Eddie Offermann's Blog (32)

Took SoNice out for a quick (very quick) spin on Saturday. Engine is still overheating - only once we're underway though. It'll run for quite a while at the dock, barely getting warm, but once moving under power she overheats in minutes.

Didn't get to spend as much time as I'd intended on Sunday to try to diagnose the problem. My mechanic is coming by tomorrow to take a look at it. It's gotta be something straightforward, but I've already checked most of the obvious stuff. We'll…

Sean Collins, the man who revolutionized the way surfers find the best waves with the surfline telephone report and surfline.com, passed away while playing tennis in Newport Beach the day after Christmas.

Many of the articles about Sean's passing indicate that his love for sea and surf and his knowledge of weather forecasting originated in his childhood while…

I may be sabotaging myself here, by sharing this, but Herb sent me the link to this listing for Hull #19 - Kaomi. http://ning.it/vxVhfc

I went down to visit her this morning.

She needs a great deal of cosmetic work on the exterior - The decks need to be stripped, the hull should probably be sanded and repainted, the topside as well, but her standing rigging looks almost brand new, her engine is shiny with only about 70 hours on it... The…

For the past three years, I've done a sail out to Santa Barbara Island from Marina Del Rey, CA.



For folks not used to sailing in the area, Santa Barbara Island is nowhere near Santa Barbara. SBI is roughly 50 miles off the cost, roughly southwest of Marina Del Rey. It is a largely undeveloped rock, part of the Channel Islands archipelago, with sparse succulents, a large population of nesting seabirds, and one of the largest sea lion rookeries in California.

Most…

I know this is something that we as boat owners pretty much have to accept as a fact of life - boats are damp places and areas without good ventilation will be even damper.

Anyone have any interesting approaches to providing better ventilation to the storage areas on their Newporter?  Mostly, I have this problem in the hanging storage in the forward berth and in the storage bins in the cabin. These areas all appear to be pretty much original construction except for one bin…

So I brought SoNice from her previous home down in Alamitos Bay in Long Beach up to Marina Del Rey.



I have loved the look of these beautiful boats for years, and I have loved this girl up close and personal for the last few months as we've gotten her ready to make the trip up here, both mechanically and cosmetically: but delays have kept me from being able to take her out on anything more than one very brief trial just to test out the engine.



So the first sea trial was a 12…

So it's been a LONG time in coming, mostly involving me waiting and handing over stacks of bills...

But we finally took SoNice out for a spin!

It was just a quick one. A few minutes to circle Alamitos Bay to check engine vibration & alignment, RPMs, shifting and throttle - making sure that things were in order.

There's still an issue with the exhaust cooling - it's leaky - so we're going back to another sleeve we have, I believe.

I'll be losing use of the…

My last sailboat I not-so-jokingly have referred to as "The Best Equipped 20-foot Sailboat in All of Southern California" was an interesting learning experience, at least in part because she taught me to be really impressed with the Newporter's extreme sturdiness. That 20, a 1968 Newport, is solidly equipped for coastal cruising and near-coast excursions, with two good-size solar panels, a chartplotter, depth sounder, an autopilot, roller furler, and a good sail inventory with associated…

Bob Mitchell asked me in a PM (I'm greatly paraphrasing, there was more to it) if I knew where my particular Newporter was constructed.

I decided that the history was interesting enough, and something that I'd want to have convenient reference to apart from my logbook, that I'd place it in a blog entry.

I was curious about the origin and past of this boat - and fortunately, I have a LOT of documentation on her - previous owners have done a pretty good job of preserving…

I wrote this up originally (with a couple edits to make it appropriate for a blog post and to add a few more details) as an email to Bob here at N40T and thought it would make a good introductory post here.

I just bought a 1959 Ackerman Newporter.

Hoping to find some good footage of a Newporter in original condition, I got the movie "My Blood Runs Cold (1965)" which I'd read contained scenes shot on one.

Turns out, there's a little over 20 minutes worth of footage that takes place on one, and it provided some interesting insights: so I pulled the clips all together into one YouTube video featuring just the scenes of interest to Newporter owners and lovers. I didn't edit it very vigorously, so there are certainly camera…