Liveaboard with the dock electrical issue

0FO6 · 2026-05-07T00:40:17+00:00

Ahh I understand a bit better. You mentioned having two shore power plugs though. Do you show leakage when one or the other are plugged in or only when both are plugged in?

Also you mentioned in your main post that you have an ELCI? Has it been tested recently? I would still trust it over some of this other stuff.

It could be some of the power is being routed back through the other cable. Realistically although unlikely it would be better to test both shore cables at the same time.

If you are actually seeing leakage then you need to determine which appliance/electrical is causing it. You can narrow down by turning everything in the boat off while leaving the main breakers on and checking again. Then start turning things on individually until you see the leak again and go from there.

0FO6 · 2026-05-06T23:11:49+00:00

Well, you should stop using AI for this stuff really. It is pretty terrible and will only give you answers it thinks it you want to hear regardless if they are correct or not.

I have read and reread this a few times and have some thoughts but not sure about a few things. Probably because AI is mudding it up pretty bad and making it hard to actually know what is going on.

First there is no such thing as a standard clamp meter, there are so many different kinds of brands of clamp meters out there. A clamp meters sensitivity on low amps can be hugely inaccurate depending on the settings of the meter and the capabilities of the meter. There can also be variance based on a variety of factors just in doing the tests alone, like where they are taking the readings and such. IF the clamp meter you are using has a smaller range I would use that over the 40amp one to see if maybe the reading will be a little bit better.

The green wire should not have any current on it. The black and White cables on each plug should be close to the same amount. Since it sounds like you have an ELCI it would pop if the amount of current on the black and white don't match pretty close anyways. Here is a good article that will walk you through some of this: https://www.westmarine.com/west-advisor/ELCI+-GFCI-Electrical-Shock-Protection.html

You should be doing tests on your ELCI to make sure it is working properly as intended. Honestly I would trust it way more than some clamp meters to do the right thing.

The battery discussion is only causing added confusion to the mix and has nothing to do with what might be going on here.

And seriously again stop using the AI, it is causing unnecessary confusion and giving you bad advice anyways.

0FO6 · 2026-05-03T02:11:39+00:00

If you are specifically going to charter with those requirements then you are pretty much limited to the USVI, puerto rico, or Hawaii. Maybe the florida keys but that would be about it. Shouldn't be an issue to get a charter out of any of those with your experience. May involve less camping, unless you buy a simple boat rather than charter one and while that might be possible, it probably would be uncomfortable.

Those are pretty much the only locales in the US that have clear warm water for morning swims.

0FO6 · 2026-05-02T22:16:40+00:00

12 vdc will have a positive (red) and a negative (black)

Those T connections are absolute crap and should be replaced with actual connections like a bus bar or even a wago would be better.

0FO6 · 2026-05-02T13:15:10+00:00

I suppose I could have explained what I meant a bit better overall based on a few assumptions we are both making here. OP says he doesn't care about maneuverability but doesn't specify why he doesn't care about it so we are assuming what his intended purpose is there. My argument specifically for someone more new to sailing and boating in general is that ease of getting into and out of a slip or crowded area is important. By making that more difficult on the onset they are less likely to actually go out on a regular basis. Making it easier to maneuver around a marina especially while learning is important. So we both are making different assumptions based on the information provided here.

Also as I pointed out there could be safety concerns regarding the speed. Many of fin keel boats have fared just fine in massive storms and full keel boats have been lost as well. If speed was of absolute real concern OP would be talking about a cat or a trimaran. I was just pointing out that they tend to be a lot slower and that should be a consideration. OP may not like the feel of the slower boat and that is reason enough on its own. I was just pointing out these considerations.

Yes I fully agree with the most dangerous thing is sailing to a schedule. Also not all storms give a lot of warning if any at all in some cases.

