When we sailed into Opua, New Zealand, in a gale in September 2014, after crossing the Pacific Ocean solo in four months and four stops, Gannet, my ultralight Moore 24, was beginning to unravel. All the tiller pilots were dead. The port floorboard was broken and the port pipe berth unusable after the tube jumped out of its socket when Gannet became airborne off a wave and crashed into a trough. These were more important than they might seem because they left no place to brace my foot in the cabin while the little sloop was heeled 30 degrees and more to port as she generally was in the last 48 hours of that passage from Tonga. We had inadequate solar charging in overcast conditions, with two of the six panels nonfunctioning.

RELATED: Solo Sailor Webb Chiles to Finish Sixth Circumnavigation

One of the lessons learned from investigations of airline crashes is that they are often the result of a cascade of small failures, none important in itself, but collectively fatal. I did not know what might break next on Gannet, and I did not want to find out, so I pushed hard to get in port before the wind backed, increased from 40-45 knots to 50-55, and closed the door—forcing Gannet to remain at sea for several more days.

Not long after our arrival, I unraveled some myself when I fell and all but severed part of my left shoulder rotator cuff.

I do not claim to be better than ever, but, thanks to physical therapy and my own exercises, I was better than I ever expected to be six months later. I know that a torn rotator cuff does not heal, but it felt as though it had.

Gannet definitely was better than ever by the time we put to sea again. The boatyard in Opua made new iroko floorboards. I had new tiller pilots and great hopes for the mostly underdeck Pelagic pilot. In port, the pipe berth was as easy to pop back in place as at sea it was not. I replaced the failed solar panels. And I made several improvements.

By far the greatest of these was reconfiguring the cockpit by removing a bridge that held the mainsheet traveler that was always a nuisance to step over—and at sea sometimes a hazard—and relocating the traveler to the cockpit floor.

The idea for this came from photos I saw online of other Moore 24s that have made the change, and I was greatly aided by Gilles Combrisson of GC Rigging in Point Richmond, California, whose firm made the pod on which the mainsheet block and cam cleat are mounted, provided me with the Harken track, risers, bolts and G-10 backing plate cut to size, and advised me of the Harken Duo-Cam that solves the problem of running the underdeck backstay control. Combrisson credits Scott Easam for first devising this configuration.

I did the work myself over a period of four days. It would have taken less, but this being New Zealand, I was often ­interrupted by rain. The result was dramatic. Living on and sailing Gannet was easier in many ways every day. This was one of the best modifications I made to the little boat.

During that stopover, I also took delivery of a new G1 gennaker from North Sails’ Opua loft. My old gennaker was fuller cut and good for broad reaching, but it slowed the boat as the wind moved forward. With the new sail, I had a vision of setting both gennakers wing and wing on an ocean passage and watching Gannet fly under clouds of sail.

Because the G1 didn’t furl well with my Facnor gennaker furler, I ordered a ProFurl Spinex top-down furler. I then cleared the deck by removing unused genoa tracks and cam cleats, also reducing the number of nuts on which I can hit my head inside the cabin by more than 40.

I added a TackTick wind system, which being solar powered and wireless was easy to install.

And I dramatically improved the sound of music with two Megaboom speakers, which when linked to play in stereo were by far the best waterproof Bluetooth speakers I’ve heard.

Though some of these upgrades were far from essential, all enhanced life aboard and sailing oceans. The Tasman, Coral and Arafura seas, and the Indian Ocean laid ahead.

Writer and sailor Webb Chiles completed his sixth solo ­circumnavigation in 2019 when he and Gannet, his Moore 24, ­arrived back in San Diego. You can follow his ongoing ­adventures on his website, inthepresentsea.com.

The post Upgrades for a Circumnavigation appeared first on Cruising World.

The germ might not have sprouted on the Spanish Camino de Santiago in June 2013, but it found fertile ground there. By bicycle we were traversing the 1,000-year-old pilgrim’s route to the mythical crypt of St. James, and on crossing into Celtic Galicia, where the landscape starts feeling witchy, we both realized we wanted to travel more deeply along Europe’s outpost edges. We’d each lived in European capitals before, but now we wanted to dwell in places still older than those: not Madrid but Catalonia, not Paris but Brittany, not Dublin but Connemara.

