Sailing from Berkeley to Hawaii in a 19ft Sailboat | Hacker News Reader

Sailing from Berkeley to Hawaii in a 19ft Sailboat

potter-yachters.org

143 pointsprotonbob89 comments

Very cool! More info on an equally charming old website here, including a remarkable letter from his wife:

http://josephoster.com/billsvoyage/index.html

I suppose every wife in any generation wants their husbands to be safe, but each generation has a different approach to risk and adventure. I know my wife would be resolutely opposed to any voyage like this (says the man with a dream of sailing a Hobie Cat across the Great Lakes...perhaps when my son is grown).

This page also includes a 100x136 pixel high-resolution color digital photo of the boat, and the year: 2002.

http://josephoster.com/billsvoyage/potter.html

There's also an update page with a GIF animation of the weather accompanied by the text "WARNING!!! file size: 1.5 MBytes"

From the article:

> The batteries were charged for about 1 hour daily using a Honda EU 1000 gasoline generator coupled with a 3-stage battery charger. The generator burned 1-1/2 gallons of gas in 24 days. ... There was no backup power source for charging the batteries.

24 hours of runtime and 1.5 gallons of gas equate to 0.625 gallon usage per hour. From the spec sheet, an EU1000 generator has a 0.55 gallon tank and can run for 6.8 hours at 225W output, that's 0.081 gallons per hour, so I estimate that the generator was operating at about 174 watts, given it ran for an hour that's 174 watthours per day.

23 years later, anyone would assume that your default source of 174 watthours per day would be a solar panel. A single 2x3 foot rigid panel would do ~100W peak and see the equivalent of 4-6 peak hours per day, easily beating that requirement. Any serious sailboat (even a little trailerable 19' coastal boat like this one) would have a whole array powering lighting and sensors and radar/radios and telemetry and would budget much more than that.

Username astoundingly appropriate

Cost per watt 23 years ago was likely $5-$10/watt for the panel plus the cost of the inverter etc. the Honda would be much simpler and was about $1000 USD and self contained

You should do it! Go Nacra instead of Hobie if needed but you should absolutely do your own version of the Worrell - just have somebody trail you in a motor boat if you need to feel more comfortable :)

Have solar panels become that popular in the last ten years, and are people retrofitting old boats? All my prior great lakes sailing experience was on boats that would use the diesel motor to recharge batteries.

Yes and yes. Being able to have all but guaranteed power to float charge batteries, run bilge pumps, etc, etc, really makes disuse a much easier problem.

And batteries like the cyclic nature of the sun much more than a constant on float charger.

> Very cool! More info on an equally charming old website here, including a remarkable letter from his wife: http://josephoster.com/billsvoyage/index.html

That letter from his wife, Naomi, contains a link to her website[1], which is itself fascinating. Its About page contains the following, which made me think her particular brand of value-add in the world is of the kind that will survive:

> I fill-in the details of the couple in each Ketubah by hand, with ink and pen, as Jewish scribes have done for thousands of years. Nowadays, most Ketubah artists use fonts and fill-in the texts by computer rather than by hand, because many have not studied calligraphy, an art which takes much time and practice to master. I, personally, like writing the details by hand, though it is not easy work, because it is traditional, and because it connects me in a personal way with my clients and my prints.

[1] https://www.ketubotbynaomi.com/

I lived on a catamaran around 2000 onwards as a kid. Solar panels were surprisingly widespread, particularly on multis with outboards (and therefore limited ability to make power through alternators). Obviously the $/W sucked, but people also didn't have as many power draws. One big drawback was older generations of solar panel had terrible performance in partial shading. A stay or rope shadow passing over the panel was a big issue because of fewer bypass diodes, simpler battery chargers, and so on. That sort of thing is a bigger issue for a yacht with less clear space for panels.

