Which Way is Dtarboard Again? Archives - Which way is starboard again?

Of love and refrigerant

RIP big fridge

A few months back something truly sad happened. After 13 years of loyal service, the mega boat fridge Paddy built – the one that made it all the way round the South Pacific, helping out cruisers with less functioning fridges and housing the 50kg Tuna of Terror – cooled its last cold thing.

Since we were no longer living aboard, it took a while before we actually noticed it. It wasn’t until I stayed over on Wildflower to make it easier to catch an early morning flight that I made the discovery. First the lack of noise tipped me off – the fridge’s comforting buzzing and whirring was part of the boat’s soundtrack – then it was the smell.

While we didn’t have much food in there, it was enough to make it smell like something had died and was in the process of quietly decomposing. So I did what sensible adult would do, I slammed the lid shut and hoped the problem would go away.

It didn’t.

The cleanup

On getting home and finding the problem hadn’t fixed itself, there was nothing for it. We picked a weekend, gathered all the cleaning products known to mankind and set to. The smell was horrific. We grabbed black rubbish bags and threw the freezer’s contents in them without pausing to identify what anything used to be (the former bait was fairly easy to work out though.)

Once the offending former-frozens were jettisoned (stuffing black bags into the marina rubbish bins while stifling gagging noises when fellow yachties walked past) we scrubbed the living daylights out of the fridge and freezer cabinets.

Being a chest freezer this necessitated extended periods of time hanging headfirst over the edge of the cabinet, holding my breath while the blood rushed to my head. I am pleased to say though that this and a combination of cleaning products, bleach, vanilla essence and airing the thing out, means Wildflower is now blessedly stink-free.

A new obsession

Wildflower’s lack of refrigeration left Paddy with a couple of choices. He could buy a new fridge or he could build the Mother of All Fridges. I’m pretty sure you can guess which option he went with. Building Fridgezilla is actually something Paddy had been talking about for a while when the old fridge was starting to reach the end of its life.

And so the research began. I would come home to find Paddy mesmerised by YouTube videos on how to build a boat fridge. So many YouTube videos… I had no idea so many people were so passionate about refrigeration – and that so many of them had YouTube channels.

A couple of top examples for the geeks:

AC Service Tech LLC (YouTube channel)

HVAC in SC (YouTube)

Note: Paddy says most of the stuff on YouTube is biased towards air-conditioning but the principals are the same for freezers and refrigeration.

I joke about it but it’s actually pretty cool that people are so generous with their time and prepared to share information that otherwise giant nerds like Paddy you wouldn’t know.

Goodbye kitchen table

It started off with a few packages arriving at the back door with the odd switch or coil in them

Then our kitchen table turned into a steampunk nightmare of copper piping, wire and dials. Every day a new package arrived and the mountain grew bigger. A hermetic compressor, suction line accumulator, sub cooler, liquid refrigerant receiver, a water cooled and air cooled condenser appeared, along with lots of copper pipe and fittings, various valves and (after some negotiating) a big orange bottle of refrigerant.

Note for nerds: Paddy says he was going to put the whole thing on a basal platen made of prefabulated amulite, but when he discovered that didn’t exist he used aluminum, which he got from his mate Gregor’s workshop

I am also learning a lot of things about fridges.

For example I know Wildflower’s new fridge will use British thermal units, which Paddy tells me are the best kind of thermal units you can get.

“BTUs have always been better than kilowatts. If you don’t believe me just go on Google and see how many BTUs there are in a kilowatt. There’s more, so it must be better” – So sayeth Paddy.

A mysterious love note

Things got even more fascinating one weekend when Paddy was away for work and I spotted a hand written note on the coffee table in our living room.

‘That’s nice,’ I thought. ‘Paddy’s left me a note. I wonder what it says?’

I picked it up and quickly realised Paddy hadn’t written it. In a woman’s handwriting was the very un-Paddylike sentence ‘I love you, you handsome (something a little tricky to make out) wonder’.

I was, understandably, a little surprised.

Examining the note more closely I discovered it was not exactly a new one, and apparently not from New Zealand. It was written on the back of a deposit slip from the Camden National Bank in Maine USA and the empty date section started 19– , so definitely not written recently!

So what was it? Where did it come from? Was it a memento from a past love? Did a time-traveler from the US have a crush on one or the other of us?

When Paddy got back I handed it to him and said ‘sweetie, do you know what this is?’ It turns out he was just as puzzled as I was. When I told him where I found it he had a eureka moment and burst out laughing, then fished out a retro looking book.

He had bought a second hand copy of Refrigeration for Pleasureboats by Nigel Calder online and when he opened the package a piece of paper that had been used as a bookmark fell out. He didn’t think much of it and put it on the coffee table. Mystery solved.

