When we purchased Ananda in 2006 we were fortunate to also obtain a lot of manuals and detailed records from the previous owner. These have been invaluable reference material to me over the years. While the documents were quite well organized I have always wanted to make further improvements to enable accessing the information they contained even easier. Some of the improvements I have made over the past few months include:

• scanning all documents to PDF
• processing all scanned documents through OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software so they can be searched with the Adobe PDF Reader search engine
• printing out duplicate copies of all documents
• setting up two sets of documents: one set (originals) to keep at home for safe keeping and for reference when I am not on the boat; and the second set (copies) to keep on the boat for handy reference
• loaded all text-searchable PDF files onto directories in the boat’s laptop and on my iPad

This was pretty time consuming and tedious work but it was also very satisfying–especially since I had the experience of spending a lot of time combing through various manuals last summer while trying to resolve various maintenance issues and having a more efficient system could have saved me a lot of time.

I was so happy with the end result of my efforts that I did the same thing for my good buddy Chris for his Northern 37. He will repay me with Scotch and cigars 🙂