So there were a lot of diesel powered yachts generating power throughout the day. Something that was pretty common back then as an adjunct (and much rarer now) were small wind generators. Seemingly you could choose between noise and power output because the fancier ones made a racket and the quieter ones always seemed to be on boats idling their engines all the time anyway. When we entered anchorages, we'd make sure to avoid being near the loud ones. I can't imagine what it would have been like living with one.

Hydrogenerators weren't very common (they're a bit more common now) but my dad was given an old 12V tape drive motor by a friend and I remember him letting us help him build a towed generator. The tape drive motor sat on the back of the boat connected to about 20m of rope going to a dinghy propeller on a piece of stainless rod to try keep it underwater. Drilling a hole through the motor shaft with a handheld drill was the most time consuming part of the build. We called it toady (short for towed generator) and watching the input Ammeter on the battery bank go all the way up to 6A on a cloudy day felt like magic. It's part of what made me want to be an electrical engineer as a 10 year old.

Given all that, on a 19ft outboard powered yacht in 2002 a generator probably was the best solution for one voyage.

Wait, is this exact boat for sale? https://sfbay.craigslist.org/eby/boa/d/san-leandro-west-wig-...

what a remarkable coincidence!

Yep, name of boat ("Chubby") matches as well.

Hey great find man!

If you're interested in learning more about solo sailing voyages, the new non-fiction book "Sailing Alone: A Surprising History of Isolation and Survival at Sea" by Richard King is fascinating.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/64645764-sailing-alone

Another recommendation: Racundra's First Cruise by Arthur Ransome.

I love “Sailing Alone Around the World” by Joshua Slocum. He was the first to do so. I always wanted to build a replica of his boat (plans are available) and do some solo sailing, but maybe not around the world.

His boat is famous for being balanced in its sailing characteristics -- holds course without him at the helm.

Also, John Guzzwell circumnavigated his self built 20 footer named Trekka from 1955 to 1959 and wrote a great book about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Guzzwell

https://goodreads.com/book/show/1037445.Trekka_Round_the_Wor...

Two other single-handed round-the-world accounts I enjoyed are Robin Lee Graham's _Dove_ (the name of his boat), and Chay Blyth's _The Impossible Voyage_. Graham's voyage was noteworthy because of how young he was -- 16. He might have been, as I recall, the youngest ever to make such a voyage at that time. His book was later made into a film starring Joseph Bottoms and Deborah Raffin. Blyth's was noteworthy because he was the first to sail singlehanded "the wrong way round," westwards, nonstop. Incredibly arduous. Wikipedia says The Times called this "The most outstanding passage ever made by one man alone." His vessel was a 59 footer called "British Steel."

Did the same voyage in a similarly sized boat, solo. Departed Berkeley then out under the bridge to half moon bay, then off the deep end for Honolulu. Took a bit longer than expected and was nearly hit by a passing vessel, but smooth sailing otherwise!

I'd like to know more about the near-miss. Was it close to either port or was it during the open-ocean portion of the voyage?

The "Loose Ends" section of Teplow's write-up mentions that he didn't bring along a radar detector. Then or now, would a radar detector significantly increase a solo sailor's situational awareness?

Better would be active radar, but it all helps, especially when you have to sleep.

It was with a freighter, China to Panama bound - no one on watch - about a quarter of the way across to Hawaii. My boat was so small it was mostly invisible to radar - I spotted it on the horizon, but it appeared to be on a parallel course so I wasn't too worried - I went back to sleep and was woken by engines. After crash gybing out of the way, I radioed the vessel many times, with no response. Out of paranoia I then did the rest of the leg with a strobe on - my next encounter was a vessel that had stopped because it thought I was in distress...

HN's own Paul Lutus has a great sailing book: https://www.amazon.ca/Confessions-Long-Distance-Sailor-Paul-...

If you're interested in doing something like this, you could join the Vic Maui race: https://www.vicmaui.org/

It's on his site as well in HTML and eBook form:

https://arachnoid.com/sailbook/index.html

I read it years ago and still think of it from time to time. It's a great read.

