A mid-year update…
I’ve been working since January on a pair of projects that are starting to become more real. Both of them are about providing infrastructure to help with the energy transition, in boats, from diesel to electric power. Today I want to announce the first one, Rising Tide Boat Works.
If you want to build a new electric boat, or repower a diesel boat to electric, you’re gonna need, at the very least:
a place on dry land big enough to contain the boat while you work on it, ideally covered and heated
industrial zoning that lets you do the work
a way to get the boat in and out of the water! Once a boat is too big to fit on a trailer, you generally use a travel lift, which is a kind of giant remote control crane truck that can pick up the boat and drive it out on a dock to deep water, then drop it in
… which of course means that your spot has to be waterfront, in deep and protected water
Places like this turn out to be really hard to come by.
The nice thing is that wherever you do find those basic ingredients, a lively ecosystem grows up around them. I absolutely love Boat Haven in Port Townsend, which is 20 acres of municipal land hosting a delightful assembly of machine shops, fiberglass experts, naval architects, welders, marine equipment thrift stores and distributors of brand new engines, builders of new aluminum boats and restorers of old wooden ones. They’re all surrounded by boats in every possible condition, and all sharing the core facilities provided by the Port, as well as sharing stories and advice over lunch at the on-site cafes or while wandering in and out of each others’ shops.
Rising Tide Boat Works wants to be like that, but exclusively for electric boats. The dream is that if we can provide the basic shared infrastructure, we can attract an ecosystem not just of welders and machine shops (though certainly them), but also people developing new electric drive systems, or new types of solar panels, or experts in assembling giant battery banks or in converting diesel fishing boats or…
But first, we’d need a large industrial lot with a big covered shop and a deep and protected waterfront, and places like that are really hard to come by. Which is why it’s really exciting that we’ve managed to buy one: 5 acres of what was once a WWII seaplane base, in the gorgeous surf town of Ucluelet on the west coast of Vancouver Island. It is going to take quite a while to restore the old flying boat hangar, clean up the soil around the military’s old fuel tanks, and build a new pier for a fully-electric 100 ton travel lift, but it. is. going. to. be. awesome.
We’re going to need help, obviously. If you can see yourself being a part of this ecosystem, in any way, get in touch: I’m avi@rtbw.ca or you can spell it out in full as avi@risingtideboatworks.com .
(No, there’s no website yet at those domains. Actually, that’s something we need help with too).
It’s been a year now that my main web presence has been a wall of text about what I was thinking about and working on at the end of 2023.
That’s gone well, I think. It’s been a helpful place for people to land when they have my name or email address and are trying to get some deeper context for me. People do seem to take the time to read it, for which I am grateful.
It was also a helpful exercise for me. And of course, since it has been a year, and we’re once again in that light-starved liminal period at the end of December, I should do it again.
So: I still don’t have a legible job, and that’s still great except when introducing myself at parties. I sometimes consider claiming to be a boatbuilder, but have not yet had the courage for such a bold new identity.
I do spend an awful lot of time thinking about boat design, however, and managing the build of one boat in particular. Although the first Solander 38 did not, as I once hoped, make it into the water last summer, construction is well under way and I’m pleased with how things are going.
To recap: this is an electric 38’ catamaran, using an existing sailing catamaran hull design, but replacing the mast and wheelhouse with a custom aluminum superstructure that builds in enough solar power to make it totally self-sufficient for coastal cruising.
It’s been fantastic working on this with experts in composite fabrication, hydrodynamics, aluminum welding, machining, mold making, DC electrical systems, marine thermodynamics, and so on. I’m learning an incredible amount, which is my favorite place to be.
The status is the two composite hulls are complete, having been trucked from the fiberglass shop in Ohio that owns the molds to the boatyard in Port Townsend where we’re finishing the structure. The cross-deck is still being laminated but will follow shortly.
Meanwhile, the drivetrain is complete and ready for installation, the shop drawings for the superstructure are being reviewed by the fabricators, the cabinet maker has started planing some local maple, and I’ve got a mountain of LFP blade cells and other electronics that I’m slowly turning into a battery pack.
This summer there will be some cruising.
Stepping back a bit: I keep getting more interested in electric boats as a category. It feels like electric cars in the early 2000s, where mainstream awareness and acceptance was effectively zero; and yet it feels equally important and inevitable to me that the shift from “electric is weird and niche” to “electric is obviously better” will happen. I think it took about 15 years for cars (starting with the Tesla and the Leaf, until now), so maybe that’s a good estimate of how long it will take for boats as well. I’d like to help make that happen.
I also spend a lot of time managing house building, though unlike with the boat where I’m literally thinking about every bolt, with housing I’m thankfully operating in the arena of zoning, permits, leases, loans, and other such abstractions. The Galiano Cottage Co-op is well and truly underway, with one 2BR unit complete and ready to live in, and three more projected to complete in May. The construction part is going very smoothly. I’m not sure we’ve got the financing model right. The fact is that building detached housing is expensive, and it‘s hard to make the rents as affordable as we’d like without significant subsidy. I’d love to be building multi-unit housing instead but the local zoning simply won’t support it, and rule one with this project is to go with the flow of existing bylaws rather than get caught up in years of public hearings. There are some funding possibilities on the horizon, but lots more work to do there next year.
One thing I don’t spend a lot of time on anymore is Galiano’s radios-in-trees community internet infrastructure. We’re finally at a place where there’s a stable group of staff and decent systems in place and positive cash flow and it’s just ticking along. Of course, just as we get there, there’s a new government-funded fiber build starting which will make us totally obsolete - but becoming unnecessary has always been our fondest hope. More time for boats!
