I didn’t mean to vanish for months, but once summer arrives and the boat goes in the water, everything else becomes background noise. This year I had a beautifully organized plan: wash and wax the boat, install water lights, swap in a new electric toilet, update the electrical system so solar could finally join the party, and of course install d3kOS for real‑world testing. The idea was to knock all of this out in April and be cruising by May, relaxed and ahead of schedule. Naturally, the universe laughed.
Spring weather was a mess. Cold, rain, wind — the kind of weather that makes you question your life choices. The lake level dropped so low that launching the boat would have meant leaving it sitting beside the dock like a sad ornament. With boating off the table, I did the next best thing: I went to the Greek islands. And honestly, that trip was spectacular. Sun, water, food, scenery — everything my lake refused to provide. I came back refreshed, ready to get back to work, and completely unaware that chaos was waiting for me.
The first sign of trouble was digital. My website had gone viral — for spammers. Over sixty‑five thousand new user registrations appeared out of nowhere. For a moment I thought I had become wildly popular, but no, these were not fans. Every service I use started demanding upgrades because of “exponential growth,” and I had to take down three sites, harden the registration process, and strip unnecessary information from GitHub. It felt like digital pest control with a side of panic. Thankfully, the original blog subscribers survived the purge and everything is back online.
While dealing with that mess, I removed OpenPlotter, installed d3kOS, and began QA testing. If anyone out there is worried about AI taking over the world, relax. AI gets bored. It drifts. It stops reading instructions halfway through and starts assuming things because it’s more fun. I found over ninety bugs — and counting. One of my favourites was the USB monitoring dashboard. Instead of actually monitoring anything, AI decided everything should be green, declared it a placeholder, and deferred the entire feature to a later date. It’s now fixed in version 0.9.9.4, but the experience taught me that AI has the attention span of a toddler holding a cookie.
Of course, software wasn’t the only thing misbehaving. When my boat was winterized, the guys forgot to pull the batteries, so that became an unexpected replacement job. Then the water pump filter decided to leak, which led to a moment where the boat was… let’s say “moist in ways it shouldn’t be.” Thankfully the bilge pumps were feeling heroic. After that came the smaller annoyances — the bimini skeleton acting up, stripped Allen key plugs, and a collection of mystery issues that boats seem to generate out of thin air.
Meanwhile, the fish were biting like crazy. Everyone was getting their limit within an hour, and I managed to join in whenever the weather allowed. But the weather this year was something else. Waves from one direction, wind from another, and the boat doing a full washing‑machine cycle in the middle. I’m now seriously considering stabilizers. And of course, when the weather gets rough, I take my wife out to test her sea legs. She loves that. She absolutely does not love that.
Between the weather, the bugs, the leaks, the spammers, and the boat gremlins, I’ve spent more time fixing things than actually boating. But that’s boating life. A job that should take ten minutes somehow becomes a two‑day project, and that’s if everything goes well — which it never does.
Over the next few months, I’ll be sharing more details about the d3kOS testing, the solar integration, the water lights, the toilet install, the electrical upgrades, the stabilizer research, and the ongoing saga of “Why is this broken again?” Some older posts had to be removed because they were videos, but those are now safely on YouTube.
The boat is floating, the website is hardened, the AI is behaving (mostly), and the fish are biting. Summer didn’t go according to plan, but it definitely wasn’t boring.