HN submission:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=901072

His site never gets much love from HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=arachnoid.com

> I did not invest the time to experiment with my SSB receiver and therefore never got any weather reports during the voyage.

wow

Nowadays virtually every boat has Starlink and 4 new forecasts every 8 hours and routing via PredictWind.

"Generally I relied on canned goods to supply the bulk of my meals. Each can was protected in double Ziplock bags to prevent rusting. Pinhole leaks in cans caused by rust and corrosion can be lethal to the unsuspecting mariner."

Is a pinhole leak on a can really that dangerous on a 24 day trip. I get ocean air...but wow. That is something I would have underestimated for sure.

wondering if someone in the know can weigh in? is this over cautious or like yeah, good idea?

I can't think of a reason it'd be any more dangerous than if the same food was sitting on your counter for the same time period. But some people won't eat cold pizza that sat out overnight either.

When we can food, sometimes there's a jar that doesn't seal. We just put it in the fridge and use it in the next few days. It'll keep at least as long as if it hadn't been canned.

Having said all that: if I went to open a can of food and saw that it had a leak, I wouldn't eat it, because how could I be sure that it wasn't leaking when I packed it 24 hours ago? A visible leak now might have been too small to see then, so who knows how long it's really been leaking.

Rust develops much faster on a boat at sea. A breach from rust can affect a can with enough botulism toxin to have bad effects within 3-4 days. Most cans probably have a plastic liner though but I'm not sure how much of a safeguard it is.

A pinhole means low oxygen + outside contact which means botulism, which only thrives in almost sealed environments. Botulism toxins kill. Moreso than many other ways your food can spoil open to the air.

Bacteria is everywhere.

But double bagging each can for a trip seemed excessive.

Maybe he’s concerned about cans banging around on a boat.

Thanks for your thoughts!

Most is not particularly harmful. Some is really bad and it trives in conditions that are rare (probably because we encounter the common ones enough that not being resistant is an evolutionary dead end). rare dosen't mean never seen though.

I used to live and work on tall ships.

We never had this issue, but we also likely had better storage conditions in that there was precious little chance of actual seawater reaching our food cans. Cans would sometimes rust on the rim, but I don't think I ever saw a can rust all the way through, despite some of them being likely years old.

This seems like overkill unless you are very convinced that your cans will come in contact with seawater.

>This seems like overkill unless you are very convinced that your cans will come in contact with seawater.

It seems like a really minor effort layer of protection with almost 0 overhead to protect a person against death. Getting botulism food poisoning at sea by yourself in a tiny boat could very well be a death sentence. Especially if a substantial portion of your food was compromised.

$20 at costco for bags and an hour bagging all of your cans before your trip is hardly overkill.

I guess a more accurate way to say it is that I never heard of doing anything like that in my career on sailboats.

Its cheap and relatively low effort, but I just don't see the benefit. Modern cans typically already have a plastic coating on the inside that will take care of things getting in through any pinholes, and to preserve flavor.

I spent close to a decade as a professional sailboat captain, including on long offshore passages. I never saw a single can of suspect food, and it wasn't something that is ever talked about. Even in survival kits you would see canned goods that weren't wrapped in plastic.

Really, if you are in the business of minimizing risk, you don't undertake an open ocean voyage in a 19 ft. sailboat.

Taking on a big risk shouldn’t make one feel cavalier about other risks, even if they’re smaller.

(Spoken like the project planner I used to be)

Sure, but there has to be a risk in the first place, and there is just no evidence that corroded cans lead to food poisoning.

The most recent botulin report from the CDC lists 19 confirmed foodborne cases in the entire US. of those 19, it looks like only 7 were related to outbreaks tied to suspected commercial food circumstantially (no tests confirmed this), the rest were from home-canning.

