July 2018 – Adventures on the Club

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Our plans to head off on the boat were put on hold when Jeff was diagnosed with congestive heart failure back in December. His cardiologists had said that the next 1-2 years would be very important, and we thought the best we could do was to leave in the fall of 2019. However, much to our delight when we were at the CHF clinic last Monday we received the go-ahead to cut the docklines next month!

Jeff had a cardiac ablation procedure four months ago which so far, knock on wood, has restored his heart back into rhythm (it’s not uncommon for atrial fibrillation to reoccur, even with an ablation). Once he recovered from the procedure he immediately noticed an improvement in his energy. Since then his ejection fraction (the amount of blood his heart pumps out of the ventricles with each contraction) has improved to 50-55% which puts him on the low edge of normal (it was 15-20% when he went into the hospital), so for now he doesn’t need an implanted defibrillator. Continue reading “All Systems Go!” →

When Jeff was diagnosed with congestive heart failure we knew we would have to stray from our “keep it simple” principles when it came to our anchor setup. Pre-CHF we planned to have a manual windlass (i.e. not powered by electricity) or perhaps go without one altogether. After all, it wouldn’t be that difficult to raise a 22 pound Rocna anchor plus some chain by hand.

With his diagnosis came lifting restrictions, so going without a windlass wasn’t going to cut it anymore. I suppose if I had started seriously working on my pushups I could have raised the anchor by hand, but at 49 years old and aging every day, we decided that might not be the way to go. The manual windlass also wasn’t ideal in case I was incapacitated and Jeff needed to use it by himself. An electric windlass was clearly going to need to be installed. But how to do it?

Searching the internet, we couldn’t find any examples of Bristol 29.9’s with electric windlasses. This may be because boats this size don’t typically need one, or it could have been that the relatively shallow anchor locker for the 29.9 wasn’t optimally designed for one. No time like the present to give it a shot!

Continue reading “An electric windlass on a Bristol 29.9? Why not?!” →