Cycling was a great way to travel deeply in foreign countries, and we proved to ourselves that even in remote places, we could fix flat tires and adjust cables as simple mechanisms faltered. But our scope was ultimately limited by the twin 20-liter paniers each bike carried, and that revelation soon set us off to thinking about sailboats for some extended traveling. After many months exploring the yacht-brokerage market, in fall 2017 on Florida’s Atlantic coast, we found the right boat for our project: a 1988 Passport 40, designed by Robert Perry. She was Hull No. 141 of the 148 P-40s built in Taiwan between 1980 and 1991, and we named her Billy Pilgrim—a nod to our own peregrinations but also to the Kurt Vonnegut character who came unstuck in time. He or she; never they: Billy P abides gender fluidity but abhors sloppy grammar.

Porthole Project

The Punch List

The Passport 40 was perfect for us in a hundred different ways. Still, there’s no getting around Billy Pilgrim’s 30 years of living. We knew that a shakedown would reveal items to update and refit. Sure enough, by the time we sailed from Florida to our home port in New England, we loved Billy P all the more, despite a pressing short list of shortcomings. One category earned its place at the top of the list: leaks. Fixing those became our priority when we hauled the boat for winter at Maine Yacht Center in Portland.

Tim has worked through boat problems before. As a teenager, he slept aboard his family’s liveaboard CT-41 ketch surrounded by Tupperware to catch the downpours from a leaky cabin top. Since then he’s partially refit a 1974 Vineyard Vixen 29 (see “A Jade Mist Dream Come True,” CW, October 1998). Lesley’s experience with boat ownership was limited to a fleet of kayaks and a 1985 Boston Whaler 15. She’s owned homes built more than a century ago and knows that when you address one problem, you inevitably uncover others, and that sometimes it seems best to just leave the damned dominoes alone rather than set off the whole series. Still, this particular home would also be oceangoing, so it was clear that some projects couldn’t be ignored forever. We went into the refit as enthusiastic amateur marine technicians, eager to learn. Yet the more we got into it, the more we realized there are some things the eight-hour-a-day guys know that we didn’t even know we didn’t yet know.

We determined that unwanted water was coming into the boat from three sources: portholes, chainplates and hatches. The process for stopping the leaks at each source suggested the same steps: Remove the items without damaging vital parts; keep track of what went where; and re-bed the parts snugly so that they don’t start leaking again.

One crucial choice stood over every part we removed: Repair it or replace it?

Re-bedding Portholes

On examination, the gaskets that seal the glass lens in the porthole frames weren’t compromised, nor were the frames themselves. Water was instead leaking in through the cabin house around the edges of the porthole assembly. We determined that five of our 10 portholes needed re-bedding: one on either side of the V-berth, two portside in the galley, and one above the starboard settee.

Each Hood porthole assembly comes in two parts. Installed from inside the cabin is the body of the porthole, which comprises the glass lens, stainless-steel frame, hinges, and a flange that protrudes from inside to the exterior. Outside the cabin, a flat trim ring fits over the protruding flange and provides surface area for sealant. Both the frame and trim ring are secured with wood screws into the plywood cabin side and are bedded in marine adhesive sealant.

Removing the wood screws was straightforward enough. But in order to remove the porthole, we had to break the seal of the 30-year-old sealant without damaging either the stainless fittings or the cabin sides. It may have been crusty and leaky, but it sure didn’t want to let go! We rank amateurs started by using a series of putty knives, screwdrivers and pry bars, working around the edges of the frame, slipping in the blades to loosen the sealant, and prying to get it to release from the cabin side, while at the same time trying not to scrape up the surface or bend the stainless trim ring. A slender putty knife with a certain amount of stiffness worked best to get under the edge and move around the trim ring’s circumference to break the seal. After our initial trials, one of the trained professionals at Maine Yacht Center came by to offer advice and provide us with a selection of small wooden wedges to replace our metal tools when we’d broken the seal. We were now able to move our tools and break the bond on another section.

Once the exterior trim ring came off, we had to break the seal on the porthole flange inside the boat. To do this, we started from the outside by bonking the flange toward the interior with a rubber mallet, trying to move it evenly so that the porthole would slide out at the same angle it had been inserted through the hull—challenging because we were still working against the ancient sealant. Our first porthole removal was not entirely elegant. Some of the melamine surface inside the cabin got a little chipped, but we hadn’t ruined anything vital. One down, four to go!

For the remaining portholes, our friends at Maine Yacht Center provided us with a simple custom-made porthole puller: a wooden contraption that looks kind of like an old-school vise with two feet. Using the puller, you still have to break the seal of the old goo under the trim ring. That done, you put the two feet of the puller against the interior cabin side and the other end against the outside edge of the flange; then you torque the nuts of the two bolts, thereby pushing it toward the inside of the boat. This was a revelation, a process far tidier than our bonking method.

With the portholes removed, now it was time to clean up the surfaces before reinstalling them. Both the porthole assemblies and the cabin-side holes through which they pass needed some work. The water that had seeped in had made a mess of things.

