Lots of progress (and big purchases) on the cruising front. We bought a windvane and (another) dinghy!

Instead of exchanging gifts this year we dipped into the cruising fund and purchased a Monitor Windvane. We decided to go with the Monitor for a variety of reasons, including the fact that they had experience designing and building Monitors for Jason 35s, they are local to the Bay Area, and have a great reputation. So far it's been a great experience working with them, they've been very helpful and willing to answer all our questions.

And questions we've definitely had, as the instruction manual contains something like 20 steps, many of which involve drilling holes in the boat or cutting parts of the very expensive windvane with a hacksaw. We are a solid two days into the installation process, and it looks like we have at least 1 more to go. Right now we are waiting for the epoxy to dry on the deck so that we can finalize the mounts. This will undoubtedly be followed by more drilling, hacksawing, skinned knuckles and the occasional curse word.
(Accompanying photograph is Julia with Ron from Scanmar who drew the installation drawing and answers all our questions about installation-thanks Ron!)

We are optimistic about the windvane, as we've read a lot of good things about the Monitor. We'll definitely be writing more as we get the chance to use it and learn more about it. It also feels great to be moving forward on this because it's the first really big purchase we have made for Pisces to ready her for cruising, and also because in some ways it's the only purchase we would absolutely have to make before we leave to go cruising. Although there are certainly other things we do plan on buying (Liferaft, EPIRB, etc.) we could do without these. I think this is a really great testament to the quality of the work that Gary put into building Pisces.


The second big purchase we made was much more spontaneous than the windvane, we bought another dinghy. So, as of today we own 3 boats (thankfully two of them are under 8' in length). We have been going back and forth on the dinghy issue for a while now, wanting to stick with a hard dinghy, but finding that deck space is at a real premium on Pisces. By pure coincidence with saw an ad yesterday in the new copy of Latitude 38 for a 7' Fatty Knees Dinghy. This morning we drove up to San Rafael, took a look, measured, and found ourselves driving back over the Golden Gate bridge with a dinghy on the roof of the car. It's a beautiful little dinghy, and as you can see from the picture below it fits much better on Pisces.



All and all it's been a very exciting holiday!