Help us find the handsome wonder

Except the mystery isn’t solved, not really. Who is the handsome wonder? Did he ever get his note? Was it a secret admirer? Unrequited fridge-building love? Did he and the note-writer live happily ever after? We need to know!

My workmate Liz helped with one piece of the puzzle – the two words in the note I couldn’t quite make out.

I love you, you handsome ‘car heart-clad? car hat Dad?’ wonder.

I was puzzling those two words out loud in the office when she said ‘I know, it’s Carhartt!

It turns out Carhartt is a US brand of work wear (Liz was gifted a pair of Carhartt overalls and says they are brilliant).

So we now know the full text of the note reads: I love you, you handsome Carhartt-clad wonder. Which in the context makes a lot of sense!

As for the rest of the mystery, if anyone can help us, we would love to hear from you.

Our clues so far are:

A second hand copy of Refrigeration for Pleasureboats bought on Amazon.

Richmond – written on the side of the book in vivid. It could be a surname, it could be a place, it could be the name of a boat.

A deposit slip from Camden National Bank in Maine.

If any of this rings a bell to you, leave a comment or email whichwayisstarboardagain@gmail.com

It’s alive (kind of)!

After migrating from the kitchen to the lounge the parts made it to the garage and formed the shape of a fridge (or at least a condensing unit – which Paddy tells me is all the smarts of a fridge). It makes all the whizzing and whirring motions a fridge should make and passed its tests with flying colours.

For the fridge nerds: Fridgezilla was pressure tested with inert gas to 300 PSI (pounds per square inch of pressure) – 50 PSI more than it is going to use when it’s running – to make sure there weren’t any leaks. He found a couple and fixed them. Then it was vacuum tested to suck out all the moisture and it vacuum tested down to 200 microns.

Even more for the fridge nerds

If you know the lingo, are building a fridge or are just really interested in enginerding, then here’s a five minute video explanation of the condensing unit of the Mega Fridge.

Stay tuned for when Fridgezilla is on board and cooling its first ice cream!

Getting back to nature – whatever it throws at you

This year’s mental health awareness week’s theme is Nature is key – which would be great if nature wasn’t being so bastard cold at the moment *

(*When I started writing this blog Wellington was behaving awfully weather-wise. It has since bucked its ideas up but I can’t be naffed changing my intro or cover pic. Nice one Wellington – keep up the good work!)

In all seriousness though, they’ve put together some pretty cool material to remind people not to get buried in things and to look to nature to support mental health and wellbeing.

One of the things they have produced is a little green N sticker to put over the N on your keyboard to remind you to take a break and go hang out with the grass and woodland critters. It’s a great idea in theory, but I’m a bit of a keyboard masher and N seems to be right in the firing line – so mine kind of looks like this now.

Hopefully it stops raining for long enough to go outside before I wipe it off the face of my keyboard. (See asterisk above).

It might seem a bit tree huggy, but there’s actually something in it all. When I’m having a hard time with anxiety, one of the best things I can do is just drop everything and go for a walk. Blowing out the cobwebs by moving is a great distraction when your brain is trying to eat itself. Going to the gym is great but sometimes you just can’t deal with other people – going for a walk around the harbour (even if it is head first into a gale force wind) can be much more healing.

I discovered the benefits of getting out and walking when my OCD was bad all those years ago. I would get to the point where I couldn’t stay still. I couldn’t stand still, I couldn’t sit down I just had to get out of where I was. Walking through botanical gardens, parks and along beaches saved me in a lot of ways and the friends and family who walked with me (when I was up to dealing with people) even more so.

Gardening is now one of my go-to’s (a genetic predisposition from my Mum). I can spend hours playing in the dirt, freeing plants from weeds and vines, talking with worms and helping things grow. It can be very zen in some ways but great when you are frustrated too. Sometimes the more violent the gardening the better. Hacking up blackberry and ripping out weeds by the roots can be exceptionally satisfying.

Getting away from the dirt – I guess, if you think about it, heading out to sea is about as close as you can get to nature. While it wasn’t always super relaxing – and at times rather traumatic -our trip around the South Pacific in Wildflower also provided me with some of the most peaceful moments oof my life. A night watch on a still night can be stunning. When there is nothing but sea, stars and fluorescent algae to keep you company, nothing but waves and the Milky Way, there is nothing more beautiful. It is one of my go-to images when I feel stressed out.

Speaking of images, the Mental Health Foundation also has a photo challenge going, which I am having a go at this year. You can check it out here:

Mental Health Awareness Week photo challenge

If you’d like to have a look at my pics you can find me on Instagram as Seamunchkin, @Seamunchkin on Twitter or check out the Which Way is Starboard Again? Facebook page. Let me know if you are taking part, I would love to see your photos too.

