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Sailing Around the Island

A (non-sailing) friend I was telling about my requirement of sailing abound Prince Edward Island before finishing my sailing book recently said, “That can’t be hard. How long should it take…2 days?”

The reality is that it is about 475 km or 300 miles around. If I were to sail day and night It could perhaps be done

  1. if I had night sailing skills
  2. if I had at least two others to share the watches
  3. if I didn’t care to stop and see any of the shore
  4. if (and here’s the big IF) the winds cooperated.

In comfortable winds the trimaran makes 6 knots with no difficulty and has been up to 9 or 10 knots, but the stronger winds are accompanied by rough seas especially in Northumberland Strait where the side shores serve as a wave guide. 6 knots would involve about 45 hours of sailing as long as the winds held and conveniently reversed as the boat rounded the island—that would be the 2 days. Of course, if one used a speedboat with lots of spare gasoline, found a really calm day, and pushed at 20 miles per hour or faster, the trip might be done in one day, but that defeats the purpose. Continue reading “Sailing Around the Island”

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Preparing postcards

On the photo-business side of Wood Islands Prints I have for several years gone to selling postcards to the local gift shops. The market in SE PEI is not very crowded with local image products. The challenge is to find an affordable route for very small runs (100, say) so there can be a limited stock of each picture but have a wide selection. I started with home ink-jet printing but the costs of ink and card stock was high and the result was not very water resistant. Then I found Vista Print. They have printing operations in the US and in Canada, so the duty/agent fee is not an issue. Their focus is on marketing products for small businesses, but they are quite willing to print photo products as well as reminders to “Come in for your automotive service.” If you follow the special sales notifications by email, you can get sometimes get 100 cards for the cost of shipping, and sometimes even save the upload fee as well. Even at worst case I can produce cards for less than $0.25US. I then go around letting customers pick a mix of whaterver cards I have in stock.

The production challenge is to obtain images with just the right resolution and pixel count. This is quite easy in Photoshop and probably in most image-editing software. I have developed a system to make up postcards with colored borders and captions…it is easiest if one develops blank templates that are just the right proportions for the image and for the overall card. My own cards all have blue backgrounds and gold-colored captions on the front as well as B&W description on the back to make it a ‘real’ postcard.

The process is ‘better felt than telt’ and I am going through the steps in a class I’m teaching this coming Saturday (May 19, 2012) for the Photography club that meets at the Montague (PEI, Canada) library at 1PM. If any of you reading this are close you’re welcome to come…there is no charge. Contact me at (902) 962-3335 for information.

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More printing options

I have some good news for potential writers who have held off because the (relatively) low cost option of Lightning Source has some definite restrictions to do with size, paper type, and bindings. These restrictions are probably and justifiably due to the POD (Print on Demand) nature of their product–someone can order a single copy of a book and it is (I assume quite automatically) printed, bound, trimmed, and shipped.

I have just two days ago run across InstantPublisher. The company is also located in a small town in Tenessee, but does not deal in orders of less than 25 books, nor can books be supplied directly via Amazon. In return the company offers several choices that are not posslible with LS:

  1. Binding choices include several forms of spiral (lay flat) edges which are well suited for cookbooks.
  2. It seems that other sizes can be had by trimming afterwards…I think they produce the standard size book and then trim it smaller if requested.
  3. Interior paper choices include glossy in two weights and even card stock (for cookbooks?).
  4. Interior pages can be a mix of B&W and color…somehow the press identifies each page as it is printed and decides whether it needs the color inks. The cost of the two types of pages differs and this allows savings where only a few pages need to be color.
  5. Like LS, there are a number of cover choices.
  6. Finally, the costs per book seem comparable on first glance.
  7. They have gone to great length to be able to work with WORD manuscripts (modified on your own computer as part of the upload process)

So, any of you out there who MUST have spiral binding and partial color or glossy interiors, here is good news! Anyone want to be the first to try them?

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Winter Dreaming

Well, it is not technically winter here in Atlantic Canada, but it isn’t really spring either!

