191: TWELVE MORE BOAT HACKS - Learn about things that we can't live without!

Hello everyone, welcome to Boat Hacks Part 2. Thank you so much to all of you who have made Boat Hacks Part 1 such a big success. We're grateful for that and because of that we are bringing you 12 new hacks that we hope are going to help you out. But first we want to thank our Patrons. Thank you so much for your generosity. We appreciate you all and couldn't be doing this without you. And now let's get started with our boat hacks. Boat hack number one is bin and storage area lists. There are great places on a boat to store things but sometimes they're really difficult to reach. Like way up in the bow or under a bed or in a seating area that you have to lift up cushions. So what we do is we create a list and we take that list and put it on the outside of the bin or on the outside of that storage space so that before we even go into the space we already know what's going to be there. So we're not disappointed when we take a long time to access it. After about a month anyway, I typically forget what I've stored in a particular place. So writing a list helps me remember what is actually there. And for Brown who doesn't know where I store things, this makes it really easy for him to be able to find what it is that he's looking for. Boat hack number two is a fridge mat. How many times in your fridge do you spill things in the bottom of it? And then every jar on the bottom of the fridge gets nasty because it's sitting in the muck. That would be me every time. Mm-hmm. D'oh! Whoops! Definitely the one. The fridge mat is helpful for two reasons. The first is our freezer continually drips water down into the fridge. And if you have a carton of any kind that's not plastic or hard plastic sitting in that water it will make the container soggy and sometimes will cause the bottom to fail. So the fridge mat will raise the bottom up just enough where that container is not sitting in the water which is really helpful. The second benefit is that if there is a spill then the liquid that has spilled goes into the bottom of the fridge under that mat and never reaches the bottom of the other containers. That way if we don't have the time to clean it up right away or we don't know about it which is more often the case then at least the bottoms are not getting covered in the liquid. If there is a spill you can just pull that mat and rinse it out in the back of the boat with a hose and then let it dry in the sun. It makes it really easy to clean out the fridge and you have to do that anyway to defrost and clean your fridge regularly. Boat hack number three is to label the can tops with a sharpie. We have some storage space that's tall enough for cans but if we put the cans in side by side we don't know what the actual product is. And to find something if you don't have the tops labeled it can take a long time to pull out a lot of cans. So we label the top with a sharpie. We put the product name on it and we put the date of expiration so that as we go in and reach for products we make it a point to use our oldest inventory first. Boat hack number four is actually a part two of our boat hacks from the first video. We showed you how to tie down and secure your main halyard and we used lime during that. Well thanks to our friends Sarah and Greg we learned a new way that's much easier. We use a bungee now which takes a lot less time to pull that bungee off and be prepared to raise the sail. And your fellow cruisers will thank you for tying down that halyard so there is no mast slack. Boat hack number five is emergency information and it's key location. In an emergency it's really helpful to have information at your fingertips. For a mayday or a medical emergency time is of the essence. We have chosen to post information inside the cabinet behind our electrical closet as it is within arm's reach of the VHF radio, probably our key mode of communication. We posted our Dan Boater member number, the phone number to call for a medical emergency as well as a completed script in the event of a mayday. And our sixth boat hack is keyway tightness. Every two years at haul out a sailor is going to drop their rudders to be able to clean and grease their rudder bearings. The best time to do this is as soon as your boat is hauled out and is sitting in the slings. Typically whoever hauls it out will take a power washer to the bottom of your boat and that gives you plenty of time to drop your rudders, clean the bearings and re-grease them. To drop the rudder you have to remove the keyway in the shaft of the rudder. And ours was extremely tight so we shaved the size of the keyway down so that the fit was a little bit looser. In the heat also we have to remember that metal expands which makes it far more difficult to remove. The last thing you want is trouble when you want to drop your rudder and you don't want to be delayed in a boat yard because they will charge you. Boat hack number seven is check your containers. Before you dump any liquid overboard make sure you check that the container is empty. On our boat we do a lot of washing of dishes in the ocean. We have had to dive overboard for countless plates and utensils because we washed the dishes in the bucket and missed a white plate against the white bucket and oops that was dumped overboard. This is not as much of an issue in the Bahamas with shallow clear water but you probably are not going to find your plate or your fork if you drop it in the Chesapeake or in an anchorage that is 25 feet deep. Also during annual servicing of our winches we soak our metal parts and those parts are very small. We made a huge mistake this past year in the Bahamas. We threw a cup that was soaking four Super Pauls from our electric winch, our only electric winch, overboard accidentally. This rendered our electric winch unusable and we were unable at that point to fly our mainsail. Boat hack number eight is a weight and a line. This is related actually to boat hack number seven because if you happen to throw something overboard accidentally you're going to want to have a one