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

Open source first: Signal K for marine data, Home Assistant for voice and dashboards, the Model Context Protocol to wire agents to both, the Claude API for reasoning, and Whisper, Piper, and Ollama for the local pieces — on NMEA 2000, Oceanvolt electric propulsion, Victron power, and Starlink.

What nothing existing covered, we built and published — the MCP servers and SignalK plugins under github.com/sailingnaturali. The full map, built and adopted, lives on the org profile.

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.