and don’t you wish you’d paid more attention in your high school French class…
Yann Quenet is getting ready for another circumnavigation with some changes to Baluchon that you might find interesting.
Refit
on being an educated consumer…
As I said before, there’s nothing wrong with the basic sloop rig on the CAL 34 and, if your rig is in good shape by all means go with it. The problem arises when you’re confronted with a rig that is well past its sell-by date. New chainplates, tangs, toggles, turnbuckles, pins, and wire quickly …
a couple of VolksCruiser rigs…
So, here’s an alternative rig for the CAL 34… It’s the Simplicity Rig designed by Mark Smaalders and it makes a whole lot of sense in that it’s fairly inexpensive, has little to fail, and is simple. It’s what we have on “So It Goes” and it cost (mast, rigging, sails) less than a replacement …
a bit of reinvention
Truth be told, there’s not a lot of difference between most of the classic plastic designs and when you look at a CAL 34, Columbia 34, or a Whatever 34 it’s easy to see that all of the designs tend to cover the same bases. Since they all use the same rig, the same accommodation …
some thoughts on the CAL34
It’s come to my attention that there are several CAL 34s going cheap (as in less than $3K). This got me thinking about how I’d go about VolkCruiserizing them today knowing what I know now after living aboard and sailing “So It Goes” for ages. For starters, there’s a CAL 34 going for $1k which …
something that pisses me off…
So there’s this guy who wants to buy a (new to him) boat to sail off into the sunset. As it happens, he also has a YouTube channel that has quite a few followers and more often than not his videos are both entertaining, as well as educational. Just to be fair, I’ll point out …
a great conversion…
As always, Atom Voyager takes an outboard conversion to what I can only term as ‘High Art’. Seriously, this is the way to do it.
Putting together a VolksCruiser on a budget…
I’m sure if you’re considering getting a boat and going cruising on a budget you’ll be getting a shit load of push-back from just about everybody that it just can’t be done. Kind of a bummer that. The truth is, there’s a plethora of good inexpensive sailboats just waiting for someone to find them and …
an almost cunning plan…
There’s a J-29 up in the frozen north that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit. For those unacquainted with the design it looks something like this… It, like most of it’s J-Boat brethren, is a boat designed and built to be competitive so you may be wondering why the hell am I looking at …
Not a project you should be looking at…
For about a year or so I’ve been rowing by this Maria vintage hurricane catamaran and wondering how I’d go about sorting out it’s issues. Of course, that was before it sank… Again. Bringing such a boat back from the dead is a lot easier than most folks think but a lot harder and more …