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I’ve wanted to change the cabin lighting in Sea Puppy since I first saw it.. The factory fixtures are a square ugly design and they also are old and yellowed.. even the lens on them is yellowed. Despite how bright the bulbs are it is not very bright in the cabin using them.. All in all they needed to go. 🙂
Being the geek that I am. I wanted to replace them with LED lights. However most LED fixtures are still fairly expensive and I didn’t want to spend a lot of money. Last week on one of the mailing lists I subscribe to someone mentioned cheap LED fixtures at Superlumination.com
They were right.. I purchased a bunch of 24 LED lights for 9.99 each. Plastic chrome with self adhesive backing and 30″ wire leads, wide angle 100 degree oval leds. They measure 3-1/2″ diameter x 1-1/4″ thick and operate at 10-14.5 volts drawing only 120 milliamps. They are rated to produce 480,000 mcd light output..
Jan 22 2006 I went out with Ben on Anago yesterday.. Winds at about 10 to 15 and seas 2 to 3 maybe… I was a nice day to sail other than being very cold… we went out about 11am and came back in around 5pm… I got to handle the steering wheel on anago for a couple hours…. it is still harder for me than a tiller.. it doesn’t give as much feedback to you and it is harder to tell where the rudder is pointing.. I had some problems with over steering and also wheel dyslexia.. I would turn it like it was a tiller and end up going the wrong direction…. 🙁 not happy abuot that but it’s getting better.
Well we have only gotten to go out a couple more times on sea puppy. I had the boat pretty well torn apart for a week or two with repairs and upgrades since the last set.
The last time I took sea puppy out was to single hand for the first time.. The sailing went well 🙂 10 to 15 knots wind and 3 to 4 ft seas and she handled great.. I cross sheeted the jib sheets accross the cockpit so I could adjust them from the high side and it worked very well. With this setup I can handle the tiller, mainsheet, traveler and jib sheets while sitting in one place. For raising and lowering sails though I still want a tiller pilot. It is tricky if you have to reach a hand for the tiller every once in a while to stay into the wind while rasing sails.. To many hands are needed.
Well it has been an intersting couple weeks.. I just bought Sea Puppy a Beneteau First 235 in the end of december. I helped Patty buy her last march and have sailed and worked on her since then with Patty. Patty is now moving up to a 323 and I was able to swing buying Sea Puppy.
Here is a picture coming into Little River Inlet at sunset from Sea Puppy.
Our first sail with me as new skipper was January 1st for the Hangover Regatta… what a blast … flat ocean and about 6 knots of wind. temperature in the mid 60’s.. we were racing a 30 footer and two other boats 36ft and longer. we kicked ass 🙂 Sea Puppy is a fast boat and handles beautifully. the 30 footer Anago would catch upto us on the downwind legs as they were running a spinnaker, but we would pull ahead on the windward legs.. at the end of the race we crossed the finish line just seconds ahead of them… The other two boats decided to go party before the end of the race as we and anago had forged so far ahead of them.
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