L-36.com

Welcome to L-36.com

Dedicated to the enjoyment of sailing

Introduction

Spring of 2023 brings many changes to L-36.com. Let me tell you about a few of them. First off is the new look. This main page will be where I share the latest goings. It will be more of a blog or maybe just ramblings. It will no longer be teasers to articles as it has been. Whatever it is, it will evolve and at this point could go in any of several directions. Articles that used to be linked here can all be found under the "Article" tab. The old home page is linked in the index at the top. That said, here is what is going on.

The site is supported with ads but in the transition to Google auto ads, there were too many. I have reduced the number of auto ads quite a lot and eliminated most of the manual ones. I hope you appreciate the change.

Weather

Top Marine Forecast NWS Buoy Airport Tide Map GEOS Radar

The weather page has a bit of a new look with a clickable index along the top like the one above (try it!). This allows users to go quickly to the section they are interested in. There have also been many changes which add locations to several of the areas so it might be a good idea to click on "Default Setup" in the link menu at the upper right. Also on that menu is the "One Page Printer Page" which has also been improved. This page allows you to print weather and tide information and take it with you. Speaking of tides, the tide depth charts now have a depth line. The image to the left is an example. Just click "Edit" and enter your preferred depth. Set this and you will get readouts of the times that you are withing your limits. I set mine to 5 feet and know I can leave the channel if I am within that time period. The radar and GEOS have had stations added or removed to keep up with the changes.

Manuals

The manual pages switched from presenting a pdf to showing images of the pages several years ago to make the pages readable on phones. The images auto scale where the pdf files extended beyond the page borders which caused Google to downgrade the rankings due to mobile incompatibility. But that made it inconvenient to go through the manual as you needed to constantly click "Next". The new manual layout has all the pages one after the other. If this doesn't work for you, let me know but hopefully everyone has enough bandwidth these days that it will work. It seems to work really well in my and others testing.

PHP 8.1

The ISP this site runs on has indicated that there is a new version of PHP and that we need to upgrade. This upgrade has been both frustrating and rewarding. Frustrating because it completely broke the site so I had to quickly switch back. The transition is taking many weeks and countless hours of work. I switched the site to php 8.1 on 5/1/2023. Rewarding because it has caused a close examination of many of the pages and these changes have led so some feature improvements and general cleanup. Frustrating because I have had to make edits to and test about 1,000 files. So far I have had only two crashes since the transition. The site had a few million visits while I was doing pre switch testing and all errors had been fixed. Yet with just the right user data a page went down. My apologizes if that was you. If you see any page that is not working the way you think it should, please leave a comment.

Hackers

A note to hackers. L-36.com does not use MySQL or any other database manager. We do not store any user data. There is nothing here for you to break into. Yet we get hundreds of attempts some of which pollute storage with garbage. Some of the php 8.1 upgrade is aimed at filtering out this garbage. We try and block bad actors and have hundreds of ip addressed with denied access in the .htaccess file. Every page starts with a filter for hackers. Put "SELECT" in the URL and you will be blocked. Trust me. If you accidentally get blocked, just fill out the comment form and let me know and I will unblock you.

What's up with Papoose?

I inherited Papoose from my dad in 1989. For many years I did day sailing with my family and friends. In 1997 I did my first race, the Master Mariners Regatta. I finished second to last. I didn't race again for several years but ultimately we got better sails and were better sailors and started winning. But being run down and dismasted one year and then narrowly missing t-boning a boat that crossed right in front of the fleet during our start the following year was too much. I continued to do club racing. We won our first club championship in 2010 and won most of the races we entered. We won most of the clubs series since then including the last series of 2022. In the last few years we started skipping races if the weather report predicted winds above 30 knots. Even being careful about when we went out, we found ourselves jibing around the leeward mark in 30 knots. And to make it harder, I was doing it double handed because of the pandemic. I ended up liking double handed racing very much. This year I plan to transition back to day sailing with family and friends. It is with some mixed emotions but it was always my plan to quit racing when I turned 75. That said, I am looking forward to some fun day trips. Maybe we will enter a race or two but that will not be the focus.

The forst is from more than 20 years ago. The second one is from a race in 2022 which we won by 2 minutes, 17 seconds.

APRS Tracking

I took my Yaesu FT3DR set up to transmit our location every 3 minutes on APRS. We sailed out and back under spinnaker with 5 to 10 knots and a beautiful Tuesday sailing. When I got home, I went on aprs.fi, entered my call sign (AA6EX) and got this display. Cool stuff.

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