Safety & Comfort Hacks for Life Aboard a Cruising Boat

so Nick how many hacks do we have 1717 hacks these are things that'll save you money protect your boat and keep you safe and they're pretty easy to do yeah losing your dinghy is a major inconvenience and it could also be very dangerous met some people down in the Exuma z-- who lost their dinghy while they were at a friend's house it got untied and they never saw it again if you saw Nick's video a few months ago there's a guy that jumped off his boat to go after his dinghy and he almost died and we're not immune honey remember that time we woke up in our dinghy was gone I had totally forgotten that actually it was Morrow Bay and it turned out the Coast Guard was a little worried that somebody maybe fell overboard if we found the dinghy but it turns out it was because we didn't tie it to the boat well enough well we've solved that problem first of all we use two dinghy painters and each of those painters has its own locking carabiner so we don't even have to worry about tying a knot you really got to keep up with it because the salt air and just wants to eat away at anything metal cleaning off the salt and the corrosion is really just step one you still have to protect the metal after it's been cleaned there's a lot of products out there that do a very fine job but if you want something as simple and easy try wd-40 that's right the old standpipe there's a mixture of solvents and paraffins and oils in this stuff but it does provide a layer of protection on top of stainless steel instead of spraying it directly onto the metal I suggest that you spray it onto a rag and then wipe that rag all over the metal pieces after you're done there may be a little bit of kind of a bluish haze to some of the spots but at least it won't be rusty I'm hungry honey there's nothing in here it's just cuz I wanted to show people what you can do with non-skid this is stuff that you put under your rug or anything else on your countertops that you don't want moving around so instead of having all these jars rolling around the booth prior at me which is really not a good sound but also in really rough seas I've had this thing open up and they drop and spill so this is a really good hack to put this down and secure your jars of goodies we love to watch movies in bed but we are really really lazy instead of having the laptop in between us on a pillow or something we actually suspend our screen above the bed so we just look up it's really nice watching the movies on the iPad it makes it easier for me just to fall asleep like this Meaghan falls asleep even faster so I can go from the rom-com back to watching Top Gun 12 volt fans on a boat are great and really the more the merrier but they sometimes don't move enough air for you so what's really handy is some sort of shop style 110 will fold fan that runs off an inverter or shore power they can really move a lot more air especially if you put them near the door or a window and your really cool things down inside the boat and you can buy these a lot cheaper than the hello turbofans for about twenty-five to forty dollars you can get one that moves quite a bit of air we learned early on how important it is to have a knife at the ready the jack line follows the anchor Road up and wraps itself around the window the windlass so now the windlass is stopped and we're beamed to the biggest C's we've ever seen when you need a knife you usually need it really fast so where one is good more is better we've got four knives at the ready on clarity one right behind the hill the second one is by the back steps we've got another one right here at the mast in case we need to cut any of these halyards this is our rope Locker in the port bow this is where we keep a whole bunch of lines at the ready in case we need to replace something and right next to the lines I've got our rigging knife if I need to make up some sort of line rather quickly this will help me do it things can go from Annoying to actually dangerous in a hurry let's say that you got something wrapped up on your propeller which actually happened to us one time well on this boat we are ready to go we've got the fins we've got the masks and the snorkels right here at the back of the boat which by the way is right by the knife we could be in the water and fixing it in about 30 seconds and speaking of masks there's nothing worse than having a fogged up mask if you're snorkeling or free diving or scuba diving one easy hack is to wash the inside of the mask before every trip into the water with some diluted dish soap you don't have to use very much but if you clean it every time that'll keep the fog from forming and for whatever reason let's say you have to stay down underwater a little bit longer this spare air acts like a mini scuba tank and it'll give you about five minutes underwater what do you got here name-o this is my collection of bums is that like an instrument if you were to have a leak on a boat it's probably gonna come from just a handful of places one of those places would be the through holes the bungs are used to close off a through hole that is leaking for whatever reason but that's not the only spot where water can ingress you could have some ingress around a shaft coupling a rudder stock or maybe some other sort of through hole fitting here's another emergency solution that I think should be a board just about every boat this is epoxy putty it's like a Tootsie Roll where you've got the two different types of material rolled up together all you have to do is break this apart and squish it into a little ball and it's gonna set up into hardened