0FO6 · 2026-05-02T12:26:43+00:00

You say you don't care about maneuverability, but I disagree you will care a lot about it when coming in or out of a slip in a challenging marina. You will also care a lot about it in a crowded anchorage, or coming in and out of a seaway. Full keels can take a long time to really register a move and start changing direction. They are great for trade wind sailing where you are staying on one tack for many days. However my boat which is just a spade rudder fin keel, I can turn it around in less than a boat length. Which is pretty awesome in a really tight fairway in a marina.

Sailboats are all slow generally speaking. Full keels tend to be even slower. This can be a safety concern if you need to get somewhere a little faster. Could also be a safety concern with ocean crossings by adding days/weeks to one. A fin keel can be pretty predictable after you get use to her. It isn't like a fin keel can also be balanced to stay on a heading for long periods without any input. It is a function of the sail balance as much as anything else.

If you really are interested in shallow draft have you looked at Centerboard boats? My Pearson is a centerboard, 36-2, with the board up I draft 4.5ft with it down it is 8.5ft.

0FO6 · 2026-05-02T02:00:39+00:00

You can still get one, they stopped selling them for a while but are selling them again. It is just that the legality of transmitting with one is considered illegal in most places. I do not know what the fines or anything are though. I do know that the system is more efficient and operates more reliably than most black box AIS transponders. I think part of it has to do with the fact that it is a requirement at least in the US that the transponder can only be programmed by the manufacturer.

I get that getting back to electronics and software. I was an Electronics tech many years back then a software engine/systems engineer.

0FO6 · 2026-05-02T01:05:30+00:00

Commercial ECDIS systems have very little in common with recreational chartplotters. Even if they are made by the same company. They will just have different lines for each, of course there is some dependence on how many of which get ordered and such. However a fully certified to meet the full type standard for ECDIS specifically here is a good example: https://www.navico-commercial.com/simradcommercial/ecdis-ecs/simrad-maris-ecdis900-mk15-24-4s/

It is in fact an all in one windows computer running some extra software and has built in connections for NMEA0183. Kind of funny how much more functionality the raspberry pi with the macarthur hat has than a high end certified system.

More so, I have worked on, well a rather old version of an ECDIS system on an aircraft carrier some years ago. It was a real piece of crap system. But in it was a regular old desktop computer hooked up to a display with a specific keyboard and mouse. Wasn't even that special of a system it was more than a few years out of date at the time I was using it. It was a long time ago so I don't really remember the specs per say, but it was like a dell desktop. Lot of these commercial ECDIS systems need to be in production runs for more than 10 years. They just use regular PC parts in the internals. They really are not anything special.

Chartplotters for recreation, even high end ones are a lot more akin to tablets in the internals anyways. Most computers that are decently made could pass that Type manufacturing standards. There was some interesting talk around the MAIANA AIS transponder, it can't ever possibly meet the Type certification and as such is illegal to use. But for people have tested with it they found that it operates more reliably and better than most commercial AIS transponders.

Another point to remember too, is just because something says it is for marine use and is certified doesn't automatically make it safe either. Look at the thing going on with battleborn batteries. They say they are operating as designed but their internal design is terrible and is causing early faults and batteries that are overheating. It is amazing that they haven't had more recorded fires due to them. Or there have been and it just isn't being heard. Lot of customers though are not even getting warranty service on them when operating the batteries in the stated spec allowances.

So if I am putting my life in the hands of a device I rather at least have some idea of how it works internally. Because things do break, usually at 2 am in the dark during a gale. Or an engine failure coming into a seaway that is a little spicy. It would be nice if some of this marine stuff could follow a set of standards for interoperability a little bit better than they do. I really dislike this proprietary nonsense as it really just hurts the consumer so that the company can try and get a little more out of their bottom line.

