Team Giddyup: numbers

Showing posts with label numbers. Show all posts

Most passages are short, but most passage nights are spent on long passages

Team Giddyup 1/27/2016

In the last 5.5 years we have sailed from Victoria, up to the Haida Gwaii and then down to Mexico and over to Australia. What are our passage NUMBERS?

In those 5.5 years, we have spent 136 nights at sea over 45 passages.

Data by passage: Of the 45 passages, 22 (49%) of those passages were single overnighters between anchorages and 9 (20%) were two nights. We made 7 (16%) passages between three and five nights and 4 (9%) passages between six and nine nights. Only two passages were 10 nights long and 1 passage – Mexico to Marquesas obviously – was 26 nights.

The data show that most of our passages were short one to two night hops and only 15% were passages of six or more nights. But this is a bit misleading when you want to know what the average night at sea might feel like. What was the most common

Data by night: Of the 136 nights at sea, 34% of nights were spent on passages of 10 days or longer and 18% of the nights were on passages between 6 and 9 days. This means that more than half of the nights we spent at sea were part of “longer” passages of 6 or more nights. 23% of nights were part of 3 to 5 day passages, 16% of nights were on single overnighters and 7% of nights were on two night passages.

If I want to know what most passages were like, I can easily say “short”. But when I think back at my nights at sea, so many of my memories are from our long passages, where the night watch had become part of my daily rhythm and I was starting to enjoy that time.
As an aside, twice we left on a Friday and we were *gasp* perfectly fine. We actually tried to leave on a Friday the 13th but the weather never cooperated.

tonga

A Pacific Ocean’s Worth of Fees

Team Giddyup 1/17/2016

How much did our Pacific crossing cost us in fees for entering and exiting countries? Time for a NUMBERS post!

Important background: We are 35’ with two people aboard and no pets. We spent four seasons in the South Pacific between 2012 and 2015. I am counting the cost of all required things for entrance and exit, even if the money doesn’t go to the goverment because I’m counting how much it cost us. We made some choices that other people don’t have to make. We didn’t visit all countries. Fees have changed over the years (particularly in the Cooks) so YMMV.

In sum: If you aren’t interested in the nitty gritty, the most we’ve paid in fees for clearances was for Australia, with Mexico coming in a close second. The least we paid in fees was for New Caledonia where we paid nothing. Most other countries were in the approximately $200 range.

Country break down: All of the below are listed in the approximate USD cost.

Mexico: $400 USD buys a lot of cheap tacos! At the time of clearance in 2012 we had to pay a little over $110 for our TIP, $40 twice for fishing licences, and $210 for Mexican liability insurance (required by the govt, paid to a private party, despite our having other insurance). This would have allowed us to stay for quite a while (I forget how long) but we left after 6 months.

French Polynesia: We paid about $200 for an agent so we could avoid the bond. If we had been willing to risk the ups and downs of the currency markets and also getting our bond back in CFP at the end of our stay, this amount could have been zero, but I think our choice was fairly representative. If you count our return to Canada for our long stay visa,

this would, of course, be the most expensive country on the list, particularly if we included airline tickets in our estimate of the “cost” so I’m just considering our first run through the country which was more normal.

Cooks: We paid a total of about $300 - $50 to clear in Suwarrow and then about $250 in various fees to exit.

Niue: It is a little difficult to decide how to categorize Niue. We only spent $54 in fees but you essentially must take a mooring which adds another $10 per day. Depending on how long you want to stay (and are able to with the exposed anchorage), this could become costly.

Tonga: We spent $183 in Tonga for three month stay. The clerance was inexpensive but after one month the visa ran about $30pp/per month.

Fiji: We paid $180 for all of the standard fees including visa extensions for our more than 4 month stay.

New Caledonia: No fee! No bond! No exit fee! …but you only get 3 months as a N American.

Australia: We paid $450 for two visas and the quarantee fee. Granted, they give you a year but holy crap!

numbers

Sydney New Years Eve 2015

Team Giddyup 1/02/2016

There are times while cruising that I am filled with such joy at our choice to take off on a boat – not a plane, not a campervan, but a boat – because whatever I’m experiencing is so much better from the vantage of a floating home.

Being on Sydney Harbour, with our own boat, after having sailed there across an ocean, watching the fireworks explode seemingly over our head, from multiple directions was an experience of a lifetime.

