All the News That's Fit to Print
(well, most of it, anyway)

Over time (quite a bit of time, I suspect), I will continue to update the pages on this site and convert them to the new format.  Most of the pages, particularly those written years ago during the intense rebuilding project, also require some minor editing and updates.   In the end, this process should improve the appearance and navigation of this website, as well as more successfully address future updating and refreshing issues.  I hope you find the new format interesting and useful.

I am aware of some glitches in the links at this time.  I will fix it, but for now you may need to find other ways around these problems.  If you return to the home page, the drop down links should work properly from there.

If you have other comments or questions, please address them here.

Glissando News
April has been a terrible month here.  After a very late start, winter seems reluctant to release its grip on Maine, and in the first two weeks of the month we've had two large snowstorms, interspersed with generally cold, unpleasant weather that is not conducive to boat work outdoors.

Glissando is still wearing her winter cover as of this writing, and it looks to remain for another week anyway.  I finally scheduled a launch date, though:  May 29.  This is a bit late, but with the current weather, the amount of work I need to do to the boat this spring, and a variety of other factors, it makes the most sense.

Stay tuned for more.

Excitingly, we have applied for a mooring permit in Buck's Harbor, in east Penobscot Bay.  The harbormaster indicated that our chances of getting a mooring this year are quite good.  Buck's Harbor is an excellent, friendly, and well-protected harbor in an ideal sailing and cruising location.  The only pitfall is that it is nearly 2 hours away from home.  But the harbor is good enough that we are willing to deal with this inconveninence.  After years of fretting and concern over an overexposed mooring location at our old spot in Falmouth, the thought of moorage in a protected, safe harbor is tantalizing.  It's also right in the heart of the best cruising grounds in Maine, with all our favorite haunts within weekends' sailing distance. 

However, the problem is that even if we get our mooring in Buck's, we won't know till June sometime, after the deadline for renewals expires.  Since we can't wait till June, I have made other mooring arrangements for the immediate term, and have sent in an application for a seasonal rental at Ocean Pursuits boatyard in Rockland, ME.

Poor Glissando, after her year of neglect while I built the house, will require a bit of work this spring, mostly focused on her atrocious brightwork, which I'll need to pretty much strip back and begin again.  With luck, the weather will improve soon so that I can uncover her and get to work.  I don't have a launch date set yet, but plan to figure that out within the next couple weeks.  I expect to launch sometime in mid-to late May.

Website News
I am desperately hoping to revitalize this website.  I have a new menu and navigation setup planned which is in the works, but I am ironing out some issues and details at the moment and haven't truly begun implementing the new plan yet.  In addition, I hope to edit and update many of the project pages, as well as refresh their look and improve layout.  The information won't change, but may actually improve.

The problem is that this website is so huge that this sort of work takes much time.  In addition, I have server problems that are currently preventing me from publishing correctly, which I need to have addressed. All in due time.

Meantime, I will attempt to keep some basic updates going on as work on the boat begins.

We moved into the new house on schedule on November 10, and have been working steadily to get settled and continue with some of the unfinished projects.  There's still work to be done before I can call the house "complete", but it's great to be in nonetheless.  I will continue working as much as possible, but I am also returning to work now after the summer "off".

Glissando is of course covered for the winter, and has been since late September.  She'll need some varnish work in the spring, but otherwise there is little required.  OH, I need to fix the anchor platform that was damaged at the beginning of the 2005 season (which seems so long ago).

I'll do my best to keep you informed of the goings-on!

I have been working non-stop on the house since the past update.  Things are almost in move-in condition, with only a few critical items standing between us and liveability, and we expect to be able to move in sometime in the first half of November, as soon as possible once the kitchen is complete and the wood flooring is installed.  I've been keeping a web log for friends and family that details the progress, and I won't go into detail here.  If you're really interested in a detailed day-by-day description of building a log house, largely alone, then email me for the link.

It's been an experience, to be sure, and as much as I have enjoyed most of it I am looking forward to getting settled again and getting back to work on my first love--boats!  I have a yard full of boats at this time, and three in the shop building, so there's no shortage of work to come in the months ahead.

This winter's projects include, at least in part:

-Rebuilding someone else's Triton to prepare her for extended cruising and liveaboard

-Complete the demolition, dismantling, and some of the structural repairs on our Allied Seabreeze 35, Pixie.  Look for this to begin during the winter sometime, at least sporadically.

