Welcome to our new cruising blog. This will be the story of our adventures aboard Kama Hele, our custom, home-built steel cruising boat. We began construction in July of 2009 with the delivery of about 50,000 lbs of steel to a small outdoor build site at the old Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo, CA. Romeros Welding built the bare hull, with my wife and I doing a lot of fabrication to provide Romero's with a steady supply of parts for this first phase of construction. Many of the parts for the boat were sourced from shipyards and the marine surplus market. My wife and I did just about everything else, from propulsion to plumbing to electrical. We launched Kama Hele in September of 2012 with most mechanical systems operational, and a few years of interior fit-out ahead of us. We moved aboard about one month after launch and did the remaining fit-out work while living aboard full time. The whole story of the build from vessel design to where we are now can be found here:
buildingkoloa.blogspot.com
Our original name for the boat was to be Koloa (which is a type of hawaiian duck) and when we decided on Kama Hele instead (Hawaiian for "Traveller") it didnt make much sense to change the blog name that we had already established.
Last year we reached the point where the interior was mostly done, and we have recently started cruising around locally and anchoring out around the SF bay Area in order to shake things out a bit and see what needs tweaking. At this point Kama Hele is fully functional as a coastal cruising boat and we are working towards getting her outfitted for blue water cruising. As we shift from boat builders back to boat cruisers, this seems like a good time to start a cruising blog, so here it is.
We'll be posting pics of our shake down cruises, experience with on-board equipment and gear, and anything else that seems relevant to cruising on this blog. I'll continue to post the more technical boat building stuff at buildingkoloa.blogspot.com.
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