The Retirement Wake on S/V Imagine

Cooking on a sailboat is not much different that at your house.  We have a 3 burner stove, with oven and it does a really good job.  We have a refrigerator, double sink, but we do not have a dishwasher.  Wait that's my job, well really the rule is you cook the other clean.  So I cook a lot! We bought a pressure cooker before we moved on the boat, and tried it several times.  I love using it for its speed, tenderness of the meat, and flavors it injects in the meats.  My wife is still cautious to use it, she thinks it s a bomb about to explode.  We make a Greek Taco that uses lamb which is very good and because  you use lemon juice it makes the aluminum shine on the inside keeping the pot looking great.  Our new favorite recipe is Pollo Con Chile Verde total time prep and cook is 30 minutes. Pollo Con Chile Verde via Pressure Cooker This is a quick and great taste of Texas if you only want to spent a total of about 30 minutes to make a great meal. You will need a

To be quite honest since moving to the boat in Oct. of 2014 our time has really gone by fast.  We did join a group called TMCA (Texas Mariners Cruising Association) which is a mix of sail and power boaters.  Tons of social stuff, planned cruises, tons of knowledge, and great friends have been gained. What has snuck up on us is time. Time to get stuff done, with the plans being a late 2017 departure. We have completed some projects, like the holding tank ripped out and a composting toilet in place.  Yea I know there are critics of both.  The choice for me if I have to deal with the by products of humans I want the really bad stuff to be a dry material, rather than a slurry of aged material. It also reduces the amount of maintenance, and repairs that have to be made from what I see all the time.  This has also eliminated the smell of Head on boat. The final bonus was opening up an area about 18 inches by 48 inches by 14 inches of extra storage space and on a boat that is equivalent to a

We did not have an AIS system on our boat when we got her, but we did use a internet one that works fairly good called Boat Beacon.  It is great if you have Internet, but once you loose that your blind.  The big question is what I wanted for an AIS system.  Looking around there are a ton of choices, but we decided on The Vesper XB-8000 with the wireless system.  It does wireless, along with NMEA 2000 which will crossover to many systems.  With more and more systems going wireless this just really seemed to stand out from older technology and moving into the newer technology.  The Vesper only uses 3.5 watts which is one of the lowest power hungry systems on the market.  Price, size of unit were also big factors for choosing this product.  We did use the VHF antenna slitter to use only 1 antenna on our boat versus another stand alone antenna.  This is the Vesper XB-8000                    Screenshot of Watchmate from Vesper.  Very fast loading of Data.