There are many ways to strap a GoPro on when kiting. You can mount it on your kiteboard, your helmet, your kite strings, or even (*groan*) a selfie stick.

We like the shots we get with our GoPro strapped to the main strut of our kite, near the leading edge and this is the mount I made to do so. I made wide strap out of Crypton Ultrasuede scraps I had aboard from our cushion covers with two strips of 2” velcro. I used some Seam Stick at first so I could take it to the beach and fit it onto a few different size kites to make sure it would work before I sewed it.

Then I took neoprene from an old old laptop case and made a pocket for the GoPro. In the flap on the open side of the pocket, I put a snap in plastic tarp grommet and some kite string (spectra type). The kite string was cut long enough so that one side could be tied to the pump up loop on the kite and the other side to the GoPro in case the case failed.

With the case and camera mounted on the kite, I outlined the lens of the GoPro with chalk, removed the case, and cut out the lens hole.

We accidentally tested the backup string when we crashed the kite so hard that the camera popped out through the lens hole (!!!) and the string kept the GoPro dangling from the kite while we sailed back to the beach and removed it.

And here is what we get with it. Not as flexible as a drone, but dirt cheap, and very satisfying.

When we were preparing our boat (and selves) for cruising we watched all of Lin and Larry Pardey’s videos (and read all of their books). The inspiration for these pillows came from one of their videos. I can’t remember which one so you’ll just have to watch them all and figure it out for me ;)

In the video, Lin shows some pillow cases made in a velvet-like material that she used to stow fabric items, like sleeping bags. I thought to myself “Brilliant!” and enlisted my sister-in-law to not only make us slip covers, but also to make us pillow covers.

My very, very nice sister-in-law did an excellent job but I chose a crappy fabric for the pillows and so even though the slip covers she made looks like new after 3 years of hard cruising, the pillows were disintegrating and the cotton fabric had absorbed salt air and humidity from the start.

Tip: The Crypton Suede we bought for the slip covers, and used in this version of the pillows, is almost indestructible. We’ve spilled wine, coffee, etc on it. Rubber our salty, sunblocky skin all over it. More than three years cruising in the tropics and each time we machine wash the covers, they come out looking new again.

I used the exact same Sailrite video/pattern that I used to make the cockpit cushions. I measured out panels of the Crypton Suede (Curaco) 14” x 20” and used 6” as my width. I didn’t bother adding for seam allowances because I didn’t care what exact size the pillows were, just the approximate dimensions. I also put the zipper on the small end of the pillow this time so it makes them more comfortable to lay on while watching videos.

We have 4 pillows: one for towels, one for bedding, one for sleeping bags and one for everything else. When we go between laundry for a long time, the pillows can get half-empty and if it bothers us, I’ll consolidate – putting one pillow and its contents inside another.

And there you go. Hidden storage, comfy pillows, and linens that don’t smell (too much) like “boat”.

So, perhaps a bit of TMI, but we are cockpit shower-ers. In close quarters with other boats we wear swimsuits or wait for dark, and when not in close quarters with other boats, as we like to say “What you see with binoculars is your own damn fault”.

After years of dealing with shampoo and soap bottles jammed into the small opening where our cockpit shower exits the cockpit combing, with our new sewing machine I made a caddy for our stern pulpit using Sunbrella, a UV resistant mesh product like Phifertex and some 2” velcro. I measured the distance between bars, added the circumference of the bars (twice) and velcro width (four times) and seam allotment (twice) and that was the length of the sunbrella fabric to cut. For the width I measured between our dinghy engine hoist and dinghy engine bracket (plus seam allotment – twice). After that I was really free handing the mesh and the pockets look a little lumpy close up. Good enough for us!

Inside the caddy fit 4 reusable squeeze bottles I picked up at REI.

Sometimes it is the little boat improvements that are the most exciting. Our cockpit transformation is 2/3 of the way done: cockpit cushions (check), shower caddy (check) and now we need new mesh pockets near the dodger to replace our shredded ones.

I took a sewing and cooking class in middle school in which I learned some basic sewing. Fast forward nearly 30 years later and I have done almost no sewing since. I am definitely not an experienced seamstress and so it was with some trepidation that I bought a Sailrite sewing machine and the supplies for some major canvas projects on our boat.

While the sewing machine was crossing the ocean from the USofA to Fiji in a container, I watched a bunch of videos from Sailrite’s impressive stock of free tutorials on their youtube page. In addition to their project videos, if you are inexperienced like me, I particularly recommend their basic sewing videos and their sewing machine tension adjustment videos.

As previously blogged about, the first projects I worked on were simple repairs to the sacrificial sun covering on our jib, our mainsail cover, dodger, bimini, and our mainsail. Because I was mostly working with UV proof GoreTex Tenara thread on these sun exposed bits, I had a great deal of problems maintaining proper thread tension and I was very happy I had watched all of the tensioning videos and read through Sailrite’s tensioning and Tenara/PTFE section in the small manual that came with the machine. Even so, occasionally as the fabric thickness changed on the jib I would drop a zig or a zag and get a single straight stitch. As this was simply the sunbrella covering, the stitching of which has partially rotten off twice in the sun, I am still glad to have chosen the Tenara.

The first major item of new business that I tacked were cockpit cushions. Somehow, we have managed to cruise for nearly 5 years without them. We have had blue chairs a la West Marine, and we still have (and enjoy) our beanbag pillows from Tahiti, but we were seriously overdue for some arse cushioning.



Sailrite’s video on making your own cockpit cushions, available free on their site, is truly impressive as an educational -instructional piece. The video is clear and precise. Everything I needed to do the job was explained including a materials list and project checklist. They spend time going over the complicated bits several times and show the simple bits only once.  I must have watched the entire video 4 times and parts of it a half dozen more during the project and by following their directions, magically, everything turned out. Each time a cushion fit into its home I was a little stunned.

Our cushions are not professional quality and the small irregularities of an amateur sewing on her own boat while floating at anchor in Fiji are obvious to me. However, having seen what “pros” produce in our current location, we are confident that our final product is as good as what we would pay for here and of course, at a huge savings, plus the pride of having made them ourselves. If I hadn’t already paid for the sewing machine with our maintenance projects, I certainly covered the rest of the cost by making our own cushions.

Lesson learned: I wish I had watched the video before ordering materials – definitely a mistake. I would have ordered piping instead of making my own (possible to do, certainly, but time consuming and not really money saving), would have done a better job of estimating materials and I would have ordered a hot knife. With that said, I was able to do without the hot knife and as we won’t be pulling the covers off often I think that it will be fine. Regarding the Sailrite machine, I don’t have a lot of experience with sewing machines so all I can say is it has ploughed through every job I’ve put at it, fairly easily (except slippery Tenara).