We anchored in Farm Cove in about 35’ of water. We had arrived on the 30th of Dec and anchored farther into the harbour in shallower water. By noon on the 30th there were a dozen boats in the harbour and at least the same amount at the mouth of the harbour by the point on the East side. On the morning of the 31st we saw a nice hole in the anchorage with a better view and moved to it (S33°51'36.50" E151°13'13.07"). By noon, the anchorage was packed. By 5pm it was getting ridiculous and as the winds switched direction, people had to reanchor to avoid hitting other boats as we swung. By 8pm, the already packed anchorage had a few last minute additions – the last minute people being the least skilled at anchoring of course. We watched one boat try so many times that another sailor got in his dinghy, boarded their boat and helped them anchor (he was downwind of their gong show). With all of that said, the winds were light, the mood was exuberant and friendly all around us, and we only felt the need to put fenders down once on one side of our bow. Not too stressful.

The air show was excellent, the water spraying tug amusing, the lighted boat parade was classic and both sets of fireworks were spectacular. Go Sydney!

On a NUMBERS note, in the 2015 cruising season which began at the end of April for us and finished at NYE, we used 153 engine hours, about 43 gallons of diesel, about 50 gallons of gasoline and we refilled our 20lb propane tank 4 times.

weather

Is New Zealand Outside of the South Pacific Cyclone Zone? Yes, No and It Depends

Team Giddyup 10/24/2014

Every year hundreds of boats transit the South Pacific, leaving from ports in North or Central America, and arriving in tropical paradise. By the end of the cruising season, after visiting a handful of Pacific Island nations, each boat has to decide where to weather out the South Pacific cyclone season. By far, the most common strategy is to reach New Zea

land in early November with plans to return to the tropics at the end of the cyclone season in April or May.

As we sit here swinging at anchor in Tonga, at the end of October, boats are in transit, already transited or waiting for weather to sail to New Zealand.

One reason New Zealand is the default option is because it is commonly considered to be outside of the cyclone belt...but is it?

Yes. By definition, a cyclone* ceases to be a cyclone the moment that it leaves the tropics. This exit is called an extratropical transition and the former cyclone is now called “a storm of tropical origin”. In addition to the fact that a cyclone has exited the tropical arena and reaches colder waters, it often (but not always) loses other physical characteristics such as the eye that are necessary to be considered a named cyclone.

No. Even though this storm of tropical origin is no longer accurately labeled a cyclone, mariners and news outlets usually continue to use the official cyclone name as a former cyclone approaches New Zealand because, semantics aside, the strength of the wind in the storm of tropical origin can be as extreme as any tropical based cyclone. Over a 27 year period (1970-1997), Northland averaged one storm of tropical origin, with cyclone strength winds, per year. In April 1968, Tropical Cyclone Gisele re-intensified near Wellington producing winds gusting to 145 knots and blowing the roofs off of houses as far south as Christchurch on South Island. As recently as March 2014, Cyclone Lusi brought cyclone strength winds to North Island.

It Depends. These former cyclones, as they reach New Zealand, are usually rapidly weakening and for that reason don’t often reach very far down the North Island. While an average of one extratropical cyclone per year hit the area from Auckland north, the area south of there, between Auckland and the top of South Island averaged half as many. Still, extratropical storms of considerable strength, as described above, have reached all of the way down South Island. Strangely enough, although El Nino is generally associated with increased cyclonic activity, the strongest extratropical storms affect New Zealand when the ENSO cycle is neutral, not El Nino.

In Sum. While the risk is still relatively low, New Zealand is not accurately described as being unaffected by cyclone strength storms of tropical origin. New Zealand has been directly hit by substantially more extratropical storms of cyclone strength than areas of French Polynesia (i.e., the Marquesas and Gambiers). It is more accurate to say that New Zealand is a low risk border region – albeit one with well protected harbors, stout marinas and facilities for repairing any damages.
--------------------
*In this region a cyclone, among other characteristics, starts as a 10 min sustained wind speed of over 34 knots. 10 min sustained wind speeds of over 64 knots (a hurricane in other regions) are a Category 3 cyclone.

References:

numbers

Water consumption data

Team Giddyup 3/12/2014

Time for another NUMBERS post. I’m preparing to review our old watermaker (which we returned) and our new watermaker but first I thought I should start with our water use.

