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.

Not getting these..

So totally getting a boat, just not any of these. There will always be derelict hulls out there, some nice, some crappy. So the killer with the steel hull hulk? 10' draft. Can't get it close to where I live so would have to store it two hours away and drive to work on it over the weekends. Even after it was fixed, no joy, still have to dock it far away, or move.  The neat-o keen-o Cheoy Lee? She wants way to much for it, and it requires way to much work to get off the hard. So we are going to buy a little 27' to 32' run about, a derelict, fix it up a little and go have some fun. A few years from now if we still want to we will get the big boat. Have my eye on a couple just a few miles from the house here, now that might be fun.

Fun weekend trip

So when we last chatted we were headed down to Norfolk to check on another boat. Met a really great owner, Paul. Paul loves his boat, but then who wouldn't? It's a 50' Dufour, he modified the V berth up front so he could have a nice queen bed.

I thought he did a good job with the work, as well as fixing a vexing issue for most boats. Whoever is the outboard sleeper, they have to crawl over the inboard sleeper to get out of the bed. This can be annoying for the one that didn't want to wake up right then.  Our major reason however was to look at the salon/galley area.                 

This is the galley looking from the salon, we thought it was a very nice use of room. The boat was bright and open and very comfortable. It is of course out of our price range @ $129,500 or so. But we did want to see the galley arrangement. 

That is all for today, we had a most excellent meal last night at the Byrd and Baldwin. Without a doubt the best steak I have ever had in my life, bar none. The barkeep made me a perfect martini or two, and a fabulous bottle of wine to go with dinner. Port, desert and coffee after. So now I am moderately hung over and sleepy, hard to remain alert during the 2.5 hour drive home. Thankfully we stayed in Norfolk last night, @ the Sheraton Waterview, I don't recommend that however. Their sheets did not fit the bed. I know hard to believe, but that is the way of it. Totally weird.

Another weekend, another boat.

Morning faithful followers,
Up early today, received an email from the broker for the wreck, just a simple, follow up, "Did you decide to make an offer?"  Basically. And no we haven't decided. We are in no hurry to decide anything currently. No reason to, it will be years before we go anywhere but we are tossing the idea around. One of the things that makes this hull interesting is that once we purchase it, we own it out right, no payments or additional real debt incurred. There is a great deal of intangible debt however. Needs a new power system, and then electronics, and the list goes on. But on the other hand there is another one of Mr. Wittholz's designs for sale up Annapolis way, cool $500,000. A little longer, a bit older, and with a pilot house, but still, 1/2 a million. Makes having a working sailboat to sell loads more profitable than trying to get the junker out of your backyard.

Read an interesting book last night, Own less, Live more, first I thought it was interesting that I paid like $9.00 for a sailing book and this one didn't cover a lot detail, but he is a good story teller. He did surface some interesting points. One of the first things I grabbed onto it that they also purchased a wreck. A sank at the piers wreck. So before they could even work on it they had to raise it off the harbor bed. Now that is dedication. I liked another of his points, the answer to that age old question, "Which is the right cruising boat for me?". I am a firm believer that everything is a compromise and your boat is just a series of compromises. But the end point is, it's the boat you can afford. We are right in the middle of the middle class and can't afford a mega yacht. Can't afford much of a boat all, but we are determined to go do stuff, so will see where that takes us.

Anyway we are headed out for pancakes then to Norfolk to look at yet a different boat. I'm going because I am interested in the modifications the owner made to the boat. Betty is going because that is where the car is going and she would rather not stay home and do laundry. Will give you the run down later.

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.

New Books and other ramblings

We have our cabinets for the kitchen now.  They are stacked semi neatly in the dining room.  Part of one of the false walls that enclose the kitchen has been taken down and only the header is still kind of attached to the wall to keep the other false wall made out of the old cabinets from falling completely over and killing us.  We started this project about six months ago simply so I could rebuild the kitchen.  Got new hard wood floors, new carpet and pad in the bedrooms, a new electrical panel, and while getting a new roof we also got rid of a number of mold colonies that had taken up residence in our attic space, damn illegals.  Also added 14" of new blown in attic insulation, bought a hot tub as well as creating a deck to put it on.  Now the thing I wanted from the start, a new kitchen.  Along the way I have found I am a lousy manual laborer.  If I was being paid piece work on this particular job I would have starved to death long ago.  Anyway we stowed a number of items from the pantry that I moved last year when we ripped it out of it's normal place in order to put our new fridge in place.  And yes ripped is the correct word.  After partially rebuilding it I moved it across the kitchen and gingerly settled it next to a wall hoping it wouldn't return to kit form in a spectacular explosion of frosted mini-wheats and rice grains.  Anyway I am hard at work taking up the old tile squares, well actually I am waiting for my battery to recharge for my battery run tool of maximum destruction.  As soon as I finish this little piece of procrastination I will rig out my other tool of maximum destruction, the one that you plug into the wall.  I was hoping Betty had forgotten I owned this tool, as a dead battery is always a great excuse for some down time with my favorite time suck, Zuma.  If you have never played this game all I can tell is just don't, for the sake of your marriage just ignore that link on Facebook completely.  Anyway I digress as I usually do.