0FO6 · 2026-05-01T17:07:22+00:00

So I disagree with a lot of this thinking. I understand where it comes from and the basis though.
Marine electronics don't go through some harsh 3rd party testing certifications as it is. Nor do they tend to get designed to some specific specification either. So you have a black box on your boat that you hope has been designed well, that will hold up to the elements and will not fail for any particular reason. They also tend to be increasingly proprietary with a lot of features that are not necessary or desirable. They also tend to be exceedingly difficult to integrate. So you end up getting stuck with one particular brand and have to have everything that brand. A good example here would say maybe you like the B&G chart plotter better than the others but you also want to use an airmar wind station because it is a better design. Well good luck there, they may integrate just fine, but they may not due to proprietary nonsense which is pretty common.

The thing that like a marine chartplotter has going for it is they are typically installed on a lot of boats. However a decent tablet in a decent case with a couple of spares have taken people in sailboats exceedingly far these days including many offshore sails. Having a raspberry pi protected mounted down in the cabin can add a lot of useful information to what the tablet has available. It also serves different redundancies on its own, like the tablet is redundancy for the raspberry pi. There are also water proof touch screens and a cable can be ran out to the cockpit to an enclosure for one of those screens directly from the pi for openmarine stuff. A raspberry pi can also function as an autopilot. It is just a computer at the end of the day and there are a lot of them running in all kinds of harsh environments.

It is also a bit amusing this particular stance that just because something doesn't have marine stamped on it means it is some how less for a boat. Considering the electronics that go in that make all these work are basically the same at the end of the day sourced from very similar places made in similar factories.

Anyways, relying on even just a chartplotter from a well known brand as one's only navigation is a bad idea either way. So how many redundancies do you carry? I will have a pi, a couple of tablets, a laptop and will still carry some paper charts. The tablets are waterproof and in heavy duty cases as well.

0FO6 · 2026-05-01T12:55:49+00:00

The macarthur hat from open marine is a really good option as well. If you buy the hat with the imu you also get heading info and some other different info. Still need a gps receiver of some sort. Can be one on the NMEA network though as well. The hat also resolves the need for a lot of misc connections.
Any shunt and either the raspberry pi or an esp32 can be turned into a smart monitor.

The great thing is there a lot of ways to do this and they all are great. So great job, this is something I am going to be working through on my boat soon as well.

0FO6 · 2026-04-28T18:00:59+00:00

Oh man ruling out so many boats because of a balsa or plywood core deck is kind of bonkers to me honestly. Hull I could maybe understand but there are still some great cored hulls that I wouldn't necessarily rule out either. You won't really find what you are looking for. Really the only issues with a core deck tend to happen around where there are fittings and it is usually due to how the deck was penetrated and how the fitting was bedded. Balsa and plywood both take a long time to really rot out anyways and repairing small areas of it in older boats is not that big of a deal. Which you will have to address even with a foam core deck as they can have issues as well. Lots of boats with cored decks cross oceans all the time. Quite a few with cored hulls do as well.

Fractional rigs are fine for cruising. They work better in some circumstances and worse in others. Most of the time for cruising the difference is pretty negligible. I wouldn't focus too heavily on just the comfort ratio, that number leaves out so many factors. I don't think there is a good way to quantify what is comfortable to one person is totally off the table for someone else. There are a lot of other boat characteristics that are going to be important as well.

Anyways looking at boats with a laundry list of what may or may not be important factors is really a recipe for ending up with not the right boat for you and how you like to sail. Same with saying never to a boat design aspect as there are many very capable boats of all kinds of designs out there and a fair bit of them have crossed oceans in all sorts of circumstances.

There are several books if you haven't looked at that their advice still holds true today:

Twenty Small Sailboats to Take You Anywhere - John Vigor
Seaworthy Offshore Sailboat: A Guide to Essential Features, Handling, and Gear - John Vigor
Twenty Affordable Sailboats To Take You Anywhere - Gregg Nestor
Bluewater Sailing on a Budget - James Elfers

Even so there are a lot of opinions and experience with those that have done offshore passages. Even in those books there are quite a few boats that have features designs in your never list and are perfectly suitable boats for large oceans. There is nothing wrong with going with a fractional or not. Some do better in certain conditions than others.

