What the heck are the 5 Gold Stars that have appeared on the title page of this thread?
Good things don't usually happen when you slide off a roof, fall off a ladder...
A long time friend and Santa Cruz sailor/rigger, Steve L. is now stuck in a wheel chair with a broken pelvis and fractured vertabrae. Good news, Steve is home and being cared for by his devoted wife, also VNA (Visiting Nurses Assoc.) Bad news is Steve is stuck inside their smaller home. The entry steps and turning area are too steep and too tight to get Steve outside, as he so wishes to be.
Enter Howard S.'s creative genius. Brainstorming with Steve and myself, we've come up with a simple ramp system that will utilize plywood, 2x4's, a couple of padeyes, a Hobie-16 mainsheet tackle, some Spectra line, and left over non-skid paint. We're also affixing safety rails in the bathroom.
Here's Howard at work on the incipient ramp:
Did you know Howard Spruit once designed and built what was one of the fastest catamarans on the West Coast? Here's Howard's 34 foot ROCKET 88 sailing off Santa Cruz in it's initial configuration in ~1988:
Thanks to Jonathan and Christine telling us more about Howard and the local Santa Cruz boat building community on their norcalsailing.com news site. Theirs is a well researched and wonderful story of what can be achieved when imagination meets Santa Cruz boat building culture with some drugs involved.
http://www.norcalsailing.com/entries...l#.XGQxFRJ7nIU
Thanks to Serge Pond and norcalsailing.com for photos
Last edited by sleddog; 02-13-2019 at 08:56 AM.
Hi Skip -
from what I can tell, the gold stars in the thread listing are there because someone 'rated' the thread positively. VBulletin has the concept of rated threads built into it.
At the top of this page (or any page with a thread listing) is a horizontal menu bar and one of the items is 'Rate This Thread'; someone must have opened that list and selected 'Excellent' = 5 gold stars. A bit odd, but that seems to be how social media is designed. Hopefully you are not offended!
There may be a way to disable or turn off the thread rating feature, if folks find it annoying.
- rob
Webb Chiles has reached Panama on his passage from South Carolina. Good reading in his Passage Log: http://self-portraitinthepresentseaj....blogspot.com/
I won't spoil it except to say he goes through all GANNET's tiller pilots (4) and resorts to sheet to tiller steering. This causes many accidental jibes and off course miles. No windvane on GANNET. Too much weight and complexity on the transom, and inability to use the Torqueedo near shore.
Before departing, Chiles bought an I-Pad Pro for navigation. Not needing cellular he ordered the WiFi only model. He failed to realize that model did not contain built in GPS. For another hundred dollars, the WiFi and Cellular model does have GPS. "Making a false assumption was a costly mistake," writes Chiles
His welcome in Panama is mixed. My guess is GANNET may be loaded on a truck for the Canal crossing. Webb's patience has worn thin with shore-side bureaucracy.
Says Chiles, "If you live to be 70, the world into which you were born will almost completely vanish ..."
Last edited by sleddog; 02-14-2019 at 12:50 PM.
We're a small group, with a forum. On that modest forum is a thread which has continued for eight years and has over 3,000 posts and 1.3 million views.
I didn't do it, but I'd give that thread five gold stars.
Hi Skip -
I checked with Carliane (web administrator for SSS) and she agrees - rating threads is not useful.
I've turned off the thread rating mechanism and the little stars seem to have gone away. And yes, that function is a forum-level thing an administrator has to go do, not a 'feature' a user can turn on/off at the thread-level.
- rob
PS - I'm helping Carliane out a bit with some of the under-the-hood web details.
don't need gold stars to see that there have been 1,321,089 hits. I think alot of sailors start off their days with a Skip hit.
"Helping...a bit" is an understatement. I am glad that Rob is on the ball and got this taken care of. My guess is that the poster just wanted a way to express how much entertainment and information can be found in Skip's posts. This is the thread I always check first whenever I pop on the SSS forum (albeit not as frequently as I should). Rob and Skip certainly both get 5 stars from me
I am not sure about NEWPORT, but the world i grew up in, getting 1 gold star was something you could brag about to your parents, and might get you a ride to the beach instead of going to church.
5 stars might excuse you from mowing the lawn for a month.
Last edited by Howard Spruit; 02-14-2019 at 09:45 PM.