or two pound weight just available with a line connected to it that you can throw overboard and the reason is if you are not in water that's too deep if you toss the weight over immediately you then mark the area to be able to find whatever it is hopefully that you've thrown overboard. Now this will depend if it's a sandy bottom no problem if there's deep turtle grass it's going to be a lot harder depending on the size of the object but at least it marks the area and makes it a lot smaller than if you had to guess where you dropped it. The connected line to the weight helps you find the weight more easily as it floats up into the water. What you may not realize is that your boat is in constant motion. It is swinging on the hook and without marking the spot and taking note as to which way the boat is swinging you have no chance of finding your object. That's what happened with our super poles. Instead of a 10 foot radius to try and find these small pieces of metal which we might have been able to do we had 200 feet to try and find the super poles. Boat hack number nine is consistency. Our boat came with three Lumar winches. To fly our parasail we had two winches installed. It did not even occur to us to insist on ordering Lumar. Instead the company ordered two Harken winches. Back to hack seven and eight and throwing those super poles overboard. Yes we learned a lot of lessons from that. With one type of winch we could have shared parts but with two different winches we needed two different sets of parts and we had to work with two different distributors and customer service. Save yourself a headache and where you can stick with one company. Boat hack number ten adhesive wall hooks. Boat organization is essential because boats are really small the space is tight and you need to organize the interior as best as you can so that you're A not tripping on things and B you know where to find things every single time you go to look for them. Boat hooks have been amazing to help us out with this. The adhesive wall hooks I just bought on Amazon have been amazing making finding our tools our flashlights or even reading glasses so much easier and things have a place now and are not underfoot. We highly recommend these adhesive wall hooks and if you ever want to move them or take them off the wall it's a very easy process and there's been no damage at all to the interior. Boat hack number eleven is use of spreadsheets. Spreadsheets rule. I do geek out on my spreadsheets. They are so important to the organization of the boat and just remembering things that I never would be able to remember and accessing that information really easily and quickly in one spot. So we keep an electronic sailing log. This is helpful for a lot of reasons. When you want to change insurance companies and they want to see evidence of your experience you can email that to them. When you need to give your accountant the dates you have spent outside the country for tax purposes it's right there in front of you. If you want to share an Anchorage GPS coordinate with a cruising friend you can just send the electronic file to them. If we want to log maintenance done on the boat in a particular spot it's sometimes easier to associate where we fix something with what we fixed. We also keep a list of cruiser friends that we meet in this spreadsheet. I just use multiple tabs at the bottom of the same spreadsheet. Our cruiser friends are organized by Anchorage. While we do swap cruiser boat cards trying to remember who people are and where we met is impossible if you don't write it on the card. In the spreadsheet I keep contact information, name of the boat and a little information about each of the cruisers. This also serves as a reminder of the names of their children, pets, significant others or other pertinent information that I want to remember for future contact with these cruisers. We also keep a list of part numbers of the items we've ordered and the contact information of the person or company from whom we've ordered. We also keep a list of maintenance tasks, what courtesy flags we hold so that when we arrive in a country we know if we have the courtesy flag. We keep track of our spending, our income, what we give to charity, our YouTube video list and any other information I might want to quickly access. Spreadsheets are the best. Boat hack number 12 are tiki torches. Being visible at anchor is really important. We have anchored in the middle of Mackay Shoals and other major channels at night and it can be really unnerving without having a lot of light on the boat. An anchor or deck light is also helpful and we use that but the tiki torches mark the bow and the stern of the boat and give us a lot more visibility. And they're super cool looking too. A few tips. First of all, take the bow torches down under passage as seawater does ruin them. Also, take them down if you are using a parasail so the tiki torches don't get caught on the sail and rip it or the sail doesn't break the torch. Secondly, use velcro zip ties instead of plastic ones so you can remove them and replace them easily. Thirdly, turn off your tiki torches when on a night passage because they do ruin your night vision. And lastly, if you want to do your stargazing, it's just one press of a button and they go out. So you can easily stargaze and then turn them back on. And if you've gotten this far, you get a bonus. Number 13, a baker's dozen for our 12 boat hacks. And this is velcro zip ties. We do love and use our plastic zip ties for sure. But we also discovered velcro zip ties that are reusable and we love them. First of all, you can use them over and over again. And how many times do I connect a zip tie only a second later to realize I didn't put it in the right place or I didn't use the right size. So our velcro zip ties are fantastic, especially inside. I hope these 12, well, actually 13 boat hacks have helped you. And we will continue keeping track of our boat hacks that we think are going to be beneficial for you to know so that you can have a more organized and simple life aboard your boat. See you next week.