This is the first 3-ish minutes of their summer long trip north:

It’s all true!

The next step was to hire someone with the necessary skills to make us a new bottom half of the dodger from sunbrella and vinyl. After a lot of calling around and getting some ridiculously high quotes from people who either did not want to really do the work. Or thought way too much of their skills. We finally found someone that we could work with.

The folks we got to do the canvas work for us on the dodger is:
Jones Company Design, LLC.
Lorraine & Ken Jones
jonescodesign@yahoo.com

They did an AWESOME job on the dodger. They did exactly what we wanted. Even when working from awesome instructions/request from me, like…”uh…I don’t know. What ever you think looks good”. The whole thing turned out way better than I could have hoped for.

Don’t believe me? Take a look for your self:
From the front:

From the back:

Ignore the ugly ass sail cover. We are getting new sails this fall and the sail cover will be replace then.

And to answer a question from a friend. The canvas is attached to the hardtop portion by a track I had screwed and 4200′d into place. The track material is called Flex-a-rail. And is very easy to work with. Heat it up with a heatgun and mold/bend it to the curves you want and your good to go. I put a screw every 3 inches and used 4200 for added holding and to keep water from getting under the track and causing issues down the line.

I never do.

What I normally end up doing is taking a beginning photo….then approximately 7/8ths of the way though the project, I take a couple more photos with nothing in between. My current project is a perfect example of this.

Right now I am working on replacing our old worn out canvas dodger with a shiny new hard dodger. Well, top half will be hard. Our current dodger is your average one inch steel tube frame with canvas and vinyl stretched over it. The problem with it is that it is well over 10 years old and absolutely falling apart at the seems. Which is to be expected of 10 year old canvas.

The other problem is, we want to mount two additional solar panels on top of the dodger and that is not really doable on sun rotted canvas. So, we decided to build a hard dodger. At first we thought of building it out of fiberglass. Which turns out to be a bit more work than either one of us really wanted to do.

The other option I came up with was to make it like you would when making a skateboard; using 3 or 4, 4×8 sheets of 1/8th inch birch board and laminating it together with tightbond 3 water proof glue, then cutting it to shape. That was the way I was planning on doing it, until Tawn stumbled across a webpage of a guy that did something very similar using a plastic product called Starboard.

Starboard turned out to be the way we were gonna go. So bought some poster board and taped it together to make one big sheet and laid that over the top of the existing stainless tubing, which is to remain in place and serve as the base/frame for the new hard dodger. I cut the poster board into the shape I wanted to use as a template. I then went to Tap Plastics down on Lake Union and got a 4×8 sheet of 1/2 inch think tan colored Starboard.

Using the poster board template; I simply cut the Starboard to the outlined shape I wanted using a jig saw. The Starboard material can be worked just like wood. I routed the edges to get a nice smooth round edge and did a little light sanding.

To mount the Starboard to the frame, I am using 1inch stainless steel “U” clamps and counter sinking the screws from the top.

The dodger frame is curved, so I lined up and fastened the starboard to the flat portion on top and center of the frame as seen in the picture above.

Using a set of ratcheting tie-down straps from my jeep; a couple heat guns and a infrared heat lamp I was able to get the perfect bend in Starboard. I’m actually very surprised it turned out as well as it has.

And another view

I will be finishing up installing the mounting hardware this weekend. And we are having someone come out to measure and give us a quote on how much it will be to make the bottom window out of canvas and vinyl.

Step 1: Get a bunch of heavy card board boxes from England delivered to your boat.

Step 2: Open that shit up and look at the stuff inside.

Step 3: Start putting above mentioned stuff on the back of your boat.

Step 4: Repeat step 3 a bunch of times over the coarse of your weekend. (Note the use of pvc pipe instead of the heavy stainless steel for the mockup).

Step 5: Go sailing and let the stuff from step 2, and installed in steps 3 & 4 do the driving.

If you have any questions about the installation process, I can’t help you. It really was so simple I didn’t really use the instructions included other than a read through once or twice a few weeks prior to the stuff being delivered.