-Get serious about working on Sprite, our Lyman 23

-Exterior brightwork renewal on Glissando, as well as a few other small maintenance projects

If you've managed to stick with me during these dark boatless times, thanks!  I'll try to keep things interesting going forward.

See you soon.

During the last week of June, Steve Morse brought Glissando up to Whitefield.  It was nice to have her home where I could easily keep an eye on her.  My first order of business was to wash her and remove the spatter from her travels (it rained on the day Steve brought her up).  I also installed the batteries and pumped the bilge, and cleaned the bilges with sweet water to remove some slime buildup from the rainwater that had been in there.

I desperately need to renew the varnish on deck, but at the moment all my staging planks are tied up at the house.  Soon, they will be available again, and I'll do something about the varnish then.

I greatly miss sailing and having the boat in the water, but realize, of course, that it just could not have worked this year.  Still, it's hard to look at her in the driveway rather than bobbing at a mooring somewhere.

We closed on the sale of our house in North Yarmouth yesterday, so don't go by looking for me!

Steve Morse picked Glissando up from the house last week and brought her temporarily to his shop, where she is stored in the yard.  When time allows, Steve will bring her up to Whitefield, where I can keep an eye on her.  Meantime, she looks OK, but I'll be a lot happier when she's here.

As many of you know, Heidi and I purchased land about a year ago, and now we are making plans to move out of our house in North Yarmouth as we begin construction on a new house in Whitefield, on our 50 acres.  We're fortunate to have a 5th wheel camper, in which we will live comfortably during the house construction.  I am planning to build the house myself, with significant help from the ever-friendly and -competent Bob Emery during the initial stages, from foundation to closing in the house.  Once the roof is up, I'm on my own, though. 

I am greatly looking forward to this experience, as I expect it to be a once-in-a-lifetime project.  It represents a temporary change in focus for me, however, and I will be working full time on the house for most of the remaining months of 2006.  As a result, we made the difficult--yet ultimately soothing--decision to refrain from launching Glissando this season.  With the construction, I felt I would be far too busy and focused to use the boat enough, and would also worry and feel guilty about her most of the time.  It will be tough to not have the boat in, as she represents a very important part of our lives (and mine in particular), and we will sorely miss our annual cruise.  However, it's a temporary thing, and is for the greater good in the end.  I'll be having so much fun working hard on the house that I'll hardly have time to miss sailing this year.  But I'll be happy to accept any charity offers of an occasional daysail, should they come my way!

Groundbreaking for the new house is scheduled for tomorrow, March 6, 2006.  Yee-ha!  This is exciting stuff.

Of course you already know all about the new shop and all...if you don't, where have you been?

That's it.  All the news that's fit to print.  See you next time.

I'm starting to think ahead to launching day, which is now only two months or less away.  I have little to do on Glissando before launch, but there are some final details to wrap up, including some more varnishing, bottom paint, and other normal pre-season projects.  I hope to do some work on the mast, not the least of which is to install some new wind instruments at the masthead.  I doubt that I will paint the mast this year.

In other news, we succumbed to the "woodie" temptation and purchased an old 1960 Lyman 23, a classic, tumblehomed mahogany runabout.  The boat is in relatively sound structural condition, though some structural work is required, but most of the work required will be cosmetic in nature; all the paint and varnish needs to be stripped and redone.  Mechanically, she seems sound, as the engine appears to have been quite well maintained.  Work on this boat will be slow, and I don't expect to get into anything significant until next winter.  Of course, I've started a new website about the boat, so please check it out at www.lapstrake.com if you're interested.   This does not represent a move away from sail in the least, but sometimes a relaxing putter around in a classic powerboat is just the thing.

I haven't forgotten about my continuing work on upgrading and enhancing this website, but I've been so busy with work on the Daysailor that I simply have not had time to do much on my huge overhaul.  I got most of the critical stuff done earlier in the winter, and now what remains is mostly to satisfy my own need for the site to be better in function and better looking.  And easier to maintain going forward.  So my upgrade will continue, but most of the work will be behind the scenes over the next months.

There you have it.  All the news that's fit to print!

Once these initial steps are complete, I plan a complete redesign of all pages, centered around a slick new expanding tree menu system using server side includes (SSI), which will make future changes easy across the board.  The cosmetic changes will only occur once I shift to this new menu system, but it will all come together soon enough.  Perhaps then I'll feel good enough about the overall site layout and organization so that I can rest on my laurels for a while.  Ah, if only I'd known in the beginning what I know now.

