Reborn in the "Birth Canal" at Tuvkhun Monastery, Mongolia. The legend is that if you crawl down to the end and turn to the right if you're a man or to the left if you're a woman, then crawl back out, you will be "reborn" (in a Buddhist sense; nothing to do with Evangelical Christiantity). Unfortunately, it's sized for a local, not a westerner. I got my femur stuck and it took about 10 minutes and a lot of encouragement from above to find an angle to dislodge it. No wonder there's such a beatific look on my face as I was crawling back out! (Click to enlarge)

Welcome

We are Tom Keffer and Lee Christie. This website is about our projects, travels, and thoughts.

What's New?

• 6/30/17. Write up on rebedding the genoa tracks.
• 3/6/15. Writeup on machining a new holder for the B&G autopilot Rudder Reference Unit (RRU).
• 6/2/14. Writeup on installing new anchor windlass foot switches.
• 5/2/13. Writeup of building and installing a new control panel for Velocity.
• 7/29/11. Writeup of rebedding the chain plates on Velocity.
• 7/15/10. Description of some plugs for Velocity's hawse pipes.
• 2/16/10. Wrote up my one month long trip to Indonesia for Mercy Corps in January-February 2010.
• 11/1/09. Moved information about weewx, the weather software system that I wrote in Python, to its own website http://www.weewx.com. Local weather conditions will continue to be hosted here.
• 6/20/09. Description of adding a locking latch to the lazarette.
• 6/12/09. Added a description of new anchor chocks for Velocity.
• 5/14/09. Shut off the old weather software 'wview', and started using 'weewx', the new Python-based software that I wrote over the winter.
• 4/12/09. Added a page about The Environmental Impact of Gifts-In-Kind from a track I led for Mercy Crops at a Gifts-In-Kind conference.
• 9/7/08. Added a description of cutting a new access plate for the starboard fuel tank on Velocity.
• 4/1/08. Added a narrative about a Phoenix Fund trip to India and Nepal, 2008.
• 3/27/08. Added a slide show about a visit to the Manokamana Handmade Paper Factory in Upper Lingten, India (near Darjeeling, India).
• 1/18/07. Added pictures (and some captions) from my trip to Mongolia in August, 2006.
• 10/15/07. Added weather info from our weather station.
• 10/10/07. Added info about our new boat, S/V Velocity. Also, added a navigation tree on the left margin (unfortunately, using it requires allowing Javascript).
• 4/9/07. Added a budding Project Page. Not much there now, but I hope to add to it.
• 4/9/07. Brought the site up to XHTML 1.0 transitional standards. Lot of fiddling around, but nothing too taxing.
• 3/26/07. Added a narrative on my trip to Palestine with Mercy Corps, in the Spring of 2006.
• 3/24/07. Finally, after a year and a half of procrastination, I've added the logs for Cats Paw's trip to the Queen Charlotte Islands.