The down and dirty of our little boat (this is a work in progress). I see this on every single person’s sailing/boating website out there (save one, actually) when I click on “The Boat” or “HomeSweetHome” or whatever they call it. I’m thinking there will be pretty pictures of interiors and stuff but instead I get how many spare sails they carry and what size bolt holds their through-fittings in place, and oh jeez how freakin’ boringImightsleepnow.

So here’s our Boat Dork info for those of you who feel this is blinky-eyed fascinating shit. If it bores you to tears, serves you right.

GENERAL
Model: Searunner A-Frame (Trimaran)
Designer: Jim Brown
Length: 32 feet (design is actually 31 but ours is special)
Width: OH fer crying out loud, BEAM: 18 feet

AFT CABIN ACCOUTREMENTS
Galley: Swedish 2-burner alcohol stove (the “Bern” from IKEA); um, sink; some stuff
Refrigeration: None, nada, nonexistant, zip, zilch, zero, nichts, naught, no-can-do, negatory. We’re coming over to your boat for the cold beer.
Sleeping Arrangements: Settee table slides away and seats fold down into a nice comfy double berth.

FORWARD CABIN ACCOUTREMENTS
Sleeping Arrangements: Two single berths
Dressing Room: Sink, bilge pump below
Head: Porta-potty thing. Holds 4 gallons of the narsty. We’ll see how this works out; I really hate to have to poke more holes in the boat than necessary.

ELECTRONICS
Radioage: VHF (white) with trucker-like gizmo to talk into; hand-held VHF (boring, black, needs to be recharged for a specific number of minutes, which is sort of irritating. Someone needs to invent one of these things that runs on seawater) – Oh, it’s an ICOM IC-M32; Grandpa Tucker is sending us his old SSB (YAY! Email!), hopefully it isn’t ginormous or else it’s getting mounted on Joshua’s side of the bed; tape deck (that means it plays cassettes, of which we own none, except the Jimmy Buffet that came with the boat. I see a watery grave for that, actually.
   Updated to add: SSB received; it’s pretty huge. I think it was made in the 1730s. We’re brainstorming ideas as to where it could fit on the boat. See, there are TWO parts, one really large one that’s the “radio” part and one even larger part that is the tuner and evidently required for the first part to work. Maybe we could add it to the mini-keel for additional ballast. (Has lots of cute knobs though.)
GPS: One large and one small spare, which is sparkly blue and which we will probably use most because it requires fewer batteries
Navman depthfinder/knotmeter
Misc: Laptop (such dorks); I-River mp3 player (plugs into the cassette player for some speaker action); 2 (cough) digital cameras; 72-inch wide-screen TV with surround sound

PROPELLANT
Sails: One somewhat undersized mainsail (but adequate) because our rig is off a Catalina 27; jibs are 90%, 150%, 170%; plus one wee storm jib
Engine: 6hp Tohatsu outboard
Solar: 45-watt panel aft; 20(?)-watt flexible panel (you supposedly can walk on it); we haven’t figured out where to put it yet
Misc: A, um, generator, which is really relatively quiet; we need to recharge the laptops and camera .. if this doesn’t work out we’ll just cover the thing in solar panels.

TENDER
* 10-foot Porta-bote folding dinghy; name of Alyosha
* 2-person inflatable kayak ; name of Tigralita

GROUND TACKLE, YAAHRR
* 33-pound Steel Spade. Hoof.
* 7.5-kg Chinese “Bruce Lee”
* 10-kg Bruce (just given to us by Woodwind in 2007, who has about 10 spare anchors cluttering up their berths)
* Fortress 16 (um, medium size, can’t remember weight)
* Dinghy anchor (I think)
* Two 10-foot pieces of 5/16 chain (yeah yeah we need more)
* 300 feet of 5/8 rode
* Two 150-foot lengths of ½-inch rode

SAFETY
* Epirb
* (The spare GPS and hand-held VHF also fit into this category)
* Jacklines and harness/leashes for when we wander about topsides while underway
* Box with emergency stuff and axe (in case we have to chop our way back inside in the event of a capsize) lashed to the main hull under the catwalk and on top of the trampoline (actually we still haven’t done this..)

MISC GEAR
* Compass mounted on steering column
* Two Optima spiral batteries
* One Statpower 20 battery charger = purchased! Joshua is mounting it today.. it’s 5 pounds and not too huge
* One 15-minute AA battery charger (for the camera/gps/flashlights/etc.)
* Sextant given to us by Joshua’s dad and which I don’t know how to use (Joshua technically does)