This will all take weeks, maybe months, to accomplish.  But it's coming.

Please bear with me--I am undertaking a major reorganization of this website, the first step in what will ultimately be another thorough redesign.  Over the years, the site content has grown to the point that maintenance is becoming more difficult than it should be.  As a result, I have decided to reorganize the site, and to change some of the formatting to make it not only easier to maintain, but also for you to browse.

Whatever else is accomplished by this reorganization, the most noticeable--and beneficial--result will be the complete elimination of frames.  Frames work fairly well for small, easily-maintained sites, but quickly become annoying in a large site--and also make it impossible to point directly to a specific page, making reference more difficult than it could be.

This was one of those web projects that I began innocently, but in the process I created a monster.  Therefore, I ask for your understanding and forgiveness over the next several weeks, as portions of the site may be changed, while other portions remain the same.  Also, I may limit new updates to the site during this renovation, to avoid publishing too many pages of varying formats.  I will work hard to complete the changes as quickly as possible, but with hundreds of pages to reformat, it will take a while.

When the reorganization is complete, the first step towards a better, more refined, and easier-to-navigate site will be done.  Without the reorganization, any further cosmetic changes are pointless, so such changes will wait until a later date, once I have a chance to see how the new structure is working out.

You may already notice some of the changes, as I have completed a number of pages and categories already.  If you notice a dead link, or any weird formatting problems, please don't hesitate to let me know about it.  My goal is to keep the site functioning during this process, and I don't relish having pages become inaccessible in the meantime.  Still, there may be some slight interruptions in the navigation, and some pages may display without convenient menus, or with other problems.  It's all part of the process.  There are at least 270 separate web pages to modify, and each page requires up to 14 separate steps to bring it through the entire process I hope to accomplish.

Overwhelming?  Well, sort of.  So perhaps you will understand if things aren't always properly functioning for the next few weeks.  The goal is a cleaner, neater website where it will be easy to find anything you want to know.

Thanks for your continued visits, and for your patience during this process.  Your comments and notes about pages that don't link or otherwise work correctly will be appreciated as applicable.  Email me.

First of all, allow me to apologize for "neglecting" this website.  My efforts have been concentrated on the new Daysailor project, and there simply hasn't been that much of note going on with Glissando.

Wow.  September has been beautiful, weatherwise, with two nearly straight weeks of bright sunshine, comfortable temperatures, and great sailing winds.  As work and progress on the boat barn allowed, I managed to get a number of nice daysails in, and Heidi and I spent a weekend on the boat in there as well.  Unfortunately, there was no time for a real cruise; barn construction was simply not far enough along to allow me to leave.  Next year, we will go.  

I scheduled a haulout date for Wednesday, October 8, with the mast coming out the day before.  Glissando will be headed for the new boat barn this winter, and I intend to take care of a number of projects on board--a sort of minor refit.  More on that later.

As I write this, Hurricane Isabel is churning towards the US east coast, still several days away from landfall.  While it is unlikely that she will head as far north as Maine, the track is such that it requires contingency plans for the boat, just in case.  I have chosen a little hurricane hole that I hope will be suitable, should the worst happen.

Otherwise, I've been very busy working on the boat barn, and this will continue for the next few weeks.  I got the electrical basically done,  and am looking forward to moving on to building the doors, insulating the building and, finally, building new shop benches and such to suit.

Stay tuned.  More to come this off season.

Construction of the new boat barn is well underway.  If you haven't been following the progress on our sister site, The Triton Daysailor, then you're missing out.  The whole barn schedule has been responsible, more than anything, for our lack of cruising this summer.  We're hoping to get out for a week or so once the barn frame and roof structure is raised, but we don't have a firm date on that yet, so no plans are entrenched.  That's OK...while I wish we had been able to go cruising for 2 months like last year, it's simply been a different summer for us this year.  No problem--I've been having a good time, and we're looking forward to a real cruise next summer.  The boat barn is an exciting project, and given the weather we've had this summer, we couldn't have picked a better year to be stuck ashore.