epoxy in about five to seven minutes it'll even cure underwater this can solve a lot of problems really quickly we have met so many boats who've been struck by lightning so if lightning hits its gonna hit your mast and it's gonna take out all of your electronics and instruments including your VHF antenna and that could be your last best communication on clarity we have a backup second VHF antenna behind the helm nothing makes you look sporty-er than having all your cool gear right over your head this is our custom rack where we keep boat hook fishing pole some paddle board paddles and some pole Spears this rack is made from a material called starboard if you're not familiar with it do a little googling it's good for a lot of different stuff and it's pretty easy to work with too we started with a pattern cut that pattern out with a Rotozip and then it was just a couple stainless steel brackets and we had it mounted it's been in service for two and a half years did you know there's an As Seen on TV section in Target do people still watch TV anyway we found this screen there and it was $25 came with Velcro I reinforced it with Velcro and then also added this additional screen all the way down with more velcro and it works really good for about one season so we just replaced it every year this stuff is wonderful this is Dyneema and you can use it for all sorts of things on a boat it's really really low stretch it's super strong and UV resistant so you can use it just about anywhere and with a couple of FIDs you can do all sorts of crazy things like splicing in highs shackles you can make soft shackles out of it it's really handy stuff we won't go into details there's plenty of videos out there so do some googling and learn how to work with Dyneema another great side benefit to Dyneema is that it tends not to squeak like other double braided clients do so this is actually what's holding our trampoline on and it doesn't make any noise now you have a fight for Tex problem no I have a phifertex solution I mean you can use this stuff for everything for side curtains for baskets for under the helm seat covers for side shades Helms I mean I cannot get enough of this stuff so phifertex comes in two different weights one is just kind of a see-through screen and then the other is a double layer and you really can't see through it very well but it's really nice for side curtains and I get it from sailrite roughly 15 to 20 dollars depending on what weight you want so highly recommend phifertex keeping cool is a big goal aboard clarity and one thing we found that has really helped keep the inside cool is this one way vinyl adhesive from vivid order this right off of Amazon I think it was 40 or 50 dollars to have enough to do all of the hatches you had to take off the hardware cut it out custom but the stuff was working great it still lets and enough light downstairs that the inside of the boat doesn't feel like a cave live from the toilet now if there's one thing that you can do as a guest aboard somebody's boat to make the captain really really cranky it's to leave the faucet on and let all of that fresh water go down the drain we've solved that problem aboard clarity to a great extent by installing some low-flow faucet inserts into the faucet so the water just won't come out very fast but if I hear that water pump running too much you're gonna hear from me and if you saw our video about the ultimate boat cushion one cushion to replace them all introducing the ultimate boat cushion but I just highly recommend this it's hard on one side and soft on the other so that means that in a situation like this where that's not very comfortable to sit against you just pop this right here and all of a sudden you've got a couch so comfortable and the best part is you can make it yourself click on the link below in the description and I'll take you to my video where I show you step-by-step how to make one we don't worry a whole lot about security on clarity but when we go to a dinghy dock where everybody else has got their boat locked up we like to lock ours up too this is rather handy this is a 12 foot mic cable for a lock we use separate locks because well these go bad after a couple years they get all rested up this you can thread through the outboard engine handle and then through the boat and your gas tank and then to the dock I recommend at least 12 feet long well that made us get organized yeah we got the boat cleaned up for you to do that video a lot of these hacks are things that we've actually come up with over the years from making mistakes like not tying the dinghy on to the boat well enough and the dinghy floats away and some things have just come about through sheer laziness like an iPad suspended over your pillows that might be my favorite hack the only thing we need now are straws so we can drink our drink without moving our heads or how about an intravenous line that'll work so put in the comments below what your favorite hack was or if you have any new ones that we could use we're always looking to learn and always looking to improve and on that note we'd like to wrap this one up and just give an extra huge shout out to all of our patrons thank you so much for all of your contributions we really appreciate it thank you so much everybody appreciate your watching and we'll see you next week you

Channel: The O'Kelly's

Views: 119,059

Rating: 4.9593639 out of 5

Keywords: Clarity, Nick O'Kelly, Megan O'Kelly, Catamaran, cruising, Leopard 46, Off-grid, DIY, sailing, SV Clarity

Id: z0JjZ66vsQ4

Length: 13min 8sec (788 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 11 2020