So we cleaned up all the nasty debris, using sandpaper and a stiff brush to get any loose chunks off, then we sealed all the plywood edges of the cutouts with thickened West System epoxy. In the worst spots we applied polyester filler with a putty knife, taking care not to alter the shape of the hole. On the stainless-­steel porthole assemblies we used a wire brush, sandpaper and even a Dremel tool in the spots that showed some pitting corrosion. All cleaned up, our parts were ready to be installed.

One charming moment came upon removing our second porthole, when a little note fell out of the cabin side. In Mandarin, we later learned, it read, “Good luck for selling your boat.” It was a sweet surprise to hear from one of the souls in Taiwan who had built our boat decades before.

We now needed to be very clear about two things. One was labeling. All the portholes we’d removed looked like they were the same size and shape. That wasn’t exactly true, but it was important that everything got labeled, to a kind of ridiculous extent. The second thing came before we started with the re-bedding: We vigilantly covered everything. We taped all edges religiously; we had tons of gloves and rags easily accessible; we covered any nearby surface with cardboard or plastic.

For our marine adhesive sealant, we used white UV-resistant Sikaflex Marine 295. Working with this stuff is ­basically like working with the insides of a well-toasted marshmallow. We tried hard not to get it on anything; once cured, it’s a nightmare to get off. So we taped around the work area, leaving about a quarter-inch gap to make a nice fillet around the edge of the frame or trim ring. We kept a trash bag ready to receive all of the nasty we were about to produce. We squeezed generous gobs of Sikaflex on all the parts (not just the backs of the trim rings, but also inside the tubular part of the porthole flange that protrudes through the cabin side) so that when we fastened them back into place, an ample amount oozed out the entire perimeter. This was our proof that the sealant filled all the voids where water might be tempted to leak in. Then we secured the trim rings and frames with new stainless-steel wood screws. With a clean gloved finger we made a nice fillet around each edge. Before it cured, we carefully pulled our tape, leaving an elegant arc of sealant between cabin side and stainless plate. This is really a four-handed job so that one person can remain goo-free and can clean the stainless with water-soaked rags. Our final step was to clean up all the unintended Sikaflex before it set and then gaze with pride. The fine white line of that fillet was the only visible sign of all our work.

Chainplate Project

Re-bedding the Chainplates

Chainplates are hidden workhorses. Before this project, Lesley hadn’t really been conscious of their existence. Ours are flat strips of stainless steel that pass through the deck. Below deck, they’re through-bolted to structural members massively laminated to the hull. Above deck is a hole in the chainplate through which the shroud terminals are pinned. These unsexy but crucial pieces of steel carry all the dynamic sailing loads, holding up the mast against all the forces from the sails and the waves.

On each side, the Passport 40 has four shrouds and therefore four chainplates. Capping the hole in the deck through which each chainplate passes is a flat, thin, rectangular steel cover; the receiving end of the chainplate sticks up through a slit in this cover. It looks kind of like a light-switch cover about 1/16-inch thick and mounts flat on the deck. Because the Passport has 4-inch bulwarks around the deck perimeter, seawater or rainwater sometimes stands deeper than these chainplate covers. It’s a recipe for leaks and crevice corrosion. Once we determined that we’d need to pull and re-bed all eight chainplates, we decided it might be a good time to add an upgrade: a step or a riser, which would raise the deck cover above the level of soaking saltwater pools. This presented us with a design project.

Inside the cabin, we removed the teak cladding that conceals the chainplates. Next, we carefully removed and labeled all of the grounding wires that were attached for galvanic bonding. Because these showed 30 years of corrosion, Tim replaced all the ring terminals and sealed them with heat-shrink tubing. Then we removed the nuts, washers and bolts from the chainplates. On deck, we removed the cover plates, which were attached with sealant and wood screws into the deck. Finally, we had to wiggle the chainplates out of their slot through the deck. Of course, inside the boat the chainplates are located in one awkward place or another: inside cabinetry in the head, behind other cabinetry in a hanging locker, or in the saloon. Each set of bolts required a different set of yogic contortions to access, but we are fortunate in that Lesley is right-handed and Tim’s a lefty, giving us options for any configuration. In several places we could read a nasty tale of leaked water. We had to release the grip of the old sealant and slide the chainplates up through the deck without distorting them. Our rubber mallet and some more bonking from above helped to free them. We again labeled everything compulsively, cleaned up any water damage, and gave white surfaces some fresh coats of paint.

