🐮 Lolcow Doug Jackson / SV Seeker - Boomer hubris personified, an incompetent lunatic's dreams slowly crumbling to dust because of his own poor decisions.

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Nearest I can tell Doug was born stuck on "I am always right" mode.
With a side order of "Anyone who doesn't agree with my obviously superior wisdom is a pathetic coward who has never truly been alive a single moment of their sheltered life."

Talk about pegging the unwarranted self importance meter.
 
Between Fort Gibson and the Kerr reservoir you first have to transit the Webbers Fall dam and lock.
In the highly unlikely event Doug would suffer a loss of propulsion, this video should give you an idea of what fate might befall him.

In the meantime Doug is quite content dragging his feet and living his best squatter life in 100 degree heat with no AC and shitting in a bucket because that one time he used the toilet his boat almost sank.
 
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Here's a quote from an observant fellow at sailinganarchy:
When the boat when into the water, it was listing at about 5 degrees. the builder has since then stuffed as much extra lead into fule tanks as he can - and there is an extra 1000 pounds up on deck to correct for fore-aft. After all of that - In a recent video, 3 men when to the rail, and peered over, and the boat listed again about 3-5 degrees.
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The Seether, despite desperate attemps at correcting her list and improving her stability by dropping lead ingots into her starboard fuel tanks is still an extraordinarily unstable vessel.
Having a tendency to heel over isn't necessarily bad if you're carrying a huge lead bulb at the end of a deep running keel (no such thing present on the Seether), it makes for a smoother ride if the boat is a bit more tender and cruise ships for example are often a lot less stable than they could be but thanks to sheer size and lack of sails they're able to get away with such a compromise for the sake of passenger comfort.
Doug is not the captain of a cruise ship but a sailing vessel and even before the addition of rigging it suffered from severe problems not much unlike those of the Sewol. Deviation from original design through undocumented retrofits that add more weight to the superstructure, overloaded with unsecured cargo and insufficiently ballasted. To top it all off this fool wants to fly canvas.

I added a couple paragraphs to the OP that try to explain the stability issues in a little more detail. It was always known that it wouldn't be a very stable boat (bilge keels, unstayed steel masts, overweight, narrow hull) but the magnitude of these issues seems worse than most critics imagined.
 
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Doug is the exact personification of the saying "knows just enough to be dangerous". There's a reason so many things in industry have all these stupid labels. The fact each sub system doesn't have it's own diagram for troubleshooting made readily available is ridiculous. I know he thinks he knows, but what about everyone else? If he gets sick or falls overboard the rest of the crew is fucked.

I legitimately can't wait for the full sail test. The mast will become a fulcrum and his shitty unbalanced boat will be the pivot. There's a good chance it will capsize in a strong wind.
 
TurdFondler said:
There's a reason so many things in industry have all these stupid labels. The fact each sub system doesn't have it's own diagram for troubleshooting made readily available is ridiculous. I know he thinks he knows, but what about everyone else? If he gets sick or falls overboard the rest of the crew is fucked.
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It is amazing that he could cast his own propeller and took the time to make every bracket, mount and door latch look like a reject from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride yet could not be bothered to type up documentation. As a data base guy you would think he would understand documentation is important.

It has been proven so many times that even he doesn't know how half the stuff works or goes together. Trying to lift the pilot house off while it it still bolted on, nearly sinking the boat becase he did not remember how to flush the toilet and then running the prop controller at nearly 10x its rated pressure come to mind. I am sure there have been others and there will be more. As he gets older this is only going to get worse.

Did anyone catch a few videos back when becase of the sea sickness he said "I would not be the captain of the ship but I would be the owner."?
What happened to their made up charity that was supposed to own the boat?

I still can't believe he built a huge ass boat without first learning to pilot one, spending a fair bit of time on one and most importantly finding out if he gets sea sick. It really is the perfect summation of the whole project.
 
TurdFondler said:
Doug is the exact personification of the saying "knows just enough to be dangerous". There's a reason so many things in industry have all these stupid labels. The fact each sub system doesn't have it's own diagram for troubleshooting made readily available is ridiculous. I know he thinks he knows, but what about everyone else? If he gets sick or falls overboard the rest of the crew is fucked.
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He doesn't even know half the time. Remember when he labelled the prop pitch lever "F" for feathered and he thought it was "F" for forward? He ignored the warning on the head saying not to mount it below the water level and did it anyway and almost sank the boat. He's on record as saying that if he needs to look something up, he'll go back through Youtube to find it.

Going down to Kerr is going to be make or break for him. He's gotta be sweating his drivetrain issues, because right now, if he goes down there, he can't make enough headway to overcome the current to make it back to where he's at. So if he goes, he has to be prepared to keep going.