Still, it's been a nice summer overall.  I have been on many, many daysails mostly on weekdays (lucky me), though Heidi has only been out a couple times.  The weather, as any of you in the northeast know, has been very inconsistent, with long periods of fog and general unpleasantness punctuated by brief shining periods of glorious weather.  Today, for example, is simply glorious--but the wind is predicted to rise sharply, making it a less-than-good day for pleasure sailing.  Neither Heidi nor I particularly care for high wind days for pleasure sails; up to 15 or 18 knots is great, but over that becomes work--unless you happen to be heading somewhere in an appropriate direction.  In practice, this rarely happens, of course, and for daysails it's not feasible.  Tomorrow looks good for sailing, though--the same weather, but less wind.  Nice.

Sorry for the lack of updates.  I've been busy, and have also been doing plenty of sailing.  I get out on Glissando at least a couple times a week--often more, depending on the weather.  I don't post logs for most daysails because there's rarely anything earth-shattering to report.

Other than my frequent daysails, maintenance days, and a few flurries of activity on the Daysailor, I've done some sailing on a couple other Tritons  recently.

On Monday and Tuesday, July 7-8, I was a guest aboard Dasein for a short cruise.  Nathan's promised to write up a quick log sometime.  Then, on Wednesday, July 9, Nathan and I headed south to meet up with Jeff Maher, owner of Kaynee, Triton #30, for what was to be a trip from his home port at Padanaram, MA up to Maine, where he would enjoy a solo cruise and then return home alone.

As things happened, however, we ended up not bringing the boat all the way east.  In fact, we returned to Padanarum after only making it as far as Scituate, MA.  Why?  Well, Jeff's discretion and sound judgment prevailed after he became pretty aware that he and the boat might not be quite ready for the trip.  I supported his position, and we still had a good time sailing on a different boat, in different waters.  A detailed log for this trip is in the works, so watch for it within a short time.

Heidi and I took a very nice overnight last weekend to Snow Island, Quahog Bay.  It was extremely relaxing and pleasant!  Hopefully I'll get a brief log written soon.

Groundbreaking for my new boat barn should get underway soon, and I've had to spend a bit of time preparing the site and so forth.  The barn construction, and uncertainty over the time frame thereunto, has left our cruising plans for the season up in the air.  We do expect to take at least a week and head downeast--hopefully I will be able to extend my own time a bit more than that and have the boat in Penobscot Bay, where Heidi can meet me.  Since she has only limited time available, I will probably take some solo time myself.

We/I have been sailing a number of times since the last log was posted on May 31, but I haven't had a chance to put together sailing logs (and besides, not all sails will get their own log anyway!)  We've spent one night on the boat, and I have been, of course, taking care of routine maintenance as I go.  The boat is great with no problems, and the sails have been outstanding, if perhaps not as frequent as I might like; the weather continues to be less than great here.

Launch and mast stepping!  All went well.

Launching is scheduled for tomorrow, May 12!

The first round of reformatting is done!  158 pages have been converted to our new look and format.  However, there are still a number of pages that I have not yet formatted (and will get to over the coming days).  Plus, I am making a second round of changes to the pages, incorporating homogeneous color schemes to the pages and improving the presentation.

It seems that as I continue with the reformatting, I keep discovering new changes that I want to make along the way.  Of course, I only discover these late in the process, so implementing them means that I have to go back and go through all the pages again.  But never fear--your intrepid webmaster shall work tirelessly to make these changes for you, dear reader. 

Check out our new public forum!  It's live as of today.  Experimental, for now, and probably full of bugs and needed improvements.  But we'll see how it goes! 

 I am also looking at some interesting new features, so stay tuned.  

In order to improve intuitive navigation and make it easier to keep track of where you are, the content of the website as you know it has been broken up into four distinct sections, each with its own entry page and menu-based navigation:

• The Rebuilding Project--all the project information and details are now conveniently located on this new site, which features improved navigation to make it easier to find whatever you're looking for
• Sailing and Cruising--here you will find sailing and cruising logs, provisioning and storage info, and related topics.
• Resources and Links--the links to other cruising and boating websites, equipment suppliers, and other useful information is now consolidated here.
• What's New--links to the latest updates on the website, new projects, and other news and information.

Each of the new sites is conveniently linked from the home page, and each opens in its own window so that the home page always remains open in the background, making it easier to return and view other sections of the site.

Over the coming weeks, I'll be reviewing the success of the new design and making incremental changes as necessary, as well as continuing to revamp the remaining pages on the site.  When the process is complete, I hope the site will be more useful than ever! 

New test website design goes online.  Site not yet live.

Glissando, Pearson  Triton #381
www.triton381.com 

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