I’ll briefly mention the on-island plastic recycling project to say: it works, but it’s incredibly labor intensive to turn dirty waste plastic into usable sheet goods, and the Precious Plastic-designed machinery is not very robust (at least in the implementation we have). I keep having to remind myself and others that documenting the failure modes is at least as valuable as documenting the happy path.
A new place I’m spending a lot of time is in a pretty serious CAD/CAE research project, combining parametric CAD constraint systems with SDF/implicit shape representations and global shape optimization. We’re not ready to release anything yet but definitely will in the new year.
There’s a fantastic group of folks working with me on this. One of the notable things about this group is that, deliberately, everyone is half time on this and half time on their own individual research. This violates the conventional wisdom that you should hire people who are willing to commit themselves 100% to your project. Maybe for a startup the conventional wisdom is true. But for a research project there’s a really great energy in bringing together a group that also have strong independent interests, and it’s also much easier to pitch people on “trade some of your time for money that can fund your own research” than “give up all of your time to someone else”.
In general, I’m really looking forward to 2025. The boat will launch. Houses will get lived in. We’ll demo some CAD tools.
And one more thing. Maybe. If it happens, it’ll be the most recklessly ambitious thing I’ve done. I’ll keep you posted.
It’s the end of 2023, and I’m taking stock of the things I’m spending my time on.
The last time I had a legible “job” was working at Stripe, from 2013-2019. Back then it was simple to answer “what do you do?”. These days, less so. That’s a good thing (it’s a great thing), but it can also sometimes be awkward. Maybe writing some things down will help.
I live on Galiano Island, a small community between Vancouver and Victoria in the Salish Sea. After a decade of working from here but mostly for Silicon Valley, I’ve been enjoying working to directly benefit the place where I live.
My longest-running project along those lines is GAIA, the Galiano Association for Internet Access. Galiano is generally quite poorly served by the big telcos. There is fiber to the island, but it’s not available for residential connections. I started a non-profit which leases a couple of fiber lines from the telco, and then distributes the bandwidth from them to a few hundred of the ~1000 homes on the island, using the only practical approach: microwave radios mounted near the top of 100’ or taller Douglas Fir trees. (The island is hilly, densely treed, sparsely populated, and culturally resistant to communications towers. The only way to get line of sight between any two buildings on the island is to go to the top of the tallest tree near each side). We typically achieve about 25Mbps down, which is plenty for a zoom call; we can model our peak usage pretty accurately with (number of subscribers) * 3Mbps. Still, it’s a lot of ongoing work to keep the network robust against radio interference, the weather, tree growth and death, power outages, and so on.
The biggest technological advance during this project was finding a LiDAR dataset from which I could derive accurate heights for every individual tree on the island, and then model which ones could see each other. This avoided a lot of guesswork, drone flights, and expensive trial and error hauling equipment up the wrong trees. It’s also spurred an interest in LiDAR data acquisition and related areas like DGPS-based compasses. I haven’t spent that much time on this stuff yet but hope to do more.
A smaller, newer local project is on-island plastic processing. The local recycling depot has historically hauled all of our plastic waste via large diesel trucks on much larger diesel ferries to processing centers on the mainland; meanwhile other trucks are coming back on those same ferries with new plastic goods. I’m working with them to, where possible, use machinery designs from Precious Plastics to turn plastic waste into sheet goods and from there into useful products that can be used locally like furniture and construction materials. The project is very early (the machines are still being assembled) but I’m excited about it for next year.
Housing is a huge problem on the island, as in many places. Prices have at least doubled since 2019. Rental stock is basically nil (it’s economically more attractive to do short term rentals during the tourist season). Since it’s an island, the local workforce has to be local - it’s impractical to commute from somewhere cheaper. This creates a pretty untenable situation. Building more housing isn’t easy, though: zoning forbids any kind of multi-unit development.
This year I founded the Galiano Cottage Co-op. Our model is to take advantage of the one kind of housing capacity that exists at scale, which is the right to build an 860 sq ft ADU as a secondary dwelling on any multi-acre residential lot (which are the norm). We hope to build a standard cottage design on as many different lots as we can, leasing a portion of the lot for 20 years for a nominal amount in return for fronting the construction cost of the unit; the co-op gets those 20 years of use, after which the cottage reverts to the landowner. We’ll do three builds in 2024, more in 2025, and see where it takes us.
For the latter half of this year I’ve been indulging myself in an expensive passion project: building a self-sufficiently solar powered cruising power catamaran. Maybe it’ll become a business, if enough other people like the design, or provide some useful plans and data to the world that can inspire an even better design. At any rate, I expect it to hit the water sometime late summer of 2024, and to be enjoyably working on it (read: coordinating many others with more skills to work on it) until then. Some specs: it’s based on the composite hulls of a Maine Cat 38 (38’ LWL, 21’ beam), but with a custom aluminum deck house whose roof is 7000W (about 350 sq ft) of bifacial solar panels. It runs on twin electric motors that can push it about 7kts with 8kW of total power. That means you can run at that speed for about 4-5hrs, covering 30 miles or so, with net-zero power use on a summer day. However, it’ll also have about 120kWh of battery allowing longer or faster runs if you take some time at anchor to charge up afterwards.
Finally, I am still doing some software here and there. I’m particularly interested in the relationships between, as a rough list: CAD constraint systems, Bayesian generative models, constructive geometry APIs (including turtle graphics), projector and pen-based UIs, and SDF shaders. I have a lot of thoughts and prototypes around this stuff and want to keep doing more.
If any of this stuff is at all interesting, please feel free to reach out at avi@avibryant.com. If you’re looking for funding for a related project, I can often help find it. Also worth mentioning: I run occasional week-long retreats on Galiano if you’re interested in bringing a group out in person (whether to work on this kind of stuff or anything else, really).