Penrowe said:
Here's a quote from an observant fellow at sailinganarchy:
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It's worth noting that that guy, if I remember right, has actually put in a few weekends working on Seether when they were still in Tulsa.


And. Looks like it's on:

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A 74' untested vessel with questionable handling characteristics on a lake on 4th of July weekend with all the partiers, where the only dock large enough to accommodate them is the Coast Guard's? What could possibly go wrong?
 
Someone is going to get killed by that thing, either its crew or some luckless river user that it crashes into while it's drifting down the river upside-down. Whilst it would be funny to watch him fail to sail it, it's probably best if it just sinks at its mooring before going anywhere or doing anything. That's not an improbable outcome, fortunately.
 
I hope the documentary crew has at least one, hopefully more boats following along to get footage. That way the crew wont have to be in the water long.
Sadly they probably just have a drone or 2 and there probably are not enough life jackets for everyone.
Knowing Doug they are locked up in an ornamental cabinet that he has lost the keys to or forgot how to open.


I would think 4th of July weekend would be a really bad time to do this. However maybe there will be enough pepole around with functional watercraft to save the crew.

I could see Doug either choosing to go down with the ship or more likely being the first one off and excusing it afterwards by saying "I made everyone sign a waiver. You are responsible for your own safety on the SV Seeker. No one else is. It all comes down to survival of the fittest."
 
I think part of it is Doug wanting to flex his boat. He knows it's going to be busy, he wants everyone to see and appreciate his handiwork.

Does anyone know anything about river salvage operations? Is it normal to have to salvage a boat of that size and weight?
 
DarthMower said:
Relief valves in place of regulators.
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LOL some hellish system of relief valves and recirc hoses instead of doing anything the right way. I'm not well versed in hydraulics but a relief valve as a pressure regulator seems like it is going to lead to bizarre, unpredictable operation.

My gut feeling is that he put in a 28psi valve, so when the pump exceeds the psi the relief valve opens and vents back into the main reservoir. But when the valve opens you essentially depressurize the whole line I think. So it's going to work in fits and starts.

@Penrowe
Yeah, you're right.
 
DarthMower said:
Relief valves in place of regulators. Lots and lots of threaded connectors. High vibration environment.

What could possibly go wrong?

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While I am impressed with the use of actual hydraulic fittings instead of pipe fittings, I don't think hanging 5 pounds of fittings off the inlet port is a good idea.

I don't think that's a pressure relief valve. Looks like a needle valve to me. Problem being needle valves control flow not, pressure. If he has that set for 280 psi at engine idle, with a fixed displacement pump(every power steering pump ever) it's going to be almost twice that at 2000 rpm because of the flow has doubled.

Even if he has it setup for 280 psi at max rippums, bits of thread tape will clog the needle valve and blow out seals again. Hydraulic thread sealant exists for a reason
 
Do you know what I like Doug and this ship the most? It's his white whale. Like bike to ADF, it must be completely fitted with absolutely everything before ridden, and of course in the end the person in charge can't use the thing to travel from A to B. Even if by some stroke of luck, his fairy godmother waved a magic wand that would fix all the technical issues and took care of the paperwork and legalities to get his boat to water, his own insistence on skipping any safety measures combined with his sheer bullheadedness would guarantee bodily harm, fires on board and people thrown overboard (possibly with wooden debris and misc shrapnel). He's absolutely doing everything so against the grain, he isn't putting the cart before the horse, he's busy installing pneumatic suspension on the cart and his horse ran away. And that's why I love following his shenanigans.
 
I reread the OP and Tom Sukanen was mentioned. I read up on his story and it's really good, definitely parallels to our boy.

@obliviousbeard
100% agree, the Seeker was a dream never meant to be realized.

It honestly feels like Doug is stalling. He's not willing to admit defeat and actually think about how fucked it is, instead he finds or invents new problems to solve to distract himself from the big picture. Every one of his innovations is a project in and of itself. He should have started with a good premade hull and then tested his junk sails and prop feathering system and dialed them in. Instead, every single aspect of the boat is experimental.
 
TurdFondler said:
It honestly feels like Doug is stalling. He's not willing to admit defeat and actually think about how fucked it is, instead he finds or invents new problems to solve to distract himself from the big picture. Every one of his innovations is a project in and of itself. He should have started with a good premade hull and then tested his junk sails and prop feathering system and dialed them in. Instead, every single aspect of the boat is experimental.
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Honestly, given the way this whole story has flowed, including his newfound sea sickness (someone more reckless might even try sailing on a boat before building one) SV Seeker will serve as an methaphor for later generations. It is a story about man so caught up in his hubris that he must keep the show going, since falling of the curtain means end of him too. Like an old wound-up toy wondering if the spring will give him just couple of more moments before getting discarded. And there's nobody but him to blame on his situation.
 
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