Over the past 3.5 years we have kept rough track of our water consumption while cruising. We average a little under 5 gallons per day of fresh water for two people.

We expected that we would use more water when we reached the tropics because we would be swimming more, sweating more and drinking more, but for whatever reason we don’t use more water. Similarly when we upgraded our watermaker from a wee one to a larger one, we didn’t seem to start using any more water.

What kind of water users are we? We have pressure water only on Estrellita -- no foot pumps. We do not have a salt water tap aboard and rarely use saltwater for cooking. We do all of our dishes with fresh water. We shower every day (unless we were REALLY lazy) and sometimes rinse off another time during the day as well. We occasionally shampoo while swimming in the saltwater, but don’t make a regular habit of it. We do pay for our laundry ashore whenever possible. When we do a load on the boat, our water consumption is more than 5 gallons that day. We don’t collect water although we think we’re stupid for not doing so and have plans to build a catchment system.

Could we conserve more? Um, obviously yes. Everything I listed above that we don’t do or don’t have we could start doing or having.

Why don’t we? Well, as a rule, we try not to solve any problems that we don’t have. There are four problems that would make us conserve: 1) if we couldn’t afford a watermaker, 2) if we couldn’t afford to pay for or find room to store the gas for the watermaker (we currently have an AC watermaker that runs off a portable Honda gen – more on that later), 3) if the watermaker broke or 4) if installing, servicing and running the watermaker was more of a pain than a pleasure.

So far, we can afford one, gas hasn’t been a big problem, our new watermaker works, and for us having the water is worth the time spent running and servicing a watermaker.

How much water do you use?

passages

Pacific Passage Provisioning: One Boat’s Experience

Team Giddyup 6/28/2013

Time for a NUMBERS post.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for more than a year. I kept track of our produce while we were on passage from Mexico (Cabo San Lucas) to the Marquesas in 2011. We used the provisioning charts in Care and Feeding to estimate how much fresh food to buy.

We purchased these items about 2 days before our passage in La Paz. After purchasing we worked our way down to Cabo San Lucas and left from there for the Marquesas. Our passage took 26 days. If not otherwise stated, we lost 5-10% of what we bought to spoilage. All items with an * were kept in green bags and items with ^ were kept in fridge. I stopped keeping track at 40 days so some items we still had at that point (e.g., potatoes and onions) are marked “more than 40 days”.

What we bought, spoilage, and how long it lasted:

50 oranges – ate last orange at day 26.
25 apples*^ – ate last 3 on day 40 in a fruit salad, crisp.
6 lemons – at day 58 were dried but still squeezable.
12 limes – lasted 31 days and were still good.
5 cantaloupes – we made the mistake of washing these and lost 50% in the first few days and consumed the rest.
1/2 of a large watermelon^ – finished on day 3 with no spoilage.
a lot of potatoes (50+) – more than 40 days.
50 carrots*^ – more than 40 days.
12 sweet potatoes – finished around 30 days, could have purchased more.
50 onions – more than 40 days.
9 leeks*^ – finished on day 28 with no spoilage.
50 tomatoes* – unsure because I seem to have forgotten to mark it. More than 2 weeks, probably close to 3 weeks.
10 cucumbers*^ – ate last on day 17 with no spoilage.
14 avocados* – half stored in a green bag. All items in green bag went bad. Others were consumed on day 11.
6 bell peppers*^ – finished on day 28 with no spoilage.
3 heads of green lettuce*^ – finished on day 13 with minimal spoilage.
3 heads of green cabbage – finished on day 27 with the last cabbage half lost.
2 bunches of radishes^* – finished on day 4.
small bag of mushrooms^ – finished on day 3 with only 1 or 2 lost.
60 eggs – finished at 35 days with no spoilage except 2 cracked while loading on boat.
2 baguettes – finished on day 3 with no spoilage.
6 loaves of BIMBO bread

We loaded the bottom of the fridge with long life cheeses and long life meats. We also bought one gallon of milk (finished day 8), 5 packets of deli meat (lost 2 to broken package and spoilage), 2 packs of hot dogs and chicken thighs.

on the web

Traffic in 2012

Team Giddyup 1/02/2013

Time for a NUMBERS post.

