Where is my boat?

Man this is annoying. Betty and I have gone out to the boat a few times, I think I mentioned it is currently sitting on the hard about 80 miles from our lovely mid 70's home we remodeled. I am at a place where I need to start parting with some $$ to move forward. Immediate needs, batteries, and not the usual $90.00 wonders we buy every year or two that start our cars. I need a few serious deep cycle monsters, AGM Group 31 type, $250.00 to $400.00 per, so I can power the interior lighting and instrumentation, as well as crank the engine. I also need some bilge cleaners and Bilge Coat, $30.00 a gallon. I am also going to have to start taking things apart as we have surfaced a fuel leak that fills the bilge with diesel fuel. We hand bailed about 12 gallons of bilge crud out so far. I can hear "Get started, you aren't working after all!" I would love to! Ok not really, but it's all part of the joy of boat ownership, which so far from all my reading has translated to "Buy a boat! Do your unscheduled maintenance in exotic places, with language issues and difficulty sourcing parts!" The issue is that a month after being told we "own" the boat we still do not have a bill of sale. The frigging paperwork is still in limbo. I am absolutely not spending any serious cash on this project till everything is in order legally. I was annoyed that we had to purchase three new buckets from Lowes to accomplish the first round of bilge cleansing.

I feel Betty and I are stuck in a version of our personal "Glory Days". Which appears to the unaided eye to be the mid 70's. House built in 1974, boat from 1977, etc. Just the weird thoughts that run through my mind in the middle of the night when regular folks are sleeping.

Have been checking on the costs of some items that will need to be replaced or added on the boat. These items are on the list, in no particular order:

• Lighting
• Ventilation
• Engine
• Paint, interior and hull
• Cushions
• Refrigeration
• Instrumentation, Radar, Navigation, AIS, Chart Plotter
• Required safety equipment, Life Raft (OMG! $$$$), Flares, Noise maker, EPRIB, fire extinguishers.
• Sole

Sails appear to be ok, hull, ok, standing rigging, ok. So once again, just like our house, the bones are viable, the skin and guts could use some work. Some of these items are on the future list, like the instrumentation, that one item is going to cost a very pretty penny indeed. While I would love to be a Checkbook Captain, my budget is certainly not going to accommodate that. So things are a touch more complicated in that I will have to do this sort of thing in stages. But the items I put in now need to support the things I will put in years from now. As the boat currently sits I feel fairly certain I could put it in the water and sail away. But not in a level of comfort consistent with doing it more than a few times or going any long distance. And heaven, actually Coast Guard, help me if anything would go south during that excursion. 

Anyway to that end I have been doing a ton of research, mainly centered around everything in the world marine. Yeah a bit scattershot. And as always it's a battle between the haters and the opposite haters. Yeah the opposite of hate is love right? Not on the internets. Go try to research anything and mostly you find a mash of conflicting opinion. What's the best battery? "Dude! Wally World has the best!". "You moron, you shop at Wally World? They oppress third world peoples and prey on the local poverty stricken." Then a three page invective riven discussion of Wally Worlds business model. All while never actually discussing which battery Wally World has that is "The Best". Somehow or another President Obama gets drawn into the discussion then it really goes off the rails. Then you look at the posting dates and see it was posted 5 years ago. So I have settled for simply looking for recommendations, not from the manufacturer. Figuring out what actually comes from a manufacturer is harder than it sounds.

After exhaustive research I am simply exhausted from researching. I zeroed in on a thing I am fairly competent in, electronics. I will need to replace all the lighting on the boat to lower power level of lighting. This particular boat will run exclusively off a 12 volt DC system for the foreseeable future. There is no lighting in any of the berthing areas, like I am never going to actually open a paper based book whist reclining in my rack. Or want to be able to find my pants on a dark night. So that will need to be added. Whether I convert the boat to a diesel electric system or not we will need to scrimp on every amp hour in the batteries. So obviously LED lighting is in my future. OMG! What is WRONG with you people! Those prices are frigging insane! $25.00 for a single round red/white puck. Screw this I can build my own. This I can do on my own. Yay! This is actual straight forward research, instantly found two reliable sources for plans, and four sources for parts. So I'll be creating my own. Ventilation is also an issue, we need fans in the berthing and living spaces. Nice quiet 12 VDC fans that aren't energy greedy. Back to qualitative research.