Before leaving, I decided to hook up one of our camaras to the back stay and have it take a picture every 5 seconds during the trip over. The end result was 1788 photos and the time lapse video below.

Not sure why the quality is so poor on youtube:

Time Lapse from Shilshole to Poulsbo on Youtube

Last winter Tawn, our buddy Danno (D-Lo Baggins) and I flew down to Mexico to meet up with our friend Scot and Angie for a long weekend in a small town called Sayulita. It about 30 miles north from Puerto Vallarta. We had such a great time in the short three days we were there, we decided that we would come back again this year for a week or longer. I’m so glad we did.

This year, we rented the same “condo” we did last year. The crew this time (Left to right in the pic below) was Kristi, Phil, Danno, Me and Tawn:

You can find all the picture we took following this link.

We rented surfboards for the week. And spent the days getting up early and surfing for a couple hours:

Then siestas in the hammocks, haning on in the deck and enjoying the view:

Then more surfing. We also did alot of exploring, hiking, scuba diving, sailing, and a lot of drinking:

All in all, we had a great, great time. Time to start planning the next trip!

Oh and this is my favorite picture of Tawn:

She will probably hate it and make me take it down, so enjoy it while it last.

I uploaded all the pictures to our Flickr account. You can view the full collection of photos from the whole trip here.

I broke them up in to small sets, based roughly on the town or area we stayed in. I’ll break them down a little below. The order they are listed below is the order we visited them. Starting on October 9th and returning home on November 2nd 2009.

Sorry if this update is so short and not up to my usual witty standards.

Santiago: Link to pictures

Our first stop was the Capitol of Chile, and the largest city in the country (+5 million). We were completely exhausted after flying 13 hours from Seattle to Atlanta, then Atlanta to Santiago. But we took a bus from the airport to downtown and then jumped on the subway and explored the city. We did not really want to spend much time in Santiago. As in our view, big cities are big cities. But we did have 8 hours to kill before our bus south to Puerto Montt left.

We traveled from our home in Seattle to Puerto Montt, Chile. Which as the crow flies is a distance of over 6800 miles. But only actually walked probably less than a mile to get there!

• Walk a hundred yards from our boat to the parking lot and into a car.
• Get out of the car and walk another couple hundred yards into the Seattle airport and to the terminal.
• Sit all the way to Atlanta, then walk from one terminal to another, a distance of another hundred yards or so.
• Sit all the way to Chile, walk out to a shuttle bus, get off that bus and on to another and sit all, until we get to Puerto Montt.

All told, we could not have walked more than a mile. Not sure why I find this so interesting?

Puerto Montt: Click here for pictures

After sleeping most of the overnight trip from Santiago to Puerto Montt (11 hours) on the most comfortable bus in the world, we showed up in Puerto Montt around 10am. We spent the next two days exploring the town and getting used to the way things worked here.  This process actually took longer than a few days. But we had to start somewhere.

Isle Chiloe: Click here for pictures

We rented a car in Puerto Montt for a week and drove all over this large island. The largest island in Chile, maybe even South America. We stayed in a number of little towns, Quellon, Castro, Ancud. And visited many others. By the time we turned in this little rental, I sorta felt bad. We drove the shit out of that thing. And I think that the car was actually the guys personal car that he rented to us. Not some random rental car. It was a little expensive, renting cars anywhere in Chile is. But we thought this would be the best way to see the most of the island.

Puerto Varas: Click here for pictures

After leaving the island, we drove to a town named Puerto Varas, which is north of Puerto Montt about 15 miles. The town sits on the southern tip of a large lake named Lago Llanquihue (pronounced Yankeeway). Very cool little city with a heavy german influence.

Mount Osorno: Click here for photos

Still having the car, we drove east from Puerto Varas to hike around a very large, very active volcano named Mount Osorno. The volcano was covered in clouds most of the day, but just as we were about to turn back, the clouds cleared and we got some awesome photos.