Blog Traffic. Last year I went over our blog stats and so this year instead of listing the stats I'll compare with last year. In 2012, as compared to 2011:

Our visits increased by 36%
Our unique visits increased by 44%.
Our page views increased by 36%.
The average number of pages viewed per visit remained steady at around 2.
The average amount of time people were on the site went down slightly.
Our percentage of new visits went up slightly.

Blog Content. Just like last year, the most viewed pages were the home page or background pages like who we are and where we are. If you remove background pages, the most viewed pages were:

The Cost of Cruising
Using our tags to find all posts about Frequently Asked Questions.
The list of the 2011 Southbound Cohort.
Our post about installing our Lavac toilet. Ha!
The video diary of our passage from Mexico to the Marquesas.

Subscriptions. The number of people who subscribe to this blog via a feedreader increased to 467 and the number of people who have the posts emailed to them increased to 216.

Facebook. Other social media that I didn't include last year include our facebook page for the boat which has a paltry 162 likes.

Video. On Youtube our top 10 most viewed videos are*:

Referrals. Who drives the most traffic to our blog? This list looks similar to last year's with a few sites jockeying for different positions. The only additions are at #6 and #10.

Searches. What do people come to our blog after searching for? As usual, mostly they are searching for our names and our boat names. Beyond that, the most common search terms were:

"beaufort sea" (presumably finding this post)
And we still have people coming who searched for "current table british columbia" (presumably finding this post)

*I don't know how to get stats by year on YouTube and I'm too lazy to try to find out.

south pacific

Landfall

Team Giddyup 4/05/2012

We made it. We sailed our home to the South Pacific.

We are safely at anchor after 26 days and 19 hours. We spent 643 hours under sail and 6.3 hours under motor (3 hours getting out of the Cabo wind shadow, .6 avoiding electrical activity in squalls, 2.3 while becalmed only 50 miles from landfall and .4 into the bay to anchor).

We broke the lower bearing in our furler and fixed it temporarily with rubber hose from our sun shower. We chafed through one bit of old rope we used as a retention line, just in case, on our windvane rudder. We lost the sunbrella stitching on the foot of our jib and we changed headsails on the furler at sea to our genoa. Other than general wear and tear, no other failures.

We used 6.2 engine hours for battery charging and while in light air we hauled our Honda 2000 generator on deck twice and charged the batteries that way. All other energy was provided by our solar panels.

We still have a good range of produce (oranges, lemons, limes, apples, leeks, carrots, onions, sweet potatoes and potatoes) but no fresh meat, only long life meats (e.g., salami and bacon) and canned meat. During the passage, because we had so much light air, we baked pies (both savory - salmon/potato - and sweet - fresh apple and canned blueberry), lasagna, brownies, coffee cake, and one round of fresh bread.

Our bodies are tired, sun touched and sweaty but other than a minor thumb strain for Livia and a bit of a sore back for Carol, we are good to go.

Time to clean up the boat, rest and then start exploring our new backyard.

usa

Canada-USA-Mexico Numbers

Team Giddyup 2/08/2012

Another NUMBERS post

We are gearing up to leave Mexico for the South Pacific and before we leave I wanted to go back over our logbook numbers for the Canada-USA-Mexico portion of the trip (at least so far).

I'm not sure how many miles we've sailed because our knot meter often doesn't work -- critters like to grow in the paddle wheel. Anyone who has sailed the same path have an estimate?

We have visited 27 towns/anchorages. We spent 106 nights at anchor averaging 4.4 nights per anchorage. This average is inflated by the 35 days we were at anchor in San Francisco and when you remove SF this average drops to 3.1 nights per anchorage.

We have spent almost 3 months in marinas (!) with a combination of free yacht club nights in California, S Pacific prep and family visits in La Paz and leaving the boat in a marina for a month so we could travel for kiteboarding.

Since leaving Tofino in late July we have used:

120 engine hours – go sailboat!
65 gallons of diesel (engine + diesel heater)
4 gallons of gasoline

Gear "failure" has included:

1 diesel engine mixing elbow
1 o-ring on the watermaker filter (did not fail - we accidentally dumped it overboard - thank you Bella Star for the spare!)
1 torn cosmetic rubber ring around our brand new Lavac bilge pump (pump works perfectly so we haven't done anything about this)
1 cracking/worn bilge pump hose we replaced
1 solar panel quick release plug (our fault, we let it sit in some water)
1 BBQ burner which became corroded after 5 years of use

on the web

Best of 2011

Team Giddyup 1/18/2012

Time for a NUMBERS post.