Betty is in charge of the sewing projects, simply cuz she can run her machine. We brought some of the pieces of the salon cushions back to the house a few weeks ago. She is thinking about what we have that can be repurposed and reused from the piles of things we keep moving from state to state.

Now if I could just get the boat paperwork we could do some "boat stuffs".

Amadeus September 19, 2014

LA!

Amadeus Closing

So very cool. So the terror is mostly declining, steely determination is trending, I'm all for that. Took Betty to the boat the other day, she was not completely displeased. We are compromising a bit on the berthing areas. It has a center cockpit, yay, but has a walk over interior. So the "Owners Stateroom" is completely separate from the salon part and has no attached head. Well I can live with that. It has a number of other berths including two sea berths, nice and snug, as they need to be. The head is all rather odd as it is split port and starboard. The "shower" and sink is to port and across a small passageway is the head to starboard. Old manual head at that. Might be looking at replacing that in the future with a composting air head. Has an interesting puzzle of interlocking doors to allow a touch of privacy for those personal moments. Two doors manage to cover three openings. The sole is junk. The Gin Fizz originally came from the factory with a glassed over plywood sole, which they then carpeted. This one just has some creaky plywood down painted and mostly not attached to the boat really. The vaunted hanging lockers are miniscule, but seeing as we don't have to sell the house to afford the boat we are not planning on living on it while the refit is happening. Still haven't determined if the engine is a rotating thing or rusted into scrap metal. We bid the boat expecting the engine to be junk, so if it isn't, gravy! Moves the plans up several years and lowers the refit cost significantly. Or at least leaves the outlay further in the future. The engine says it only has 1563 hours on it, which is insanely low hours for a boat this old. Still need to find the stupid battery bank, it's a small boat so there are only a few places left to look, but I need tools.

Anyway I am off to handle the closing tomorrow. Many more pictures and ruminations to follow. Got to make a run to Home Depot for a chain and lock for my ladder, and wasp killer as I have a hive living under the lid to the starboard lazarette in the cockpit. Forgot about them and whipped open the lid the last time I was there and promptly got stung, but only once thankfully. Any of you that know me know I have a weird sensitivity to bug bites.

LA!

OMG!! We bought a boat!!!!

So we got the dreaded email from the broker today.

I quote: "Congratulations you bought a boat. I will. Call you tomarrow to give you details .thanks Arne" yeah tomorrow is spelled incorrectly, but really I don't care!!!!

This is both the coolest thing ever and fricking terrifying. My initial reaction is jumping up and down screaming, which is rather amusing seeing as I am who I am, Mr. Doom and Gloom himself. You could call me Eyore. There is so much to do! And the firstest thing is getting Betty on the boat. She wasn't able to come with me to check it out, so I did a FaceTime walk through with her after I determined it wasn't a total pile of crap. We have been looking for so long that the culmination of this phase is very hard to believe! I have spent the last couple of days doing research and making lists. 

Really that is all for now, I'm going to get stupid drunk and eat pizza. More when the news soaks in and the terror slides into steely determination. 

Amadeus

Hello faithful followers. So it has been quite a few months since we last reviewed Craig's obsession with getting a new boat. I saw a listing for another derelict hull for 8K somewhere around here and called the broker. Excited! : ) Boat was withdrawn from market due to a deck issue. Bummer! : ( However he then reached into his magic internet thingie and produced a number of other equally derelict hulls sitting here and there. Going through those listings was pretty simple, nope to small, small, to much and to small, then magic! Amadeus.

Kind of a catchy name for a boat. Amadeus is a 1977 Jeanneau Gin Fizz ketch, 37.5 feet, 17,400 pounds displacement. If you look quickly before it is pulled from Yacht World @ http://www.yachtworld.com/boats/1977/Jeanneau-Gin-Fizz-Ketch-2749683/Solomons/MD/United-States#.U-_FZ_ldV8F you can see the original listing. She is in pretty darn good shape for an older lady. Appears to have a full compliment of sails, books, almost everything. Bad thing about these boats, they cooled the engine with water directly from the ocean, usually they are fresh water cooled with a heat exchanger. So hot salt water + metal = RUST! I am willing to bet the engine is a frozen lump of cast iron back there. So I'm looking at another re-power situation. But this hull is smaller and lighter than the other beastie we offered on, so fewer batteries, smaller motor, less cost, yes!