I spent some early morning hours today dreaming with my yet-to-be-installed GPS chart-plotter (Lowrance Elite 5m). The GPS part is nice, but the chart function is great too. With charts costing $20 each (and they still require someone to plot the coordinates before you can find out where you are), the $450 for the unit was a bargain. One hand-held GPS easily costs $150 and if I had to buy 15 charts I would come out even. Now I  have charts for all of North America and even rough outlines for the rest of the world. I couldn’t find out the harbours of Tasmania but I could at least head for land. Add a simple world atlas and  basic navigation would be possible. Admittedly I have to click the no-liability statement at start up, so the fact that my electronic charts are easily 15 years behind (the Confederation bridge connecting PEI to the mainland is not there and that is hard to miss) is not a big problem…assume most shores have not moved significantly. and come into harbours carefully using the depth sounder.

Back to the dream. It is fun to move the pointer around the Island and imagine sailing into the various harbours. Which ones would be sheltered from strong NW winds and waves? Which ones would most likely have access to supplies? See how the most tempting direct path to the wharf would take me over shallow water…would my 3 foot draft get me in trouble? How far could I go in a day? Are there enough intermediate harbours in case the wind changes? As I say, it is fun to plan a hypothetical trip. I still have the around-the-island goal and requirement before I will release my book, and the GPS is a significant part of that.

Its too cold for Epoxy to set, so I might as well dream.

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Pictures for colour books

I am working with a friend, Tom Rath, redoing his book of poetry about cats for children. It is a challenge, not just because the format changes but also because the addition of colour is new for me with Framemaker (the layout program I use). Sure enough, lurking under the surface for the last decade have been features for just such options, along with far more than I ever wanted to know about spot and process colour and separations. Fortunately Lightning Source, the printer, will happily work with pdf format files having embedded jpeg format pictures. All they ask is 300 dpi (dots/pixels per inch).

Here is where my Photoshop Elements comes into play. I still have colour versions of the pictures that went into the original black and white book. They are sadly low resolution for the 8 1/2″ x 11″ format being used this time, but I have a procedure to squeeze out the best I can: Continue reading “Pictures for colour books”

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Radar Reflector you can build

About five years ago I got into radar reflectors for sailboats. the result is in an article I have on Duckworks, with additional details two years later in another article. I encourage you to look at them for many of the details…they are relatively easily made from aluminum roof flashing and pop rivets at low cost AND ARE FAR BETTER AT REFLECTING THAN ANY OF THE SMALL REFLECTORS MARKETED FOR SMALL BOATS. In short, size matters, and no passive technology can get around that.

Finished reflector on mast top

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The reflector is quite rigid with just thin flashing because of the angles. It is basically two sets of quadrahedral reflectors spaced inside each other, and gives excellent reflection over a wide horizontal circle. The two reflectors fill in for each other around the circle.

I strongly recommend building one for your boat if you are likely to be out where there is significant commercial traffic or where there are large cruisers with radar. It is also reassuring in fog, althought boats without radar would not “see” you.

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SEO and content

Search Engine Optimization has been a buzzword for years, but the abuses have gotten to the Spy vs Spy stage from Mad Magazine–each one one-ups the action of the other. Apparently there are invisible pieces at the top of a post or page that hold keywords and descriptions, but unscrupulous people stuffed them with things to ‘stuff the deck’ so the legitimate uses were thwarted. The last I heard Google, at least, is ignoring the tags and actually searching through the content of the page.

So my current theory is that there are two ways to grow web site traffic: Continue reading “SEO and content”

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Apologies, but all comments will now be moderated!

I have no desire to limit either positive or negative comments here (as long as the comments have to do with the site topic and do not lead to an obviously unrelated page), but I just discovered that some of the (vague but sincere sounding) comments with web addresses are simple spam, leading to pages touting Viagra, etc. I will try to approve comments daily and I apologize for the delay, but I had no idea spam came in so blatantly.  Such is the world of the internet.

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Do I feel stupid!

I’m crushed! I have just discovered that all the vague, short comments with a web address at the end are leading to sites promoting Viagra, etc. I guess spam now comes in sincere-seeming comments. From here on all comments will be moderated. Any with real content will be allowed unless a listed web address leads to some obviously commercial, unrelated site. Also, any “comment” with no readable content will be denied. I apologize to anyone with real comments and I will do my best to approve within a day any (positive or negative) comment that relates to the topics of the site.