See table 2 here: https://www.cdc.gov/botulism/php/national-botulism-surveilla... . Note that 2019 was the worst year that the CDC has for commercial prepared food. 2018 and 2017 had one suspected commercial can related incident each.

Basically, if you are getting botulin toxin poisoning, it is going to come from inside a can that was physically fine, or, much more likely, a home cooked meal.

A project planner should hopefully look at a risk, and think: This is a 1 in a billion risk at best (assuming that the average American eats at least 3 cans worth of goods per year).

My mom used to avoid dented cans because of botulism risk. I still do, out of habit.

Dented cans aren’t a sign of botulism.

Botulism increases internal pressure of a can, so cans that are puffed are dangerous.

Thank you so much! This is exactly b what I was wondering.

Much gratitude!

Tiny boat, probably got considerable water onboard.

With admittedly close to zero sailing experience, I would think that if your boat (no matter how big or "tiny") is getting "considerable" water onboard, you have bigger problems than your canned food.

It doesn't make sense to me either that the size of the vessel has much to do with how watertight it is.

But like I said, I don't have much experience in this!

Water comes over the sides/top in choppy seas. It rains on the deck, and the cabin has a door. It's normal. Bigger boats have taller sides. That's the difference with size, which waves will spray you. Keeping things dry is a challenge.

I recall reading Kay Cottee's account of her solo unassisted circumnavigation in 1988. She was the first woman to do so.

Part of her preparation was removing the labels from all tinned food, and then re-writing what was in the can with a permanent marker on the lid, before fully immersing each can in laquer. Presumably this was done to help deal with corrosion problems.

For a long trip like that, I can see it, but 24 days…!

Neat story through!!

I think a big reason why cruising sailors would remove the labels is that there's a belief that cockroaches & other bugs would lay eggs in the paper / glue [0], and having an infestation on a sailboat is then challenging to deal with while at sea.

[0] https://www.spinsheet.com/cruising/sailors-offer-tips-long-t...

A while back I stumbled upon a youtube channel[1] dedicated to just solo sailing trips. I'm not sure how much is him/his video composition vs. just the subject matter of filming one's seemingly minuscule progress across the vast reaches of ocean, but I became entranced by just the calm plodding-ness of his days. Did a great job of breaking down trips and prep in some of his videos.

Can't speak to his latest stuff, so YMMV, but for a while it worked for me as incredible background. I imagine there's more and more content like this on YT, what with more powerful technology becoming more ubiquitous.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@samholmessailing/videos

Thanks watched one and it was neat!

Q: can anyone tell me what these solo people do when they need to sleep and it’s too deep to anchor?

You sleep for 20-30 minutes at a time, looking for traffic in between. Seems miserable.

Of course it varies by person, but they generally take small naps with the goal being that the nap is short enough the boat doesn't travel "past the horizon" or in other words past where they could see when they were at the helm. That's speed dependent, but I've seen them say 20-40 minutes naps. Further, there are systems like AIS (automatic identification system) that broadcast your location that depending on the area most boats above a certain length will have on, so your receiver can be set to alarm if a beacon comes within a certain distance. You can also set up a radar system to alarm if it detects anything in your path in a certain distance, those are notoriously unreliable though. Plus you have a VHF radio that can be set to scan and someone might hail you in time to stop a collision. With those on, people who are willing to accept more risk will sometimes take longer sleeps and just risk it, especially in less congested waters. That channel in particular recently had a comment about accidentally sleeping through their alarm and going for several hours unattended.

But solo sailing longer passages is inherently a dangerous proposition.

Basically, as a solo, you can only safely sleep/rest when the weather is calm (day or night). So, yeah, if the weather is rough, you don't sleep. That is why many solo sailors with YouTube vids look like shit the morning after an all-nighter!

I'm a very casual sailor but I love this website and its web 1.0 feel. Great sight to explore and find something new.

We forgot how to build websites like this. Lost art. Even the page is encoded iso-8859-1 and not UTF-8.