Frutillar: Click here for photos

This was another very small town on the shore of Lago Llanquihue, again very heavily influenced by german immigrants.

Valdivia: Click here for photos

After returning the rental car, we started taking the buses everywhere. It is very cheap and they go everywhere. For the longer trips we took the more comfortable buses with the larger bus companies. (Pullman, Turbus). And would take the local buses for trips around town or to closer towns. Valdivia is on the coast. We visited a few old forts that protected the city from pirates way back in the day and also stopped off at the Kuntsman brewery for dinner and some local beer.

We also saw what had to be the largest freaking sea lion in the world.

San Baralocia, Argentina: Click here for photos

When we came down here we had just over 3 weeks total. And no schedule or plan. So, for what ever reason, we decided to take a bus from Valdivia to San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina. We figured, we were all the way down here, might as well take a visit to Argentina. Bariloche is a ski town and much more touristy than the other places we’d visited so far. But it was a very cool town. And as you can see from the pictures, the modeled themselves after a typical swiss alps villages. Again, heavy on the german/swiss influences here.

Osorno: Click here for photos

Prior to our trip down, Tawn had been email back and forth with a british couple that had sailed from Britian down here to Chile 15 years ago. They had sold their boat and bought a chunk of land and started a ranch/b & b. We had planned on stopping there for a few days to meet them and visit. But the guy was going through some medical stuff and they were up in Santiago. They thought they would be home while we were there, but were unsure of the dates. So we started moving in their direction and visiting towns and areas along the way in case we could setup a visit.

It turned out we never did get to meet them.

Pucon: Click here for photos

This town was a very cool town. Sitting on the shore of a large lake. It reminded me a lot of a mountain town in Colorado. A lot of outdoor tourism goes on here. Just about anything you can imagine. White water rafting, kayaking, mt biking, hiking, horse back riding, motor cycle tours, zip lines. They had it all here. We rented some mountain bikes and took a ride on day and took a bus tour up to some natural hot springs on another day.

You probaly also notice we have a lot of pictures of random dogs. Chile loves their street dogs. Every town has a crap load of them. They are all friendly, dirty as hell, but very well fed. Some are owned by people and some seem to just belong to a certain neighborhood. Out of all the street dogs, we liked the ones here in Pucon the best. Not sure why.

Constitution: Click here for photos

Leaving Pucon, we decided that since we were running out of time. We would head north and visit some towns in the famous wine regoin of Chile. This would also get us a little closer to Santiago, so we would not have to take a huge 11 hour bus ride again.

We decided on going to a town called Talca. To me the funniest thing about this town, was people kept asking us why we came to Talca. They could tell we were americans. I guess Talca was not high on the list of tourist spots in Chile. On our first day in Talca we jumped on a crowded bus and headed to the Town of Constitucion. Which is on the coast. Sort of a small coastal town, and we really had no idea what to expect. But after walking around abit, we found these very cool caves and a HUGE rock outcropping.

We were told to take the train back. We did, that in and of it’self was a very interesting ride. When we saw the train, I thought it was an old piece of shit and kept wondering when the real train would show up. We sat in the back and the lady checking tickets kept coming back and yelling at me for opening the back door of the train to take pictures.

Talca: Click here for photos

As I mentioned, the main reason we went to Talca, was to visit some of the wineries. But it turned out that the day we were there was  national holiday and all the wineries were closed. Booo!

So on our second to last day in Chile, we jumped on a bus and went out to a national park and went for a hike.

We jumped on a (nice) train the next day to Santiago. We wandered around town checking things out before jumping on our flight that night.

We have been in Chile for four days. It’s a little over whelming sometimes. In mexico our Spanish is passable, but here they speak unbelievably fast and drop words short. And tons of slang. But we are getting by. Tawn is doing better with the language than I am. That’s one more thing that makes us a good team.

We spent two days in Puerto Montt. Rented a car today for a week and are staying in a town called Castro tonight. Will be headed a little further south tomorrow to a town called quellon.

Ill update more details and add pictures when we get
home.