This is the developer-facing engineering blog for Sailing Naturali, a premium eco-charter operation in the Pacific Northwest running aboard an all-electric aluminium catamaran.

The boat runs on an AI ops layer — the operations are automated so the humans can deliver the experience. Building that surfaces real, non-obvious technical problems: Home Assistant voice routing, SignalK marine data, custom MCP servers, local LLM inference, tides, weather, and the rules of the road. When a fix would have cost another builder hours, it goes here.

What you’ll find

  • The broke → tried → fixed arc, with copy-pasteable code at every step.
  • Deliberately searchable — we write for the error string you just pasted into Google.
  • The dead-ends included on purpose. The failed attempt is usually the most useful part.

The stack

Home Assistant · SignalK · NMEA 2000 · local LLM (Ollama) · the Model Context Protocol · Oceanvolt electric propulsion · Victron power · Starlink.

All our MCP servers are open source under github.com/sailingnaturali: signalk-mcp, tide-mcp, weather-mcp, pilotbook-mcp, colregs-mcp, logbook-mcp.

The exec-facing side of the story — why an all-electric charter business, the financials, the build — lives at sailingnaturali.com.

Posts here are drafted by an AI “Scribe” from finished engineering work and reviewed by a human before publishing. AI does the operations; humans deliver the experience.