Culinary Contest Pics

The guest judges and me!

I look like a hot mess (because I was) but the boat and food look great!

Home Made Break'n Bakes!

I love the convenience of break'n bake cookies, but feel a bit limited by their flavor selection. Sooo...

Thanks to my slew of recipies and handy little ziplocks I now make cookie doughs in bulk, then bag and freeze them. When I want cookies I use a big sharp knife to cut off a bit of dough, peel off the plastic and bake!

Fun with Winches

Sasha had a long day with a couple winches.

He began with an exploded diagram downloaded from the internet and a few tools...

and ended with a little bottle of fresh oil before putting everything back together.

Unfortunatley, there are two down and five more to go!

Skiing!

Brrrrr!  Snow is cold.  And fun!!
(Photo by Caroline)

Photo of the small town of Telluride, CO courtesy of the Telluride mountain cams.

On Vacation

Looks like someone needs a vacation!  (photo by Miss Mareck)

So, we are heading to Colorado to experience the same snow we find in our freezer but on a much larger scale.  We've left Soterion in really good hands so we expect her to be in good shape when we get back.  Check out our SPOT Map to see where we arrrrr!  Photos will be posted here.

Merry Xmas from Planet Soto!

We are aware that it's mid-January... but better late than never, right?

Christmas morning everyone awoke with jaws dropped at our new level of cuteness. After breakfast, everyone took a vote and decided that Sasha was the cuter elf. It's all in the beard :)

Decided that sandmen were much easier to make than snowmen.

Longer sails between the Leeward islands = more time for Tara to do this.

Loved spending the holidays in the French Islands!

Shaking the Boobies

We had a few friends join us on a very rough seven hour sail from the small rocky island of Saba to the protection of St. Martin.

These birds are known as the Brown Footed Boobies and they are one of the many fishing birds here in the caribbean.

As we were sailing through the choppy seas, the birds would hover above our decks and wait for us to crash into the front of an oncoming wave.

When our bows hit the water, we'd scare up lots of little flying fish and the boobies would swoop in for a meal. This sequence was beautiful to watch... until... We suddenly remembered that as food goes in, poo must come out, and out, and out.

The boat was becoming speckled and Sasha and I did a lot of dodging until we began evasion tactics and finally shook the boobies.

A Well Deserved Surf

This is one happy guy!

Radar Replace Cont.

I'll spare you the images and language involved with trying to pull wires through the interior of the boat and out to the cockpit, all I can say is that Sasha forgot to eat lunch and was too tired to eat dinner on more than one day this week. If you know Sasha, this is saying a lot. Work was starting at 7am and continued till about 10 or 11pm.

Here is Sasha on the last afternoon of the project. The new radar display is larger than the old one, so we had to rearrange all the instruments to fit it in the same amount of space. Here you can see Sasha with his jigsaw cutting a new teak panel for the instruments. In the bottom of the frame you can barley see the tip of the black vacuum tube- I sat on the sidelines and did my best to "contain the mess" as he cut. We had to make the cuts in the cockpit because it was pouring down rain!

Here I am fitting all the instruments into the new instrument panel (yeah! they fit!).

After I mounted all the instruments Sasha came and connected the mess of wires, and amazingly enough everything booted right up! Wowza!!

We got everything finished just in time for a day of R&R before we take off for St. Martin. Looks like our best weather window is going to be on Monday Dec 12.

Radar Replace

After a year of Sasha trying to trouble shoot and figure out why the eleven-year-old radar unit would not work, it was determined that the dome itself had a bad circuit board. Mind you this is after Sasha has checked all the connections, wires, mailed bits and pieces back to RayMarine for diagnostics, and basically ripped the boat apart a few times. Of course, RayMarine no longer makes the replacement parts we need…. hum. Feel like buying and installing a whole new unit?

Here is Sasha aloft, yesterday. Good thing he doesn't mind heights because he was up there for well over an hour as we worked together to pull the old wiring out of the mast and feed new wires through, raising and lowering tools and parts up and down the flag halyards, and finally hoisting the new radar dome up and setting it on its mount. Really glad that was Sasha's job and not mine. Above you can see Sasha giving me a thumbs up on a securely mounted dome.

Tracing the wires through the boat is easy, it's ripping out the old and installing the new that's a bit harder. One wire plugs into the back of the radar dome up on the mast, runs down the mast into the generator box on the bow, then into the back of the saloon couch (bottom left open panel), then along behind the TV (middle open panel), then up to the instrument panel (top right behind Sasha). I do believe that Sasha is trying to hang himself with the old radar cord.

Here you can see Sasha climbing out of the TV cabinet saying "we're almost halfway there!".