About me

How I got here

I've always been an engineer at heart. Electronics, embedded controllers, computers, programming, mechanical design of almost any kind: I'm curious about all of it. For as long as I can remember, friends and neighbors have known me as the one who can fix just about anything.

At university I found another passion: windsurfing. The wind and the water never let me go. In 2017 I took the next step and bought my first sailboat, a 1993 Hunter 19-2 pocket cruiser. She was the perfect boat to learn on: simple, forgiving and fun. For five years my son and I spent our weekends on Lake Murray in South Carolina. We learned the ropes, laughed a lot, and learned to sail together. Her name was Sea Sun, and when we moved from South Carolina to Austin, Texas, she came with us on her trailer, to Lake Travis.

I loved that boat, but she was small. My dream was always to go past the lake and sail the sea. A 19-foot water-ballasted cruiser is a great teacher, but she's not the boat for that kind of trip.

In November 2021 I found an Irwin Citation 34 on Facebook Marketplace for $5,000, half an hour from home. I wasn't looking for a project boat. But to be honest, every boat under $40K I looked at was a project boat, more or less. You can guess how that went.

Since then I've rebuilt Vira almost piece by piece: the deck, the interior, the wiring, the engine, the rig. I kept a diary of every work day, and this site turns that diary into stories, one per project.

Who sails with me

My co-captain is my younger son, Viktor. Yes, we're team Viktor & Viktor :-) He's always happy to join me on the water. We learned to sail keelboats together, and by now we easily understand each other without words.

My wife Maria survives my "gentle sail" forecasts. Not always happily.

My older son and his family, and our family friends, come along for a weekend sail from time to time.

The workshop

At home I have a garage full of tools: a CNC, 3D printers, a TIG welder and a whole electronics design lab. Most of the designs on this site started on a page of my notebook. The Workshop has the files, free for your own boat.

Where Vira is now

In 2026 Vira left Lake Travis for Kemah, on Galveston Bay. Big water, at last. The Sailing pages tell how she got there, and the Boat diary keeps going day by day.