Unfortunately you can't spell Hawaiʻi in ISO-8859-1.

But does anyone not know what Hawaii is?

The island or the state?

That's what html entities are for.

Though I'm not sure who decided the ʻokina needed its own character rather than the traditionally used apostrophe. It's a pain to type without a Hawaiian keyboard.

Besides, the Hawaiian diacritics are not part of English orthography, so the name of the state (and the big island) is just "Hawaii" in English. In Hawaiian, it's Hawaiʻi.

> Though I'm not sure who decided the ʻokina needed its own character rather than the traditionally used apostrophe. It's a pain to type without a Hawaiian keyboard.

I dunno, the glottal stop sounds pretty different from normal English usage of apostrophe. If anything it's closer to - than ', like in uh-oh.

French uses both grave and acute accent marks, and they sound very different.

Makes sense to me

The ʻokina is not an apostrophe.

It was originally represented with an apostrophe.

It seems the apostrophe started to be inverted in Hawaiian in the 1940s.

It's not just the shape of the glyph. An apostrophe is a punctuation mark. An ʻokina is a letter. In Unicode, U+0027 is marked "Other Punctuation". U+02BB is "Modifier Letter". This matters to software.

In Unicode, U+0027 is marked "ASCII punctuation and symbols" and described as "neutral (vertical) glyph with mixed usage."

While in English, the apostrophe is usually a punctuation mark, it is used as a letter, typically a glottal stop like the ʻokina, in dozens of languages as well as when writing certain English accents phonetically, like Glasgow or Cockney.

Software does not particularly care about what unicode character you use and the switch to the inverted comma ʻokina began before unicode (or software) was a thing.

Need to write a web extension to inject some javascript to show a loading screen for a few seconds and download a few MB of js so it feels like a modern website. Should probably wrap the whole thing in a SPA too so we have options in the future

Another sailor you might find interesting is Evi Nemeth, Author of the excellent UNIX and Linux System Administration Handbook (more of a bible than a handbook, I recommend getting it to everyone); "Since her retirement, Nemeth has traded mountains for oceans and has sailed from Florida to the Caribbean via the Mediterranean, West Africa, and Brazil on her 40-foot sailboat named Wonderland. She is now in Trinidad in the West Indies and expects to transit the Panama Canal to the Pacific next year. Her son, Laszlo, lives in Boulder."

Evi has been missing at sea since 2013.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evi_Nemeth

Sadly, yea. There is a whole website dedicated to the ship (Schooner Niña) and the SAR efforts http://www.schoonernina.com/

Good share. fascinating rabbit hole to fall down. Interesting to read about other vessels which had been lost or abandoned in the same area and many months later washed up ashore rather than sinking.

What a sad loss. Why do people sail into a storm with 100+ km/h winds and 7.5m waves?

>> 3. I had no backup power source other than the Honda generator. If the generator got swamped with salt water during a knockdown or malfunctioned for mechanical reasons, I would have been condemned to endless hours at the tiller.

This worried me reading it, wouldnt redundancy be sensible, or at least solar panels as redundancy via alternate means?

It also makes me think about fiction and how the same problems are even worse. For example, I always wondered on Star Wars -- how many redundant parts do they keep onboard a ship, just in case?

There isn't a date but clues indicate that the crossing was decade or more ago. The Garmin 12XL was released in 1996. It is possible that was using GPS and none of the equipment available now, but more likely that didn't exist.

Solar panels weren't as available back then. Satellite messengers weren't available. Both are popular with sailors now.

Edit: It mentions other GPS units so could be more recent.

Related: currently the Mini Globe round the world race is on for 19' plywood boats:

https://minigloberace.com/

Specs/plans of the boats here: https://classglobe580.com/specification/

This has long been a dream of mine, albeit never got my sea legs. I was always more comfy in the lab, where I'd push for microkernel adoption, but kept a photo of Hawaii on my desk.