Books I have read lately that I recommend.

Sailing:




























I read "Chasing the Horizon" yesterday.  This guy grabs you pretty quickly and keeps you engrossed.  I read "Red Sea..." this morning and was not disappointed.  In conjunction with "Bumfuzzle..." I have decided that I don't plan on ever trying to sail a boat through the Suez Canal at any time in the future.  At least until I win the lottery and can afford to be completely and constantly ripped off by the government and everyone else there.

Fiction:














A good yarn particularly as it deals with supposed Navy types well into the future.  And a pretty bleak picture as well.  But the story it told was engaging and I enjoyed it, well up until the last 50 pages or so.  Evidently the book wasn't quite long enough so he had to add some extra weirdness just to get the page count higher.

Ok enough procrastinating.  Back to chipping the deck.

Just ignoring this space

Greetings my seven followers!  Hail and welcome!

I have been ignoring this space for quite awhile now as we rebuild the house. I had a couple months of work back at the beginning of the year and really thought I would do pretty well this year, however reality came crashing in on top of my head as is usual in this dismal economy.  I purchased an iPod2 with the proceeds of one of my jobs, paid some bills, ate out a lot and generally enjoyed being back to work while it lasted.  I discovered kindle for iPad and have spent many, many, many, many days reading way to many books and ignoring everything else around me.  So the house is still a genial wreck.  Although I did get the house and two of the decks steam cleaned a week or so ago which makes a huge difference in how the house looks.  As an experiment I stained the small deck off the dinning room, looks like it could use another coat.  Not terribly happy with the color, wasn't aware that cedar was so orange.  But it needed sealing and waterproofing.  And because I am a glutton for punishment I sanded the handrails of the back deck, the poop deck if you will :), and going to see what they look like with some 50 bazillion coats of Helm Spar Varnish.  

Anyway this is supposed to be a sailing blog but I rather lost interest when we sunk all our money into this place and decided we weren't going to get a boat this year after all.  Somebody, the somebody that actually has a job in this family, who works from home, was just not really thrilled with taking a dinghy in a driving wind and snow storm in the middle of winter as the first part of her commute really wanted a house.  So in the interest of family harmony we got a house.

I had done some reading previously and expected that with the years of experience it looked like we needed, the boatload and a half of spares and knowledge of what to do with those spares, before we could reasonably even think of going anywhere I despaired of ever really having a boat.  And even if we did manage to get one of never being able to go anywhere.  Because really I have sailed out into the Bay and back, and that is just boring.  But then again just about everything I have read about sailing indicates it is boring as well.  Add that to my years of cruising long distance on various aircraft carriers courtesy of our government, and I can tell you cruising is boring.  And you want it to stay boring as well.  Excitement means you planned wrong and are now stuck in such horrible weather that the resulting excitement just might kill you.  Anyway I digress, while poking through a listing of Kindle books under "Sailing" I stumbled across Bumfuzzle - Just Out Looking For Pirates, a really interesting account of a circumnavigation made by a couple, Pat and Ali Schulte, that are completely unconventional.  

Pat was a commodities broker, trader kind of guy and I am not sure what Ali did, but they simply decided to go sailing around around the world over a few beers, bought what they thought was great catamaran that ended up to be a POS, but still really looks nice.  Took that as lesson one.  They had about 8 hours of initial instruction, taught themselves what they needed to know while enroute and caused all sorts of consternation on various sailing forums whilst sailing around the world.  They also have kept up a blog of their adventures and daily lives.  But really just read the book.  I am sure Pat and Ali could use the $1.00 they get from the proceeds of the sale.  Beer in Mexico, while cheap ain't free after all.

This gave me some hope for our plans after all.  It is just sailing after all, it ain't brain surgery. Think it though and you'll do okay.  I even already have the little scruffy beard that Pat detests so much. Although it isn't grey all the way yet.

Anyway those are just my thoughts whatever they are worth.  People like to talk about them, good and bad since they made their plans known a few years ago and just took off.  Read the book and blog because they are fun.  Take what you want and ignore the rest.