Google Analytics reports that we had 35,363 visits to this blog from 11,133 unique visitors with 77,740 pageviews. People averaged 2.2 pages per visit and spent an average of 2 minutes reading per visit. We have 357 people who view this blog via a feedreader and 165 people who have the posts emailed to them.

So, what are you all reading?

“Best” is probably arguable, but the top 10 most viewed pages on this blog in 2011 were:

As you can see, these are mostly navigational or background from the nuts and bolts section of the sidebar. If we remove posts linked from the sidebar, we get a top 10 that looks like this:

The top 10 sites that people came from if they were referred to our blog from another website were:

The top 10 search terms that drove people to our blog from google or other search engines were almost entirely variations of our names and our boat name with the exceptions of people searching for these three items:

current table british columbia (presumably finding this post)
sv iridium victoria bc
mahina rocna

numbers

Diesel & Propane

Team Giddyup 5/26/2011

Time for a NUMBERS post…

Timeframe: 10 months (2.5 months at a dock) with 260 engine hours. No idea how many nautical miles – from Tofino until now our instruments show about 900nm (currently at 3466nm) so maybe 1500nm from Victoria around Van Isle, winter trips and now half-way back up the inside? Vancouver Island is only 250nm long…hard to guess.

Context: Travel in British Columbia. Diesel furnace used when at anchor in winter continuously, spring/fall most nights and some days, summer some nights and sporadically at dock to supplement electric heater (.2L an hour or 4.8L/day – 1.3 gallons/day). No diesel used for purposeful battery charging (charging while underway with motor but not at anchor). Cooking includes regular baking and meat roasting and no special conservation (no pressure cooker, no hot water thermos/pump). Gas used in outboard and Honda 2000 portable generator – neither used frequently.

Diesel consumed: 925L (93L/mo) or 245 gallons (25g/mo)

Propane consumed: 83L (8L/mo)

Gas consumed: 7 - 10 gallons. This is a ballpark figure from memory. We kept careful track of the other two numbers but we use so little gas, and bought it so infrequently, that we didn’t record it. We both remembered getting our jerry can out twice to top off and neither time was it empty. We paddle/row most of the time unless Carol is going far for fishing and with our solar panels we only need the generator when we have a number of overcast/rainy days in a row. I would guess we’ve used the generator less than a dozen times.

observations

What is your limiting factor?

Team Giddyup 5/18/2011

What consumable or need drives you out of the beautiful anchorage into the nearest town?

Every boat has a different limiter, based on the vessel and the crew. Of course, some people like to spend more time in population centers and I expect that as our travel becomes more exotic that towns will hold more interest to us. Right now, the towns around Vancouver Island are not huge draws for us. So, what causes us to stop in one?

Last year, as we went around Vancouver Island we found out that our limiting factor was WATER. We carry 66 gallons of water in our main tanks. We carried 10 gallons in collapsible containers that were annoying to store but useful and quickly consumed and stowed away.

We had delayed our decision on whether to buy and install a watermaker until we had some more experience with extended time on the hook. This winter we decided to buy a watermaker which we half-installed in the Copeland Islands and are currently running. We bought the smallest unit on the market (Powersurvivor 40E) and we’ll write more about that when the installation is complete.

Now that water isn’t our limiting factor, what is?

At this point in cruising, our limiting factor is social interaction. Strange, huh? People talk about cruising being super social but if you are off-season, or shoulder-season cruising, in remote areas, and if you are cruising in an area where most boats around you are weekend or work-vacation warriors*, we don’t meet that many boats. When we’ve been isolated for a few weeks, we want WIFI so we can interact with friends and family. If we have occasional wifi we can go a lot longer between towns.

Assuming our social calendar will get more busy as we head South, our next limiting factor is probably a tie between fresh fruit and vegetables and trash. We can go without fresh fruit and veggies for a while but life is better when you have them and eventually our limited trash storage capacity runs out.

In warmer weather diesel is a far 3rd, but in the winter, because of our heater use, it is probably ahead of fruit/veg & trash. We carry 25 gallons in a main tank and 15 gallons in jerry cans.