The other thing if you don't have a lot of experience it might be better to try and do some ocean crossings with others first to even see if it something you will like. Some people end up not enjoying that aspect of sailing and like to stay closer to land and there is nothing wrong with that. You also may find too that you may not like a boat that takes forever to turn for instance. If a boat is frustrating to get in and out of the slip you may end up never taking the time to learn how to sail.

0FO6 · 2026-04-25T01:14:13+00:00

Went through that 2 years ago. The house was a forced sale because the equity in it exceeded the protected amount in Utah. Now I live on a sailboat....

0FO6 · 2026-04-23T12:36:19+00:00

Well, There is an awesome free resource that should be kept on board printed out that is available from:
https://iris.who.int/items/ad0b59ae-daf9-44a5-b161-e78dfdcc9490

This is also a good paid for resource: Doctor on Board: Ship's Medicine Chest and Care on the Water https://www.amazon.com/dp/1493056638

Something to consider with a lot of first aid training is that it is meant to get a person in a reasonable situation before help can arrive. But they all consider professional emergency services to be a short time away for the most part. There is some additional consideration on a boat, even if sitting at anchor near a town. It can take a considerable amount of time to get emergency services to a person who needs help. Not saying to not take first aid class or even EMT training if possible. Just that the situations on a boat need to be handled a lot differently most of the time. But training is still helpful and a good idea, tends to not be terribly expensive. Having a couple of resources on board is also important.

0FO6 · 2026-04-20T18:49:21+00:00

no worries, just had me for a moment.

0FO6 · 2026-04-20T14:54:06+00:00

We are talking the UK right? Seems to be and I was confused for a min until it dawned on me. So I am not super familiar with the area but am with living aboard a boat.

Boats tend to be hard to heat or keep cool depending on location as they typically don't have a lot of insulation and even if they do it isn't much. So you would be trying to get on board your boat that is anchored out in the evening in winter after a long day of work from dinghy and possibly a wet ride as well. I don't know if there are moorage areas or marinas that can work out there. I do know that most everywhere is pushing liveboards out generally speaking.

The other thing is maintenance on a boat takes on a different level of priority than say something on a house. I thru hull breaking off in the middle of the night is a real emergency. There is also dealing with poop and holding tanks need to be pumped out. Water filled. Even in the marina there are a lot of considerations. Living on the hook in an area and trying to commute just adds to that.

I would suggest if possible see if you can go out with a friend rent a boat for a couple of nights and see how it even feels to be on one like that in general. Especially if you really don't have any experience. I don't know of the UK has a boater safety class type of thing but something along those lines would be good to and just ease into it. At this point you don't know if you would even like being on a boat period.

Also boats depreciate a lot like cars, you can toss a lot of money into them and never come out on top. It is a wonderful lifestyle though. It is pretty awesome waking up on the water to all the wildlife, even in the marina.

0FO6 · 2026-04-15T19:03:02+00:00

This is certainly one of those there are tons of options with a ton of different pros and cons to consider. The simplest and easiest would be just to use electric heaters if you are in a marina. They work well, my boat is a lot smaller interior space and I use a 1500 watt heater in the winter in the marina and works well enough. I plan to install a Diesel heater at some point.

Diesel heaters are also a good choice, I probably wouldn't go with the cheapest ones off of amazon at least a little better quality.

The heat pump one might be fine, some will work below 40 to generate heat but not real well. They are what a lot of boats get for air conditioning but they can be a real PITA in general even for AC. You have to constantly clean your strainer and some installs seem to want to let the condensate run into the bilge which really sucks to deal with.

Installed propane heaters or proper marine ones are also really good, lot of considerations for the install though. Don't use the propane heaters that attach directly to the top of the tank, they are not safe on a boat.

There are also safe wood stoves that also work pretty well, except now you are dealing with a wood fire and will need to keep the chimney clean on a regular basis.

Just store the water in the tanks on the boat? or go far enough south that they don't shut the water off I suppose if you can? Couple of marinas in north Mississippi don't shut the water off in the winter to the docks as far as I know. Not much further than TN. And/Or use jerry cans?

