friend and I remember him letting us help him build a towed generator. The tape drive motor sat on the back of the boat connected to about 20m of rope going to a dinghy propeller on a piece of stainless rod to try keep it underwater. Drilling a hole through the motor shaft with a handheld drill was the most time consuming part of the build. We called it toady (short for towed generator) and watching the input Ammeter on the battery bank go all the way up to 6A on a cloudy day felt like magic. It's part of what made me want to be an electrical engineer as a 10 year old.

Given all that, on a 19ft outboard powered yacht in 2002 a generator probably was the best solution for one voyage.

Cost per watt 23 years ago was likely $5-$10/watt for the panel plus the cost of the inverter etc. the Honda would be much simpler and was about $1000 USD and self contained

Have solar panels become that popular in the last ten years, and are people retrofitting old boats? All my prior great lakes sailing experience was on boats that would use the diesel motor to recharge batteries.

You should do it! Go Nacra instead of Hobie if needed but you should absolutely do your own version of the Worrell - just have somebody trail you in a motor boat if you need to feel more comfortable :)

Username astoundingly appropriate

Yep, name of boat ("Chubby") matches as well.

Hey great find man!

what a remarkable coincidence!

Also, John Guzzwell circumnavigated his self built 20 footer named Trekka from 1955 to 1959 and wrote a great book about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Guzzwell

https://goodreads.com/book/show/1037445.Trekka_Round_the_Wor...

Another recommendation: Racundra's First Cruise by Arthur Ransome.

I'd like to know more about the near-miss. Was it close to either port or was it during the open-ocean portion of the voyage?

The "Loose Ends" section of Teplow's write-up mentions that he didn't bring along a radar detector. Then or now, would a radar detector significantly increase a solo sailor's situational awareness?

It's on his site as well in HTML and eBook form:

https://arachnoid.com/sailbook/index.html

I read it years ago and still think of it from time to time. It's a great read.

HN submission:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=901072

His site never gets much love from HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=arachnoid.com

Nowadays virtually every boat has Starlink and 4 new forecasts every 8 hours and routing via PredictWind.

I recall reading Kay Cottee's account of her solo unassisted circumnavigation in 1988. She was the first woman to do so.

Part of her preparation was removing the labels from all tinned food, and then re-writing what was in the can with a permanent marker on the lid, before fully immersing each can in laquer. Presumably this was done to help deal with corrosion problems.

I can't think of a reason it'd be any more dangerous than if the same food was sitting on your counter for the same time period. But some people won't eat cold pizza that sat out overnight either.

When we can food, sometimes there's a jar that doesn't seal. We just put it in the fridge and use it in the next few days. It'll keep at least as long as if it hadn't been canned.

Having said all that: if I went to open a can of food and saw that it had a leak, I wouldn't eat it, because how could I be sure that it wasn't leaking when I packed it 24 hours ago? A visible leak now might have been too small to see then, so who knows how long it's really been leaking.

I used to live and work on tall ships.

We never had this issue, but we also likely had better storage conditions in that there was precious little chance of actual seawater reaching our food cans. Cans would sometimes rust on the rim, but I don't think I ever saw a can rust all the way through, despite some of them being likely years old.

This seems like overkill unless you are very convinced that your cans will come in contact with seawater.

Bacteria is everywhere.

Thanks watched one and it was neat!

Q: can anyone tell me what these solo people do when they need to sleep and it’s too deep to anchor?

Unfortunately you can't spell Hawaiʻi in ISO-8859-1.

Need to write a web extension to inject some javascript to show a loading screen for a few seconds and download a few MB of js so it feels like a modern website. Should probably wrap the whole thing in a SPA too so we have options in the future

There isn't a date but clues indicate that the crossing was decade or more ago. The Garmin 12XL was released in 1996. It is possible that was using GPS and none of the equipment available now, but more likely that didn't exist.

Solar panels weren't as available back then. Satellite messengers weren't available. Both are popular with sailors now.

Edit: It mentions other GPS units so could be more recent.