*In our limited experience, people who are out for a brief period of time are trying to get away from people, or to hang out with people they already know, not necessarily seek out new people. We have met a lot of nice, cool people but most were people out for 3-4 months…and so were in a similar situation to us in terms of wanting more social interaction.

numbers

The Cost of Cruising

Team Giddyup 4/19/2011

I've been looking around trying to find online reports of the cost of cruising, not budgets for dreamers or those in prep, but reports from people who are or have been actively cruising.

Here is what I have so far - know any others?

Atom
Bebe
Billabong
Brio
Bumfuzzle
Camille
Carina ($24,000 USD/yr as reported on IWAC) *
Del Viento
Elizabeth
Gilana (Euro)
Groovy (scroll to "Costs" near bottom of page)
Hawk
Hello World
Hotspur (Comparing 3 years: January February March)
Jillion
Living the Dream
Location ($1500 USD/mo as reported on IWAC) *
Luckness
Ocelot
Pacific Bliss ($30,000 USD/yr as reported on IWAC) *
Perry
Picaroon
Puff
Sage ($12,000 USD/yr as reported on IWAC) *
Scream
Serendipity
Serenity
Simmer
Slapdash ($2000 CAD/mo as reported on IWAC) *
Sophia
SoulMates
Sundowner
Tamure ($1800 USD/mo as reported on IWAC) *
Terrapin
Third Day
Tock (this link is a 3 year summary - search their blog for monthly breakdowns)
Velella
Ventana ($2,400 USD/mo as reported on IWAC) *
Viking Star
Wavetrain (scroll to bottom)
Windfall
Windom (Scroll down to financials)
Wondertime

Other: Bob Shenk (survey - in German - anyone read German because Google translate tells me they found approx 2000Euro/month was average!). Another resource: Sail Loot.

Caveat: Of course, these estimates are for different time periods, with different boats, in different locations, etc.

* EDIT: Added new link (3/2017)

on the water

How long will it take?

Team Giddyup 3/10/2011

This one is for our non-boating friends.

We are often asked “how long does it take to get from (the place we are) to (this other place)?” and we hem and haw and say “well, it depends” and they look slightly annoyed and counter “just a ballpark” as if we are being purposefully vague and we make something up to be polite.

Why can’t we give a better estimate?

Let’s take the example of sailing from Vancouver to Silva Bay and let’s stick with the round number of 20 nautical miles as the approximate distance. We had a forecast of variable 5-15 knots. FYI: A nautical mile is slightly longer than a statutory mile and knots are nautical miles per hour. Nautical miles are cooler than statutory miles because a nautical mile is one minute of latitude and so when looking at a chart you can use latitude to reckon distances.

Now first, what if we had 5 knots of wind? If that wind is coming from in front of us at about 60 degrees to our right or 60 degrees to our left, we might be able to sail at 4 knots (5 hours travel time). If that wind is behind us directly, we might be able to sail at 2 knots (10 hours travel time).

Readers will remember however, if the wind was directly ahead of us, we have to zig zag and so we might only make 1 knot toward our destination even if sailing faster through the water (20 hours).

If the wind was on the high end of the forecast and we have 15 knots of wind also at 60 degrees to one side, we might make 7 knots (3 hours of travel time) or if the wind was behind us we might make 5 knots (4 hours of travel time).
This means that in the simplest conditions we might take from 3 hours to 20 hours to make that trip.

Complications: A current against us would add time and a current with us would subtract time on either end. Waves slow us down if they are coming from ahead and speed us up if they are coming from behind. We might be the kind of boat that decides to motor if sailing less than a certain speed. As the distances get longer, the variability becomes greater. For example, a 40 mile trip in the same conditions could take 6 or 40 hours. Of course, I don’t know many people that would zig zag back and forth for 40 hours by choice. Finally, the length of the boat, the type of sails the boat has, its shape in and above the water, and the expertise of the crew all make a difference in how fast different boats go at the same wind speed.

on the web

Monetizing your cruising blog

Team Giddyup 2/01/2011

I am not an expert on this subject matter but I thought I would share what I've learned from monetizing this site, the IWAC site and the Newly Salted site. If you have other ideas, please share here or if you have questions, feel free to ask. For the most part all of the programs below have very easy set up procedures with clear directions at least as far as integrating them with a blogger blog and I assume the same holds true for wordpress blogs.

I'm going to list three earnings options from most costly to least costly to your readers.

