Second helping of worry

Good Morning!
It's early on a Thursday morning. I have about 12 bazillion things to do this Halloween day. I am feeling like doing none of them. Lots of work to do today, end of month is always a PITA.

Remember Captain Jeff? He took Betty and I out for my fiftieth birthday cruise. His boat is for sale. Pearson 424 Gypsy.

Anyway I was able to track down the widow Wittholz, while we know he was a very prolific boat designer finding his information on the internets was a difficult thing. I eventually posted a plea for help on Cruisers Forum which almost immediately surfaced the information I was looking for.

I am of course having issues pulling the trigger on this one and there are a number of valid reasons for that.

-Cons-

1. The boat is a wreck. The only thing that works on this boat is the hull and some of the wood work.
2. The hatches might or might not leak like sieves
3. The stove needs to be replaced as well, for some unknown reason the stove is electric so will need to be replaced with propane.
4. It's unlikely the refrigeration works, so will need to be replaced.
5. All the cushions and beds will need to be replaced.
6. It's quite a ways away so will have to be towed to this location. 
7. It will take years of work, working at my schedule, to get this relaunched and in the water.
8. Do I have enough motivation and perseverance to see this project through to it's completion?
9. We had discussed waiting for a few more years so that the boats coming out of the yards a few years ago aged a little more and we had a more varied selection of hulls to look at.
10. It's not a catamaran.
11. The wife was feeling a little queasy while examining the boat and it was on a river with about zero motion, well as zero as a monohull ever really gets, tied to the pier.
12. The current owner did almost no preventive maintenance.
13. It's a steel hull.
14. Guesstimating it will probably take 40K to renovate. And as that is a guesstimate, it will be more.
15. For the amount of $$ I am looking at sinking into this hull, I could buy a boat that works and be on the water tomorrow, well so to speak.

-Pros-

1. We can probably get this hull for way lower than market value.
2. The boat builder is well known for building very good equipment.
3. The designer is well know for designing excellent boats.
4. We can rebuild it to be exactly what we want it to be.
5. If we re-power with electric drive, I am confident that I can manage the maintenance of the thing. Of course I was confident I could handle the maintenance of the power plant when it was going to be diesel, I even learned how to spell diesel.
6. At the current bid I can pay for the thing with cash.
7. It's a steel hull.
8. The masts are keel stepped.
9. It's ketch rigged.
10. There is always another derelict hull out there.
11. The master cabin already has a fore - aft bed, vice a athwart-ships bed. You don't see many of those in this size bed.
12. There is a Howdy Bailey 45' steel pilot house on the market in Annapolis for $500,000

Anyway there are so many issues floating around. I need to be sure I am working for the next few years so I can make sure I have the cash to sink into this project. And in the arena I am working in, that is of course never a given. Just about anybody is in the same boat, there are just different levels of comfort in your current prospects for continued employment. 

And speaking of continuing employment I need to do the commute. It's a short one today as I am working from the home, so down the stairs I go.

Exciting day

So I spent some time today multi-tasking. Work and boat chats! Got more information about the wreck we are thinking about redoing, spoke to some great folks at Electric Yachts about power requirements. Also got the hull number from the broker which led me to some more information. Spoke to the guy that actually built the boat today, thanks so much Howdy.  Also made an appointment to look at a really interesting boat down in Norfolk this weekend. Eventually I will get the master bathroom finished, but it's not looking like this weekend.  To tired to go through the last six hours of research I have done about boats, steel hulls, more research work on DC-DC generators. Anyway if any of my now eight faithful followers can find an actual address for a boat designer Charles Wittholz I will be eternally greatful!

Time for bed, well football, then bed. Goodnight!

Hello darkness my old friend, come to talk to you again...

I'm a terrible blogger. I freely admit that. So now that my mea culpa is over, welcome back to my world.  So if I remember correctly my last posts were dealing with the house renovations. Let me spend a couple minutes catching you all up. Back in July of 2011 I mentioned that we had received all our cabinets for the kitchen. Well I am happy to inform you that they eventually were all installed.

Old crap kitchen:

New Shiny Kitchen:

I'll get a better set of photo's shortly if y'all are interested.  This is about 50% completed. It actually is completely finished and is a wonderful improvement over the previous collection of junk.

Anyway this is supposed to be a sailing blog and it got off track, do to well, massive depression would be a good way of putting it. Yours truly does not do well unemployed for serious lengths of time. It's BORING! And I'm a lousy house keeper. Anyway we started looking at boats again a few months ago, as I am now employed again and have been for the last year, almost to the day. So in that year we paid off all of our consumer debt, ran some up again, and are almost free again. Finished up the majority of the house projects, only have the master bath to complete. So that part is sorted. But more importantly we have some savings. For the first time in my entire life I have a cushion. I'm not going to go into details here, but we have made some amazing changes in our financial outlook for the future. Maybe enough to be able to actually do the thing. So we are back to looking at boats. Because simply everyone knows that throwing scads of money at a hole in the water is an excellent retirement plan. 