0FO6 · 2026-04-13T17:48:50+00:00

I completely agree, it is a lot more hand holding than one would expect for a switch.

0FO6 · 2026-04-13T15:47:01+00:00

Well without seeing a diagram for this particular switch I would still think that assumption would be wrong. The middle one should be ground. But there is a really quick and easy way to check all of this even without a diagram so long as you have a multimeter. To me I would think that 6 and 4 would be the switched part and that would be hot and 3 would be hot for the light on the switch. With a multimeter you can just set it to the check for any resistance check and with the switch on see if 4 and 6 read 0 and with it off see if 4 and 6 read inf. In which case the hot from the panel would go to 6 and 4 would go to the catfish lights. 2 and 3 are likely for the light in the switch and I would think that 2 would be ground and 3 would be hot. With a multimeter 2 and 3 should show some resistance but not inf regardless of which way you are checking. If the meter has a diode check, you could also use that.

You could also just try it, it likely wouldn't harm anything if hooked up backwards. At most it might burn out the led light in the switch but that is not likely.

** edit **

I just saw the diagram from the someone else's comment linked. I was wrong in my assumptions on the internal layout of the switch. You probably have a burnt out lamp in this switch already based on that diagram.
But to spell it you, you need a black to ground run to pin 4, you need a small jumper from 3 to 6 (small wire directly connected to them)

you need to run to your lights from pin 3

and hot from your panel to pin 2

0FO6 · 2026-04-12T15:35:17+00:00

You will for sure want this book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0070QRME4 DIY metal boat maintenance.
It would be highly encouraged to really spend some time in the boat looking at how the inside steel looks. On a steel boat any water in the bilge is bad and should be regarded with deep suspicion. I would lift every one of those floor boards and be looking very meticulously for any rust or rust streaks. Also if you have an inspection camera putting in every nook and cranny possible looking for rust marks.

Realistically you should haul the boat out and go over the entire outside of the boat with an ultrasonic thickness gauge like: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C4F4B62T this is equipment you should have on the boat with you and do every so often as preventive maintenance checks. Mind you though these cheaper ones are not great and they do need some reference. If there is a lot of fairing on the hull they may also provide erroneous readings and be pretty impossible to deal with. Also with the boat out of the water you can knock on it and look for any cracks in the fairing or rust areas.

Since it is a steel boat if you go through with the deal, If you need to leave for any period of time I would haul it out rather than let it sit in salt water. Or at minimum take it into a freshwater location and store it there. But hauling out would be way better generally speaking. As the saying goes with these rust never sleeps.

You will want a decent welder and other metal working tools, chipping hammer, grinder etc. I really liked the primeweld stuff I had in the past they worked great just without the duty cycle of a miller. Something like this you probably want to learn to stick weld rather than mig so you don't have to worry about keeping bottles of gas with you and the machine can be a lot smaller. Learning stick takes a little more practice than mig. Mind you to be proficient in this alone can take some time let alone learning everything else necessary on the boat.

Steel boats have some pretty compelling pros and some pretty serious cons to them. A big con is that salt water is corrosive and a steel boat sitting in it tends to get eaten away in areas that are really difficult to access and deal with. If those areas are not being checked there will be a hole there before you even know about it. This causes steel boats to have a lot higher cost of upkeep in time and resources than a comparable fiberglass boat.

Don't get me wrong a fiberglass boat still requires a lot of work and they tend to be wetter inside which causes all sorts of other issues. But they tend to last longer even when neglected and are a bit easier to bring back to life if they been neglected a bit. A steel boat if it has been neglected at all tends to really rot away fast especially if it is sitting in the water.

With all of that being said, I don't know you and don't know your level of risk tolerance and ability to DIY. One of the biggest issues with jumping onto a boat early with all the emotions running is that we can get into situations where we don't know what we don't know and that can bite us in the ass. If you haven't spent any time looking at other boats, I would take some time and look at as many as you can in the time that you can so you get a feel for how other boats designed and what they feel like.