1) Donations. The most costly to your readers are direct donations. This is cash that goes directly out of their pocket to yours, usually through a paypal button. I have a paypal link stuffed somewhere on all three sites but they are not something that I have pushed. So far I have received a few reader donations for the IWAC project and we have received one on this site from my Mom. Thanks Mom!

2) Amazon. The middle ground option is the Amazon Affiliate program. When you are talking about a product, you can put a link to it and if someone buys the product you get a very small portion of the revenue. The best part is that you also get a portion of the revenue if they click on the item, do not buy the item, but instead buy something else they were already planning to buy. For example, if I pimp a book I enjoyed and a reader clicks on it, goes to Amazon and instead buys a toilet brush, we earn revenue for the toilet brush. Mostly I think this is a great win-win situation because, although there is cash outgoing and incoming, readers are doing shopping that they were already planning to doing and the blogger simple gets free beer as a result. However, I've noticed some bloggers suddenly starting to pimp random products (like toilet brushes, eh?) on their blog just to get more Amazon clicks and more revenue. I find this annoying as a reader and as a blogger I try to write whatever I was planning on writing and simply remember to amazon-ify the post if there are any products in the post that Amazon carries.

3.) Ads. The least costly to readers are Google ads. They are easy to add to your blog and they cost your reader nothing. Businesses pay per passive view (impressions) and per click and a portion of that revenue is passed along to the blog owner according to a formula Google does not share. It's clear that you make more for clicks than views and that they have ways to determine if you are clicking on your own site or asking others to do so. Some people get grumpy* about being advertised to on blogs but I think it is a great way for businesses to reach the right groups of consumers and for bloggers to get free beers.

There are definitely others who have found ad revenue a more lucrative proposition than I have. Check out SV Third Day's expense report (.pdf) as an example. I find the total incoming to be a steady trickle into the beer/coffee fund but nothing more. We blog for us, as our own way of remembering and processing the experiences. I monetized the sites anyways because it is easy and free beer is still free beer.

* this blog is free to read so...you can only complain if the value of the blog is less than what you paid ;)

numbers

Water, water, everywhere

Livia 12/08/2010

We use just under 5 gallons of fresh water per day for 2 people. This is in relatively cold average temperatures, with infrequent swimming and doesn't count: laundry, hosing down the boat and foul weather gear which we do when we take on water. It does include showering - we rarely use marina facilities...just because we rarely are at a marina and when we do dock long-term we don't choose to pay every day to shower on land.

From what I can tell, on average a US household uses about 65 gallons per day (1 2) although that number varies widely. You can use this worksheet to roughly estimate your household's usage. Leaks not included of course. We carry 66 gallons in our normal tankage and it lasts us approximately 2 weeks.

We do not use salt water regularly for washing dishes or bathing. We will rinse large pots or very messy pots with salt water in the cockpit occasionally and we will shampoo if we are already swimming before a fresh water rinse.

We use pressure water for everything. We don't even have a foot pump yet although we plan to install one this winter.

How much water do you use? I'm wondering if our usage will go up when we get to warmer weather and if so by how much.

observations

Winning the lottery

Team Giddyup 11/23/2010

Can you afford to go cruising?

This is perhaps my favorite explanation of how a couple was able to afford to go cruising. Rob & Dee aboard Ventana say:

The truth at last...we won the lottery. When we departed to go cruising Rob was only 42 years old and Dee a bit older. Most of our family and friends could not believe we could afford to retire. No matter how politely they phrased it eventually most asked how we could afford such a lifestyle. Usually we mumbled something about investing wisely in the stock market but the truth is we can afford to cruise because we won the lottery. Until now we have not talked about it but our win was bigger than the New York State Powerball prize.

To really understand why I like their lottery winning explanation, click here and scroll down a paragraph or two to read the rest. It's worth a peek.

numbers

How crowded was the West Coast of Vancouver Island?

Team Giddyup 10/25/2010

Time for a numbers post.

People are always trying to find the next cool place to travel, that no one else has heard of so that they can have it to themselves. We're like that too. Then, when everyone else also finds that place, the people who used to "be there first" tend to get a little grumpy about the crowds.

We had heard some people griping about how busy the W Coast of Vancouver Island had become and how it used to be an isolated paradise. Most of our sailing has been in the Gulf Islands and about the only way to find isolation there is to go out in the winter, preferably in bad weather, so we were looking forward to the isolation of Northern Vancouver Island. Since, I've learned a lot about where I fall in the balance between wilderness and towns.