We go out once or twice a month to look at various boats around the area. We have gone as far south as Hilton Head to see a wreck, well not a wreck as it is still floating, but a 75% complete project boat passed on that one but I'm still keeping my eye on it. We are currently looking at two boats, a Cheoy Lee out in Gloucester and a floating wreck out in Lancaster, VA. The S/V (name withheld so I don't trigger web searches) is amusing in one area, when we were looking a few years back I got enamored with her when I stumbled across her listing and just loved her. Then to find her up for sale again? Well that just seemed like kismet. So we looked, did the research, remembered how great a set of boats that builder made, read a bunch more in general, etc. Just doing due diligence. Chatted with the broker, made an appointment and we were off and running again. Issues, well quite a few really. But first a little back story. Owners had fallen in love with her while she was on the hard in Maine, sailed her to her current yard, put her on the hard again and started a massive refit. The man of the two then got eye cancer, who knew your eyes could get cancer? Of course it ran directly up the optic nerve and killed him. So boat is on the market again, however the surviving spouse has no money left after investing in the boat, cancer treatments and all the other things that are required in this wildly expensive thing we call life.

So to the issues:

• Masts
• Spruce and have been sanded and then painted, white. Not a good thing to do to wooden masts. Counter intuitive I know, but paint hides a great deal of possible issues with old wooden masts.
• Mast location:
• Laying on a wonderful steel rack some 100 feet from the boat. Yeah they need to be stood up then the rigging has to be ratted down and the sails bent back on. Issue? 6k in work, and the yard has to do the majority of the work as it requires stuff like cranes, knowledge, etc.
• Rest of boat:
• Hey this is a "as is where is" boat purchase
• Does anything work? There are a great number of installed systems on a modern sailboat, and they all cost an arm and a leg to replace. Was the water maker properly pickled? Does the engine work? Are the tanks in good condition? Sails? Dinghy? Dinghy motor? And on and on.
• Deck
• She has a cored fiberglass deck and just wandering around a found a few mushy spots, not good, not good at all. Usually indicates that the cores have gotten wet and rotted, leaving just the "glass", remediation is intrusive and can be expensive.
• Price:
• For an "as is, where is" the boat in my opinion is over valued.

Next boat is an actual disaster. The back story on this one is less heart wrenching. Original owner worked with a designer and an excellent yard in Hampton to create the boat of his dreams. Cut a few decades ahead, he is very ill, house for sale, boat at house for sale. Steel hull, ketch rigged, ocean going passage making sailboat. Listing in Yacht World, here, is a touch sparse in anything, much less details. Our thinking was pretty much running along these lines, "Hm, steel hull, cheap, laying on the water, close the the house, ROAD TRIP!" Chatted with the broker, diddled around trying to get photos of the thing, got photos, decided to go look anyway. Saw her yesterday 10/26/2013. So sad. She has been sitting tied to the pilings for years, five, maybe more. No maintenance, no use at all. If you know anything at all about mechanical things, much less boats, you know that you can't do that and expect a happy ending. So yes the masts are still up, and even have sails attached. Nice deck, recently steam cleaned and not rust streaked. Engine, dead needs replacement, gen-set, even if it was working it is about the worst brand I've researched as far as the forums go, so it needs replacing as well. Interior, pretty nice, except for the sole. Which oddly enough is unfinished plywood. Might be marine as it hasn't de-laminated in the harsh conditions in which a boat lives. The rest of the interior has some very pretty wood work, the master cabin has a nice layout, a center-line fore and aft master berth versus the transverse in which one partner climbs over the other to make the inevitable head call in the dog watch. (Why do they call it a dog watch? Because it's curtailed! I crack myself up.) Up around the deck hatches evidence of either a very industrious termite colony or a great deal of water intrusion.

I'm betting on water intrusion. Lexan is showing as pretty crazed as well.  So on to the issues part:

• Hull
• Been in the water for a very long time
• No maintenance to said hull, could be 99% rust under there for all we know.
• Huge amount of growth on hull
• Are the zincs even attached to the boat? 
• Sails
• Yes they have sails attached, all need restitching and the mizzen has a tear. But they will need replacing sooner rather than later.
• Masts:
• Extruded Aluminium, no gross corrosion I could see, a few deep gouges
• No real issues to a cursory inspection
• Standing rigging
• Stainless steel wire rope, normal looking, would need a formal inspection.
• Engine
• Might as well not have one, needs replacement. In fact it would be better if there wasn't one at all, cheaper to remove nothing than pull an engine out of a sailboat.
• Gen Set
• Old Panda Generator
• Haven't heard anything good about them
• Is old with no maintenance so will need to be replaced.
• Water Maker
• Don't got one
• Solar panels
• Nope none of those either
• Lines, etc.
• All will need to be replaced

So basically we are looking at a derelict hull that currently floats. So I started doing research on doing a repower of the poor old thing. OMG! Yes it is that expensive. I could cut a hole in the hull and drive a car in there for the cost of a 96HP Perkins with install. But before we even got to that we would have to tow it to a boat yard and haul the thing to get a look at the underwater parts. But then an odd statement I read on a boaters blog caught my eye. Repowering with electric! So cut to a montage of frantic research and twelve million open tabs, youtube videos and I come down to "well it might be feasible". So a hybrid system would allow for near unlimited cruising range. By hybrid I am talking about solar panels and possibly wind generators feeding a large bank of batteries with a diesel gen set for really dark calm weeks. While the cost is on par with what a new engine would cost, I can do the install myself, as the parts are small enough to fit in the same place as the engine and I can move them myself. A greater plus is that due to my previous life experiences I know electricity a hell of a lot better than diesel motors. So one of the most expensive things I worry about while cruising on a limited budget is refilling a 250 gallon diesel fuel tank at four to five bucks a gallon. And of course then you have to have a good way of cleaning up questionable fuel from questionable sources that you find all over the world. But with a hybrid system the fuel costs decrease rapidly. The sun is free after all, and even if I deplete my batteries entirely, the sun will shine again and I will get juiced back up. So anyway that is where we stand. 

Later my seven faithful followers.