letter-to-mom

Corvo back home, Big Air in the shop, HelmLog project

Dan Weatbrook

— 4 min read
Corvo back home, Big Air in the shop, HelmLog project
Corvo 105 is looking fast wtih it's new bottom

Good morning! And happy Sunday! I hope you are feeling well and that the weather is treating you OK. Things are pretty good around here. We are hitting the late-winter, early-spring stride. It is fun to see the daffodils come up, the trees starting to bud out, and the snowfall :).

There were a couple of significant things that happened this week. First is that all of the parts for the body repair for the van have come in, so we dropped the van off to get repaired (if you missed it, I backed it into a tree branch in the driveway, by like a quarter of an inch, and while the wound looked small, it was enough to require some pretty extensive repairs). And the bottom job for Corvo was done a week early, so Butch and I moved it back to its slip at Shilshole.

Butch and I were going to move Corvo on Tuesday, but the yard was a little behind schedule getting it into the water, and a storm was moving in, so we decided to move it on Wednesday instead. Boy, was that the right thing to do. The weather on Wednesday was WAY more conducive to moving the boat.

The bottom job came out great! It is as smooth as a baby's bottom, and everything about it is perfect. I'm super pleased with the results of the bottom job, and we are ready for the upcoming season! It goes without saying that I am super grateful to Tom and Helen for allowing us to use the boat last year and this year to campaign for the J105 North Americans. Thank you, Tom and Helen.

Speaking of the upcoming season, these past three weeks, I have been developing a system called Helmlog, which will allow us to record all of the data from the sailing instruments while we practice and race, and then do deep sailing analysis on that data to help us improve our understanding of how we are sailing over the year. I have been using Claude Code to do this work, and I have to say, I have been more than impressed with what it has been able to do. I tried to do this project last year using ChatGPT, asking it questions, taking its responses, and crafting them into code and configuration, copying and pasting errors back and forth between my computer and ChatGPT, and I didn't get 2% of the way as far as I have gotten this year. The amount of capability I have been able to create and deliver on this project is absolutely astounding! I can't remember the last time I was this deeply engaged with a project. I have been getting up early and working late on this project. While at the same time getting some exercise in, as I have a desk treadmill that I have been using while I work on this stuff. I've got all the basic functionality working, and I am racing against the clock to get the first useful version buttoned up by this coming weekend, so I can start testing it on the boat again.

Thursday and Friday, there has been snow in Seattle, and a TON of snow in the mountains, but alas, the storm on Wednesday damaged the Silver Fir lift, so it is not going to be running for the foreseeable future, and I-90 has been closed at the pass, and the pass has been without power. So even with all of that snow, we haven't made it up there. We may try this week, but with the van in the shop, it will depend on road conditions and lines.

OK - I think that is about all I have for this week.

Love ya all

Dan W

This is where Athena spends her days while waiting for Catherine to return from work. Belle, the cat, often uses the one on the right as well.
That is one fast-looking bottom. It is super well prepared for the upcoming season.
I still need to get some rubbing compound and clean up the sides a bit.
Tom says this is the fastest he's ever seen it go.
Butch and I had to wait for both a southbound train and a northbound train to pass over the bridge before it opened and we could complete the trip to Shilshole.
This is a Raspberry Pi named corvopi-live. On top of it is a "Hat" that plugs into the boat's NMEA 2000 network. It takes all of that instrument data and stores it in a Database on the device. There is a webserver running on the Pi as well, that provides the ability to analyze the results of different races.
It snowed pretty good on Thursday.

The branch in the driveway I hit. It was a sunny day, and at this time of year, the angle is such that I couldn't see the things in the mirror that I normally use to guide me into driveway.
Doesn't look like much, does it? But it turns into a BIG repair job. Sigh...
Head shots from the "After" selfie of my haircuts. Newest at the top.

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