So why this boat in particular? It is inexpensive so we can buy it outright, it's a strong hull form and is quite respected. Respected enough to let a 15 to 16 year old single hand it around the world. That would be Laura Dekker in 2010. How cool is that?

This boat is not too much of a compromise, we are getting the ketch I wanted, but are lacking a hull, so monohull it will have to be. Maybe I will stumble on a winning lottery ticket and I can go get the catamaran I want in a future purchase. Until then I will be happy with the rehab on this baby. It is listed at a steep discount as it is an estate sale and they just want it gone. I am happy with that. It is located about an hour and a half from home in Solomons, MD. So anyway we tossed out a bid, will see where that goes.

So very excited! As the saying goes, the two happiest boat days in your life, the day when you buy your boat, then the eventual day when you sell your boat.

Hey did anyone see "All is Lost"? We watched it not to long ago and all I got to say is "Dude, you might be Robert Redford but you can't plan for shiite!" At least he had a sextant, note to self, maybe look into getting one, then learning how to use the damn thing. But have a back up laptop or two, a back up GPS unit or THREE, and toss in a VHF handheld as well, and for gods sake don't store them all in the same place! Beyond that though I thought they did a most excellent job in filming the movie, the sound track was awesome! I think there are maybe ten lines of dialog in the entire thing. He fought his boat and didn't abandon it till it was actually sinking out from under him. Because life rafts can keep you alive, but man they suck. Keep your harness clipped to the boat, he went over the side a couple of times.

So that is all from this end, stay tuned to see if this has legs!

The hulk is still floating

So news of the hulk. It still floats, amazingly enough. It's been doing that for 21 years now, but we had to be sure. So we drove down to see the thing yesterday, 278 miles, 28 bucks in gas. It was predictably a mess. we poked and prodded, lifted the access hatches, unscrewed ports and fills, grabbed wires and got a splinter of SS in my left thumb. Annoying to say the least, particularly as I can't seem to localize it and get the darn thing out. Anyway yesterday was a rainy winter day, very warm for the season, low 60's. The boat is of course in the Carrotoman river, western branch, so is living in a high humidity environment, like everywhere else in Virginia. And the rain didn't help any. This is a boat that will need particular attention to ventilation, all the ventilation you could possibly get in a boat. So to make a long story slightly shorter, it was raining in the boat. Well sort of, kind of a slow condensation drip from here and there. Like I said we moved everything and opened all the interior hatches, all dry in there, I was amazed. Just the main salon was having issues, well all the open living areas, but I didn't find any water under stuff. So to Google I fled, yes condensation is a serious issue in all sailboats and there are ways to resolve it, the main being to keep it flooded with DRY WARM MOVING air. Who would have thunk that? New problem located, helm won't turn, because it's out of fluid and locked up? It is a hydraulic system BTW. Locked with some pin I can't find? Cause the rudder is mashed into the ground? The rudder post is friction welded to the sleeve? Who knows. Anyway the current owners are having major issues, in that they either don't want to sell the boat, or they just want to have it magically go away. I am leaning on the side of magically wanting it to go away. So to assist with that I called my insurance company, Liberty Mutual, and extended my liability insurance to cover the thing, after we sign the magic papers, called what might be the boats new home, checked prices of this and that and tendered a new offer. 3K for the boat and all they have to do is sign the stupid papers. Then I can be the proud owner of a new derelict hull. Liberty Mutual is an awesome company BTW, I always enjoy working with them. You may have already seen the issue with this rash proposal. Yes I might be saddled with a useless chunk of steel sitting in a boat yard some hundred and five odd miles from my home. A useless chunk of steel that I own outright.