So, how isolated was each area we visited? Removing all of our nights in towns where, obviously, there was no isolation to be found, what percentage of time were we anchored in a bay all by ourselves?

Gulf Islands - 0 of 7 nights - 0%
Northern Inside Vancouver Island (Comox to Cape Scott) - 7 of 9 nights - 78%
Northern Outside Vancouver Island (Cape Scott to Estevan Point) - 14 of 22 nights - 64%
Southern Outside Vancouver Island (Estevan Point to Port San Juan) - 19 of 28 - 68%

Obviously these numbers are affected by our choices of anchorages. We sought out (and found) isolation more often early in the trip than later. Although, because I've removed towns from the tally, the percentages of at anchor isolation are probably not affected by our desire for company as much as you would think. Usually when we wanted interaction we headed to port. We also anchored in a number of places that were not ideal anchorages - rolly or exposed - rather than the main all weather harbors. For example, we spent 3 nights with other boats at the all-weather anchorage Sea Otter Cove and then moved 2 miles directly East and spent 5 nights to ourselves at the exquisite San Josef Bay (rolly).

tip

Shaker siphons are really cool

Team Giddyup 10/22/2010

At our going away party, good friends who are experienced cruisers brought us a pair of shaker siphons. In the first month of the trip we used them to put water from our collapsible jugs into our tanks and they worked quite well but it was the first time we filled our diesel tank from our jerry cans that they showed their true value.

The clear plastic hose has a fitting with a small ball in it. You put the hose end in the empty container, the ball end in the full container, and you jiggle the ball end a few times. And…that’s it. The liquids begin transferring.

Pretoriens come with 25 gallons of diesel in one main tank. We also carry 15 gallons in three 5-gallon plastic jugs. When we have to pour from the jugs, into the diesel tank, we very, very carefully end up making a mess anyways. I say “we” in the royal sense. It’s always Carol who takes this task. Aboard Estrellita 5.10b, fueling is a BLUE job.

And here is a non-messy, painless fuel transfer. He didn’t even have to take off the full enclosure!

The water hose lives in our garage aft cabin and the diesel hose lives in one of our “gross stuff” bins in the lazarette. THANK YOU SV ENDLESS!

numbers

The last roll

Team Giddyup 9/03/2010

You know how I said that we went on a major Costco trip before we left to see how well we could provision for a longer period of time? Well, the good news is that we have learned a lot about how much we can eat and how much we need to buy. The other good news is that for the most part I correctly estimated our ratios – how much of each item we eat in proportion to other items. The bad news is that we learned both of these lessons by running out of everything at the same time.

We are on our last bottle of wine and our last roll of toilet paper. It is an emergency* situation on SV Estrellita 5.10b.

We have no produce except picked berries, no milk (not even powdered, long life or canned), no fresh meat except what Carol catches. At least we still have chocolate and thanks to our going away party we still have rum (thanks George!). I honestly thought I bought 4-6 months of cheese, bacon, canned chicken, etc. I bought about 2 months worth of all of that. Our new theory is for now we will decide how much we think we should buy of something and TRIPLE that amount.

Besides underestimating what we eat, we seriously overestimated the amount of food we would find on the W Coast given our sailing plan of not going deep into most inlets. The bigger towns appear to be deeper inside the inlets and with them, the grocery stores with such extravagant items such as “fruit” and “vegetables” and “bread”. Because we are moving slowly down the coast we are exacerbating the problem. Many boats would not have so much time between Port Hardy and Tofino.

We are going to Tofino tomorrow. We heard a rumor that the co-op grocery will deliver to the docks for a buck. If so, we plan to abuse that privilege. Carol and I reorganized our interior storage (we actually still had a few lockers that are 1/2 empty – crazy, huh?) and we now have room for even more food. This might actually help our fore-aft trim issues (more on that later).

*Obviously not really an emergency. We could survive on pasta, rice and bread (that we bake) alone for another month.

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Sydney New Years Eve 2015

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Pacific Passage Provisioning: One Boat’s Experience

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Landfall

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Best of 2011

Diesel & Propane

What is your limiting factor?

The Cost of Cruising

How long will it take?

Monetizing your cruising blog

Water, water, everywhere

Winning the lottery

How crowded was the West Coast of Vancouver Island?

Shaker siphons are really cool

The last roll

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