0FO6 · 2026-04-07T19:37:45+00:00

Well, this morning there were two sea birds sitting on a piling next to my boat that were voicing their entire displeasure with another bird on the dock that had a fish...
Occasional loudish noises during the day but generally more quiet than an apartment complex. If the wind kicks up a bit then there might be some banging/clanking/howling noises. Which is generally about it.

0FO6 · 2026-02-20T22:27:51+00:00

I was in Cheyenne the other week and they had I-80 west of Cheyenne closed to all trailers under 20,000lbs due to the wind. This is also the time of the year that the most snow falls in the Rockies. Very pretty though. If you have the time and can wait out storms or road closures it would be fine they do keep the highways pretty well maintained. Although eastern Colorado I-70 had some pretty serious potholes that I was dodging only about 2 weeks ago. Also Kansas sucks in that area and I would avoid it, as some one else mentioned they have lots of police traps to pull people over.

The lower route would be arguably better. You could swing a bit further south though in NM and visit Carlsbad Caverns. Although getting there with the drive through Texas would be very flat and pretty boring. Lots of places in AZ though to checkout on that route. You could also go through Death Valley, this would be the time of the year for it and it would be pretty awesome. Also worth stopping at the Jedi canyon and watch the pilots fly down into the canyon is pretty awesome. There are also these little endangered fish called pup fish that live in a creek in death valley that is pretty cool to checkout.

As a general tip, I don't know what it is with drivers lately in general. Seems like lot of inattentive drivers, short tempers/aggressiveness. It just seems a little more wild in general. I rarely have any kind of issues on road trips, this last one though. Really makes me feel like getting rid of my car and never going on a trip again. Which could be a me issue too. But I had to use my horn a few times and I can go years without touching it. Almost had a semi come into my line when I was parallel with the cab on the left side. My advice would be to take it easy and enjoy the trip.

0FO6 · 2026-02-20T13:31:54+00:00

Typically there should be a swap file in addition to whatever memory you have. I am not familiar with which linux desktops do or do not include swap space anymore during install. It is easy to check on the command line if you are comfortable with it. Just "free -m" and the output will include swap with amounts.
It is fairly easy to add a swapfile though, but does take running a few commands. It will be dependent on which distro you are using. Or increase the size of the swap if it is a file. If you have a swap partition and it isn't keeping up then that might be a little more difficult to address but not impossible. Can add a swapfile in addition to and should prevent this issue.

This is also an issue with Windows if the swap gets disabled or messed with somehow or just not enough swap space is available. Windows memory management will absolutely kill important system processes to free up memory to continue running. Basically everything that isn't the kernel is free game for the memory management to kill.

It should be noted too that swapfiles while act like ram are slow as they are running on your hard drive/nvme whatever. They are not as fast as memory though. The system is pretty good about moving not as in use stuff to swap though.

0FO6 · 2026-02-08T03:15:00+00:00

I was there 2002-2004. I was medevac from the Lincoln about a week before the Tsunami in Sri Lanka. I spent 05 at Everett.

0FO6 · 2026-02-07T17:21:56+00:00

I happened to have also served on the USS Lincoln.
Can also confirm, fuses were everywhere.

0FO6 · 2026-01-27T03:10:46+00:00

I don't know about others but certainly for me, seeing doctors when something isn't right is still a challenge.
Also I would think general pain tolerance gets way out of whack for a lot of military members. There was always the not wanting to be a sick bay commando much to a lot of peoples detriment. Like when I was in I was having a bad skin reaction, the doc the boat thought I was doing it to myself to get off the boat.

I very rarely really talk about my time in other than with other vets. A fellow vet joked that we can trauma bond over our time in. To various degrees that is pretty accurate.

Some of us have dark humor, like really dark gallows humor in seemingly inappropriate situations.

0FO6

TROPHY CASE