Dude…check it out. Nice "butt connector", if you know what I mean. Wink-wink, nudge-nudge, say-no-more.

If that didn’t do it for you, then check out this PDF with embedded video describing each type of 3M Scotchlok connector. Yowza!

I promise you won’t get fired for watching this at work. Unless, of course, you work at a pornography shop. If so, you shouldn’t be wasting valuable work hours looking at explicit video of electronics components.

In honor of this once-every-1,461-days calendar event, let’s take a moment to sit back and enjoy this tiny video.

It ain’t gear or gadgets…there’s not even a boat in sight. But I thought I’d share anyway. Does anybody know where or when this occured? I’d love to hear more of the backstory.

I found it over at the discussion forums on TheBoaters.com. By the way, has anybody noticed that they’ve changed Lovely Hostesses a couple of times on TheBoaters.TV?

I used these for my AIS installation. Raymarine includes them in some installation kits, so the guys over at The Offshore Store were able to toss a couple my way. Officially, each of these is a 3M™ Scotchlok™ IDC Butt Connector UR2.

Alls I know is they’re dang handy! As shown in the picture, they connect the tiny 24-gauge wires from my SR161 AIS receiver to the 22-gauge wires in my Raymarine NMEA cable. Don’t strip the wires…just stick them in, all the way down, and squeeze the red button closed with a plier.

The metal connector inside perforates the wire insulation to connect up to three wires. They’re gel-filled for moisture resistance, and in the picture you can see some of gel that has oozed out the unused center slot.

To finish this joint, I used a bit of surplus shrink-tube I got at the Boeing Surplus Store (is anybody else as unhappy as I am that they closed the Boeing Surplus Store?). The heat-shrink tubing doesn’t really seal anything, but it provides some mechanical reinforcement for the two cables and the 3M butt-connector.

Trust me, you do NOT want to try to strip and solder or crimp these wires in the conventional way. One false move and you’ve broken off one or two wire strands, and with wire this small, that’s about half the conductive cross-sectional area of the wire! I exaggerate, but not by much.

[Fellow C-Dory folk Bill and El posted a quick review of the SPOT "Satellite Personal Tracker" today. SPOT is a clever little not-an-EPIRB and not-precisely-a-PLB product we've discussed before. Bill has given me permission to reprint his review here. See it in its original context over on the C-Brats site. --Tim]
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Here’s a little side tale on the Spot device. We took the Spot with us to Greece the past three weeks — worked great, for the purpose of letting the family know where we were and that all was fine with us.

1. Grandkids belong to a geography club at school — we sent them a Spot location every time we were at an interesting location (Greek ruin, usually) on our trip. They (and their club) could google earth the exact location, then use google’s satellite photo option and zoom down to see the site close up. So the class ‘joined’ us at the Acropolis, Aphea, Delphi and Olympic stadium — they then ‘wikied’ info on the sites and had a great time learning about Greek history.

2. There was a sharp earthquake while we were there

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Maptech makes navigation software as well as hardcopy "chart packs" ideal as backup charts. We all keep hardcopy backup charts aboard, in case our fancy electronics fail, right?

So Maptech is for sale, apparently, according to Panbo. I hadn’t realized it, but Maptech started out as a sort of pet project by Gary Comer, the founder of Lands’ End.

Panbo discusses this back story in more detail, and it starts to explain why Maptech’s current owners might wish to sell. Very interesting…

So the really big question is: who might buy? I can think of several potential bidders, but I’m keepin’ my mouth shut for the time being. As much fun as it might be to start an unfounded rumor and see where it goes, I’m not going to do that, and I consider that my good deed for the day.

Wait a minute…that ain’t right. Ah, here we go:

The new Fisheries Supply catalogs are here!
The new Fisheries Supply catalogs are here!

I know…funny how the least little thing amuses me. But in case my readers haven’t caught on yet, I love Fisheries Supply.

From the website: ‘To get your copy of what has been referred to as the "bible of marine hardware", please provide your shipping address. Free catalogs can only be shipped within the United States. If you reside outside of the United States, we will be happy to provide a freight quote.’

We took a cruise up to Port Townsend last weekend, and it was decided that my younger daughter and I would stay out at Fort Worden State Park, tied up to one of the mooring buoys. These mooring buoys have a reputation for being less than comfortable due to their exposed location just inside Point Wilson.  See, Point Wilson is one of the pinch-points of the Admiralty Inlet bottleneck that all shipping traffic to or from Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia must negotiate, so you can get some nasty vessel wakes through here. Plus the weather and tide can kick up the water something fierce, in addition to whatever residual swell is coming in off the Pacific and down the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

But the weather report was favorable, and there was a big fishing derby going on, which was going to make the wharf near the boat ramp a madhouse at about sunrise, so we decided to tie up to a mooring buoy and stay out of the way. Specifically, we decided to tie up to the buoy farthest from the wharf.

We made up to the mooring buoy just fine at about 21:30 Saturday evening. Low tide, a -1.1, had been at 18:15. This is important, because at 02:30 Sunday morning, when I awoke to take a look around, the mooring buoy was gone!

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I completed my AIS-on-the-cheap installation today, and that’s what it cost. Here’s an itemized list:

Except for the antenna, everything came from The Offshore Store and Fisheries Supply, two of my favorite places to spend money.

Not included: Anything I already had, such as a partially used tube of LifeCalk polysulfide adhesive/sealant, leftover wire for the NMEA signal I had to reroute, solder, cable “zip” ties, and the like.

Also, the antenna rail mount I used was not the cheapest available, but I already had it from an earlier project, and it looks a lot better than the nylon alternative.

One genuine bargain really made up for that shiny antenna mount, though:

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We’ve made no secret of the fact that we’re enamored with Hobbie’s Mirage-drive-equipped pedal-powered kayaks. So what would you get if sailboat people, rather than kayak people, made a pedal-powered boat?

You might get something like the Nauticraft line of pedal-powered boats:

Where did these unusual boats come from? Glad you asked! Fisheries Supply has the Nauticraft’s forerunner on display just now: The 1985 Hoyt-Harken Waterbug. In keeping with our recent James Bond theme, let me point out that

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Hydration Technologies’ SeaPack Emergency Desalinator does not use the reverse-osmosis process we’re familiar with to remove salt from seawater.  Instead, it uses conventional "forward osmosis", where water moves across a semi-permeable membrane without any pumping in order to equalize the "osmotic pressures" on either side of the membrane.

The end result is that the SeaPack produces a potentially life-saving drink directly from seawater. The filtered drink is said to be similar to grape juice, providing 480 calories from each half liter. The osmotic membrane rejects 97% of the salt.

If you don’t own a portable reverse-osmosis watermaker, this is a compact, lightweight alternative for your emergency kit. MSRP is $99 for a single SeaPack filter and five "sports drink" syrup charges.

They even sell them through Amazon.com