Good Show!

Flying home from Ft. Lauderdale, it was a good show. Furuno introduced their NavNet 3D product line which looks very good.

I'm also giving a hard look at their boat instruments and autopilot.

We found some excellent LED lighting from i2 which we think can satisfy about 80% of our lighting needs with about 80% less power consumption than if we had used halogen lights. And since that 80% difference mostly went to heat it should also stay a lot cooler below decks.

After that we collected an assortment of information on the availability of enhanced models of various equipment we'd been considering, from watermakers to furlers. And of course the usual assortment of boat gadgets, some of which could actually be useful!

While we were at the show they lowered the deck onto the hull for the first time. This allows them to scribe the bulkheads and begin cutting them to fit the deck to ensure a precise fit. With the deck on the hull she's starting to actually look like a boat!

Dimensions & Lines

I added the basic dimensional data, metrics and ratios to the Design page. While I haven't had time to flesh out the design story, at least you can see the basic parameters of the boat. I also added the hull lines to the Hull, keel and rudder page with a link to the pdf of the drawing.

Blog and FLIBS

The "style" add-in that I use for this site was updated today, fixing a problem with formatting the blog. Now the site has a proper blog!

FLIBS is the Ft. Lauderdale International Boat Show which starts next week. At the show we hope to find some nice LED interior lighting which will keep the boat bright and the power consumption low. We'll also see the new electronics and make decisions about the core electronics systems (radar, plotter, communications, etc.).

Construction progress continues and I posted a few new pictures. I also added V6.0 of the specification and a link to a nice article on Lyman Morse written by Ben Ellison in Power and Motoryacht.

Deck out of the mold

Last week they pulled the deck out of the mold, flipped it over and put it back in the shed. Fortunately the weather was perfect so it was a drama-free process. This week they begin initial fairing of the deck. It will be fitted to the hull in 2-3 weeks.