After reading my When Is A Cruising Sailboat Too Big? chapter in our How To Buy a Cruising Boat Online Book, Ben and Teresa, of Morse Alpha Expeditions, suggested we do a podcast on the subject together, so we did.
And to make this much more relevant, Kim Stephens, who is, along with her husband Bob, in the early part of a planned circumnavigation on their Stevens 47 (great boat), joined us to provide her thoughtful prospective.
Ben and Teresa do a great job of keeping the podcast on track, and editing it, which most podcasters don’t do, and more should!
Comments
After you listen, please come back here and make any suggestions (in a comment), that you have for how I can improve…or maybe I should just stick to writing! All input gratefully received.
Click on the thumbnail to have a listen:
Personally, I am OK with reading. I find podcasts and videos too slow (except for the Practical Sailor ones which fly along). I also like to re-read a lot because it takes me several re-reads to comprehend and I won’t re-listen to a podcast. I also don’t see the point of putting your writing through a second editorial process. I think you do a good job on your own.
I would argue that podcasts don’t replace writing; they supplement it.
For the stuff that John and the rest of us publish on here, the written word is definitely the best format. You cannot beat well-chosen words and carefully-crafted images for conveying high-level technical concepts and the design detail considerations that flow from them.
But I can’t read a technical paper while I’m at the wheel of my Chevrolet, or while I’m on my daily noon walk. Podcasts are great for that, and the format of “today we talk to an expert in the field about X for half an hour” is very popular for very good reasons.
Hi Matt,
I agree, as long as they are well done and well edited.
Hi Michael,
Thanks, I tend to agree, although I can enjoy a well edited podcast. As to the editing of my writing, thanks for the kind words, but by the time you see it it has been though a rigorous editorial process, first several passed over several days by me, and then a final edit by Phyllis. (Tips, not so much, but Phyllis still edits them once a week.)
Very interesting podcast; thanks for that.
Funny, looking at the Stevens 47. It feels oddly familiar – I did most of my sailing on a Swan 43 by the same designers. It is within a foot and a ton or so we arrived at, and I wouldn’t go larger. I would have preferred smaller, but unlimited commercial coding including high latitudes turned out near impossible with a smaller boat.
In a way it is already too large, couldn’t find a mooring in the UK for a boat that size, and it just coming in over 15 m, it couldn’t be driven up the Rhine River without a special patent. Not that I want to that, but if I wanted to move her closer to home for a winter’s worth of work, it would be convenient to avoid the rather costly road transport. But then, going up and down the river for 10 days each isn’t so attractive either. Fortunately, the marina where we will take her early next year has a 14-16 m band, so it doesn’t matter …
If you have large systems, they need to be designed extremely simply so that they can be self-maintained, with redundancy so that a single failing item doesn’t put a full-stop into the program and with a sensible set of spares and tools – competent help is often available, spares and tools not necessarily so. Some complexity is o.k. in a trade-off, unmanaged complexity is never an option.
Hence, provided that there is sufficient electricity, which is less of an issue now than it used to be, motorization isn’t such a big deal. Our winch and windlass motors are overengineered monsters, as long as wiring, switches, etc. are up to snuff, we are not too worried (and we carry spares). A motorized winch is still a manual winch as well, hence a failing motor isn’t the end of the world. On the other hand, we avoid computerization and electronics wherever we can, and we don’t have any of the in-boom, in-mast, single-line furling stuff. Fully second your opinion on slab reefing – wouldn’t have anything else.