The best thing is you don’t have to be officially cray cray for this sort of thing to help. We all lead highly stressful lives in one way or another and sometimes we just need to be reminded that there is a world out there. That outside of that meeting you were in, that difficult class you took or that politician that annoyed you on the internet, there’s an ocean and stars and trees and flowers and dirt.

I’m not saying going outside will fix everything. If it did I would spend much more time out there than I do. Treating mental health is much more complex than that. It may involve talking with people or in some cases, like mine, medication.

That’s why I get so mad when I see those stupid memes about how hugging a tree is better than medication. You know the ones – I’m not giving them the airtime of reposting. There is a great response by the wonderful mental health advocacy website The Mighty that I will share though:

To the Person Who Made a Meme Calling Depression Medication ‘Sh*t’

Like everything, it is all about balance.

So kudos to the NZ Mental Health Foundation for encouraging people to think about their brains as well as their bodies.

I know I bang on about it a lot but mental health support in this country needs so much more support than it gets. I am so glad it has finally become a political issue. It affects so many of us and we need to stand up for ourselves and each other and push it where we can.

In the meantime, if you have anything to spare, I highly suggest sending it the Mental Health Foundation’s way. They need all the support they can get.

As always, 50% of the profits from Starboard physical book sales are going to them so if you want something to read and a warm fuzzy feeling feel free to push the button below ($10 sale is still on)

Note: The super funky image at the top of this blog is called Rain and wind. It’s by jaci XIII, and was created for the Kreative People Challenge 59 CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Gators, guns and a new book

This is one of those blogs where I publicly announce I am going to do a thing so it forces me to do the thing.

The thing I’m referring to is another book, which I am in the process of writing (and now I have told all of you so I can’t back out).

I think it will just be an e-book this time. Though when I say ‘just’ an e-book, please don’t take that the wrong way.

Ebooks are great, I’ve read some brilliant ones. I’m talking more length really. I suspect I won’t have the material for a paperback as this story covers a shorter period of time. It’s more of a taster. I don’t think the process of writing and finishing it isn’t going to be any easier than it was for Starboard though!

Sorry sailors, but this time it’s not about boats – but it is about travelling.

I found that, next to the sailing and the crazy, quite a few Starboard readers picked it up because they were interested in travel writing. So this time I thought I’d give that a go.

This is going to be a story about travelling to the United States. A story about alligators, firearms, cowboys and an island that is home to more than 500 cats.

It is also a story about travelling there at a particularly unnerving point in time.

When we left the country’s president had just started lobbing bombs at Syria. While we were there North Korea’s leader was (mercifully unsuccessfully) launching missiles in our general direction and making all sorts of nuclear threats- it really was a fabulous time to be over there with an anxiety disorder!

Despite all the background excitement we had some fantastic, memorable, hilarious experiences, met some wonderful people and had many of our preconceptions challenged (in both good and bad ways).

I’m going to tell you right now, I’m really nervous about writing about the US. There is so much history, culture and shared experience that I have not lived through and can’t possibly truly understand.

As a western tourist I am fully aware I am writing from a place of privilege. There are some heartbreaking things happening over there right now and I am writing about a holiday – but I hope I will be able to do some of the places and people we saw some justice.

Like Starboard, this can only scratch the surface. I wrote that book after living in the South Pacific for just a few months. In this case it was mere weeks. There is absolutely no way you can get your head around a country in that period of time.

It was a fantastic adventure though, and I am looking forward to sharing it with all of you.

My working title is Gators, guns and keeping calm – and, because I now know you need a tagline explaining what the book is about (thanks Starboard publishers!) – an anxious Kiwi’s guide to the United States of America

Though it’s early days yet and in a month’s time I might decide I hate it and go with something entirely different. Any better suggestions much appreciated – feel free to leave them in the comments 🙂

The trip was initially just going to be to Hawaii for Paddy’s 50th birthday (Hawaii Five-O styles) but then I discovered Tom Petty was going to be doing a tour in the states at the time we were going to be over there.

Since Petty to Paddy is like Bowie for me this absolutely had to happen. We worked out Texas was the best timed and placed concert, so I bought us tickets to his show in Dallas.

We thought Hawaii and Dallas would be an interesting enough combo, but then we got talking to travel agent friend and suddenly the trip grew.

So thanks to her the book now covers the following destinations: Hawaii – Waikiki, Maui and Lanaii (the island of 500 cats), San Francisco, Texas – Houston and Dallas and (the place I have wanted to visit forever) New Orleans.

Here’s some sample pictures to whet your appetite (and an entire album of cats for the cat people). I’m hoping if I go for e-book format I might be able to include a few more photos that I could with Starboard, but I’m not entirely sure how that sort of thing works. I’ll have to do my homework!

Lanaii cat sanctuary (an island with 500+ cats! Aka heaven)