B.J. Porter

We have AC. Right now it's not plumbed to the through-hull since we needed to replumb the refrigeration to it temporarily. We don't use it...pretty much ever. I've used it for heat more than air conditioning. Unnecessary is an understatement. You acclimate to the warmth if you don't use it. A few times in some really hot places we'd turn it on if we were charging in the afternoon to take the edge off the heat in the boat. The generator never ran just for the AC or heat, it was always incidental since there was extra generator capacity anyway. We've not been doing a lot of diving since I'm the only certified diver on board. But we have a set of gear for bottom cleaning. Getting the tank filled can be a pain in the ass in a lot of places, and I don't even try to do it that often. Currently, my tank is off being "pressure tested" to see if it will qualify for the stamp to get refilled. I'd rather have a nice hookah for that job if I could. We couldn't get it filled in NZ without inspection and testing. In New Caledonia, there was no commercial air filler on the water, and the one place that might do it wouldn't because of the type of valve we had. We got lucky; we went on a whale watch on a catamaran and befriended the skipper. Nice guy, and he had a compressor on board so he filled us up a couple of times when we were in the same harbors as him. But Zonker is 100% right - if I was serious about diving, in a lot of the places we've been it would have been difficult or impossible without carrying a dozen tanks or a compressor.

Hot water makes you flaccid? Who knew? We just like clean bodies and clean dishes. We have a similar draft. We've not had too much problem with it anywhere. The Chesapeake can be a problem, but even there wasn't too bad though there are places you can't go. While I appreciate what you are saying about minimalism, it sounds an awful lot like camping. How many months a year are you on the boat versus at home?

Go ahead. The safest way to assure that Rimas will never come near me is to announce he's coming to Oz for a visit and set sail. He'll end up in Alaska again.

Holy crap. How the hell did he end up there?

That's the beef of all these nitwits. Guaranteed someday we're going to hear Rockdog bitching about his property taxes because he doesn't have any kids in the local schools. "I got mine, fuck you" is the heart of their belief system. Although in Rockdog's case, his failure to understand how risk pools and insurance work simply exacerbates the problem.

That makes is sound like you're almost slightly concerned by his behavior.

What a piece of shit he is. Nothing new from him though, Boorbird has been a POS for years.

But we digress. I'm eager to hear TMSail's take on Trump ignoring the dead soldiers for twelve days and playing golf when their flag-draped caskets arrived in the country. And his lying about how Obama (and other presidents) handled dead soldiers, and his own actions.

I prefer my coffee black. However, the "long black" ($4-5 for three ounces) here tastes like something that dripped out of an overheated engine. If you put it over ice and add water it's mostly drinkable. But if you want it hot...no. Have to have a Flat White out of necessity for caffeine, which is not my favorite way to have it and adds unneeded calories. My wife drank some of the foulest, nastiest coffee you can imagine in the call rooms in hospitals late at night after the pots had been sitting on the warmer for hours. She has always taken her coffee black and unadulterated. Even she thinks your coffee is pretty nasty to drink back, and she's put down some pretty vile sludge. Well, that, and we like to have more than three small swallows of coffee with breakfast. Don't get me started on "Iced Coffee", that 1,200 calorie ice cream and chocolate laced abomination.

Starbucks sucks. Your McDonalds here make Aussie style coffee. It was an unfortunate day in Aussie history when an espresso salesman was put on a prison transport and shipped here, dooming you to a life over overpriced, bitter coffee that you have to smother in milk and sugar to keep drinkable.

I can not agree with you on the coffee.

Stands for the Anthem.

Even more fun...in the US, with health insurance tied to employment, a serious illness often meant being unable to work anymore. Loss of job = loss of insurance. Prior to the ACA, an insurer could decline you for pre-existing conditions. Which meant that if you got sick and the sickness cost you your job and insurance, when you tried to re-insure you could not because no one would take you with your pre-existing condition. You could get some very expensive extension of coverage from your employer for a few months, but when that ran out you were fucked. There's a reason that illness is one of the leading causes of personal bankruptcy in the US.

I didn’t say that. I said I want to be the highest risk person in the pool I’m in. What’s hard to understand about why anyone would want anything else? Ah, so you only want to be in a risk pool with people that are young and healthy. Yeah, that makes sense. Put the sick and old on an ice floe then, solve the problem. Again, that's not how it works. If there is no risk being shared, it's not much of a risk pool. You will not be at the same level of risk forever that you are today. Can they kick you out then?

And if next week you have an accident that keeps you in the ICU for a month, in the hospital for another couple of months, and requires a year+ of therapy, treatment, and recovery...will that still be the case? Will you be able to keep your job? Will your self-insurance continue to cover you when you can't work for a year? When you've racked up a couple of $million in bills?