Glad to have traveled there finally, just not via sailboat..

Thanks for sharing.

Since there are some Great Lakes people commenting here, I will mention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Manry. Going on 60 years ago, I read Manry's account of his solo trans-Atlantic trip.

I've done solo trips in a 16' 4" Pinetree Ojibway 32" beam canoe in Lake Superior and a number of river systems. Didn't sleep in the boat and didn't take cans. Pasta, sauce and soup in packets. Didn't have to worry about fresh water supply.

Control F in this thread, "Dove", nothing!!!

If you find this story interesting, definitely recommend reading about Robin Lee Graham. In 1965 at the age of 16 he started a solo sail around the world.

He ended up writing a book and they made a movie. Highly recommend.

Some would call him very lucky. He had no weather reports and dodged a hurricane.

I wished for photos! Anyone know if there are some of this boat and journey?

Right. The title conjures dreamy images in my mind that I was dying to see images!

Solo sailors became a semiprominent microniche on youtube during the pandemic, you can watch this sort of thing in incredible detail that way if you want. Sam Holmes did this trip (and many others) and has IMO the best channel about this kind of sailing. He has nerves of steel and is not necessarily to be emulated in all practices but a great watch. FWIW I'm a long-time recreational sailor but I've only done a few long passages and none of them solo.

Man, I really enjoyed Sam, until he started doing things that I thought were unnecessarily risky (or in some cases plain inconsiderate). That said, ballsy MF. Solo sailors remind me of free solo climbers. Their risk assessment/acceptance is so far off normal it's almost alien.

I haven't watched all his videos especially the more recent ones but there have definitely been some wtf moments for me too. And yeah he's not ignorant at all it's pretty funny to watch him verbally run through an accurate & extremely alarming assessment of the dangers of something and then go like eh it'll probably be fine.

"Well we're going to take an unplotted shortcut here through the uh, <<checking notes>> graveyard of the atlantic, according to the charts it's 7 feet deep and we have a 6.5 foot draft so fingers crossed the charts are up to date" type shit.

IIRC he has some very serious chronic health stuff and that may have something to do with it. I don't love the risky sails when he has a passenger though. But also who the fuck am I, a weekend lake sailor, to judge. At this point he's got to be among the most experienced solo sailors on the planet. I feel a similar way about slocum or the pardeys and they are more his peers than I am.

We also stopped watching his videos when he abandoned a couple of boats that ended up ashore.

This year he apparently did a transatlantic just a couple weeks before we did ours[1], but haven't seen him around.

1: https://lille-oe.de/2025-01-24/

I'd love to see photos of this Potter 19 but you can get a general idea of the boat from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Wight_Potter_19

> I'd love to see photos of this Potter 19

https://sfbay.craigslist.org/eby/boa/d/san-leandro-west-wig-...

I mean Yes, you _can_ do it, but why?

Life is WAY more comfortable on a 36' boat, and once you add all the costs of making the passage, it's not _that_ much more expensive. Turns out, being able to stand up below decks is a HUGE advantage.

A great story about making big passages in a small boat is "Red Dot on the Ocean":

https://reddotontheocean.com/

There is a documentary video, linked on the site above.

The (very) small boat thing has appeal to some people, but persoanlly, I'd rather have a little more comfort, and not have to fight a yeast infection in my crotch like Matt Rutherford did during his first ever solo non-stop sail around the entire American continent, in a 27 foot boat.

I did cross the Atlantic Ocean in a 37' boat (as crew), and it was still a WHOLE lot of fun and adventure!

I wish there were photos...

Gah I miss the old internet. No bullshit Javascript frameworks. Just plain text and nearly written html.

Inspiring story! It's amazing what a small, well-designed boat can handle. The resourcefulness and courage displayed throughout the journey are impressive. A testament to the power of human ingenuity, determination, and the call of adventure, even in the face of adversity. Thanks for sharing this remarkable tale.

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