Crawled into the engine room, loads of room in there to get stuff done. But I am thinking that in order to get the engine out of the hull I may need to cut the floor of the cockpit out, winch the engine out, then re-weld the floor back in place. There is room in there to hold a decent set of batteries, water maker, generator as well as the hot water heater. I should even have room to put the control head for the auto pilot in there. I was concerned about that as it is a rather noisy little guy. Auto pilots constantly make small movements to the rudder, and the rudder actuator is a rather large hydraulic piston directly under our heads in the master stateroom. Having a small hydraulic pump whizzing away under your head 24x7 is not what I call sweet sailing.  But I am pretty confident that I can put it in the engine room, seeing as that is where all the lines originate from anyway.

The boat is fairly majestic looking sitting welded to the dock. I'm pretty sure it is due to the bowsprit sticking 12 feet off the bow. The boat over all is 60' give or take a smidgen. The hull is 47.5, so it looks quite a bit larger than it is in actuality. Both masts are keel stepped, and both masts penetrate the living spaces in the heads.

>>>>>>-----Breaking News-----<<<<<<

Just heard from the broker, the owners counter offered, $8500.00, same deal, as is, where is. Nope not going to happen. To much risk for to much money. If the hull had a higher intrinsic value I would have assumed other people would have snapped it up. It is not like we stumbled into a secret hidden boat selling place. It has been advertised all up and down the East Coast since September of 2013. We were slow to move on this thing. So to me the only value the hull has is the value I am willing to put into it, wow, a free market thought. So now we wait while the broker, who really seems like a nice guy, tries to get the owners to understand that this is probably the best offer they are going to get. Seeing as they aren't willing to do even the minimum to sell the thing. Really it took two hours on the phone to get the insurance figured out, less with the marina guy, who also knows the boat and lived with the previous owner. So if the current owners aren't willing to do even that little amount of work to get the thing sold, they are indeed naive.

Anyway, playoffs are on, and I am not going to bore you with the rest of my thoughts on what might be a non-starter. But we did pick out a new name, "Steel Breeze".

Go Broncos!

----------- Further Updates -----------

The hulk eventually sold, not to us and the Bronco's lost the Super Bowl. Bummer on both counts.

We might be getting a hulk!

We put a bid on the hulk last week. While it is of course a compromise in most places, the price is right, the hull is steel, and I feel confident in my ability to fix the beast up and make it all mine.

I think the best part is that we will own it out right and not have to make payments on the thing. We were really thrilled that the bed is fore and aft, so no crawling over our partner in the middle of the night.

Yup that is where the bed thing goes. Of course all this will be de-trashed, cleaned, cleaned some more, then a bit of wood work is called for I am sure.

The bones of this boat appear to be in good condition, but not much else. The engine is a lump of useless metal, the gen-set is a joke, if it even runs. The batteries are of course junk, so all we are buying is a hull with some really nice wood work inside.

I like the color of the wood work. Not so thrilled with the sole, it was never finished and is just the sub flooring of marine plywood. But you can't always get what you want. 

This is the salon area with the battery bank in the middle. All the cushions are stacked to port, out of sight. The galley area is rather oddly laid out and has an electric stove in it.

  

But we did think it was nice they had that giant microwave in there, means we will have room for our espresso maker! But really, an ELECTRIC stove in a blue water sail boat? Obviously not the primary use the previous owner, who had this boat custom built, had in mind. Storage appears to be adequate.  

This boat has at times been left to sit open to the environment, so it has some wood issues here and there. But at the price point, it looks grand.

So issues holding up the sale? Insurance. It's been sitting for a couple years with no insurance, and it has to be towed, so that is going to cause some issues. 

So the most interesting part of this boat? The navigation station.

Yes that is a pretty dolphin etched on glass, but more importantly there is a blank bulkhead right aft of the chart table to allow for mounting of monitors and what not.

So the exterior:

While I love the bowsprit, I am sure I will end up cursing it for costing extra at the marina when we pull in for over nights. But what better place to sit while the dolphins are playing in your bow wave?

Cockpit area looking forward

We did get the Ketch rigging I wanted. The sails are unlikely to be useful any more, but we might get a season out of them. The mast and booms are set up for lazy jacks, so at least the sails won't be flopping all over the place.

So now we are looking at names for our beastie.

In the running:

1. Steel Breeze
2. Dark Side
3. Betty's Boop (Not really)
4. Comfortably Numb

Anyway we are still in the offer stages, lots more to be done before we are confirmed to be the second owners of this lovely blue water passage making sail boat.