Lesley made paper templates to create new risers from 3/8-inch fiberglass sheet—higher than standing water but not so high as to introduce toe-stubbers. In this new configuration, the screws that hold the deck covers in place would no longer penetrate the deck or sit in standing water, diminishing the likelihood of new leaks. Lesley cut out the risers on a band saw, then rounded the corners with a sander and sprayed each with Awlgrip. The new risers are a thing of beauty, and now the plates and their fasteners sit well above any standing water on deck.

When it came time to reinstall, we had to make a decision about how removable the new risers would be. Should we bed them to the deck with epoxy (­permanent) or Sikaflex (removable with a bit of ­effort)? What kind of legacy were we leaving for the imaginary future owners of Billy Pilgrim if they were ever going to re-bed or replace their chainplates? The Trained Professionals we consulted strongly advocated for Sikaflex, not epoxy, and we followed their advice. After ­examining the chainplates to ensure that they were still sound (they were), we refastened them with all new stainless-­steel bolts, washers and nuts. This step presented some puzzles to detangle. Some bolts originally ran from fore to aft and others from aft to fore in order to fit inside the teak cladding. In some places it seemed like the interior furniture was built around the chainplates when the boat was built in Taiwan, and it took some fiddling around before we got everything snugly in its original place, bolts tightened and grounding wires reattached. Now we were ready to reseal from above.

We made a dam underneath each hole that the chainplates traveled through on the deck using 3M Strip-Calk butyl tape—the Trained Professionals call it dum-dum tape—which comes on a roll and is basically the consistency of chewed gum. This way enough Sikaflex can be injected to fill in the gaps, but the Sikaflex won’t drip into the whole cavity under the deck. From above we taped around the risers, as we’d done with the portholes. Next we squeezed Sikaflex to fill the hole around the chainplates, covered the ­bottom of the new risers so that it oozed out all sides to seal that bond, then covered the bottom of the steel deck plates to seal them onto the risers. Finally, we fastened the deck plates with stainless-­steel wood screws, which no longer penetrated the deck. One less opportunity for water to come in!

Replacing and Installing New Hatches

The last of our three leak-eradicating jobs was perhaps the most straightforward: hatches. Billy Pilgrim has four—two big, two small—all made by Atkins & Hoyle in the mid-1980s. The aluminum struts had collapsed on themselves, and we sometimes found little chunks of powdered aluminum in the V-berth sheets. Previous owners kept these hatches open with wooden blocks, a proposition that always bespoke smashed fingers. More ­consequentially, the aluminum frames of two of the hatches were cracked—not a case for re-bedding or repair but rather full-on replacement.

Hatch Project

For the past 20 years, Tim has either directed or judged Cruising World’s Boat of the Year event, giving him the chance to see and sail more than 500 new sailboats, as well as the gear that’s installed on them. That experience led him to prefer Lewmar Ocean series hatches, both for their security and user-friendliness. And no more wooden blocks to hold open the hatches.

Removing the old hatches was very much like removing the portholes and employed many of the same tools. Same goes for cleaning up the surfaces on which the hatches sit.

The main puzzle this job posed was that the frames of the Ocean hatches are slightly smaller than the composite bosses that are molded into the boat’s deck. We fashioned a solution from a ½-inch-thick flat marine plywood, finished off in the same way Lesley finished the chainplate risers. For each hatch, we cut out a piece whose outside perimeter matched the outside edge of the boss, and whose inside cutout matched the inside of the hatch frame. We used wood screws and Sikaflex to fasten them—no more aluminum powder in the bed!

Better still, no more unwanted water in the boat.

Billy Pilgrim has a permanent mooring in Gloucester, Massachusetts, but spent the COVID-19 summer of 2020 hauled out at Maine Yacht Center in Portland, Maine, where Lesley Davison and Tim Murphy visited on self-quarantined day trips so that work could progress.

The post Sailboat Refit for a Transatlantic appeared first on Cruising World.

There was a day, before wide screens, all-night buffets and king-size beds, when a family would cruise happily on a boat like the O’Day 27. Solid and simple, the little sloop was just right for lake, harbor or coastal exploring. Small enough for a quick daysail with friends, big enough for a weekend or week gunkholing, the 27 was hugely popular: Between 1972 and 1979, 720 boats were produced at O’Day’s factory in Fall River, Massachusetts.

George O’Day, who founded the company in 1951, wasn’t a cruiser (he won a gold medal at the 1960 Olympics in the 5.5 meter class), but he understood that an ­uncomplicated sailboat was something a whole family could enjoy.

Alan Gurney designed it. Famous in the high-end yachting world for Windward Passage and other one-off race boats for millionaires, Gurney is said to have worked with what sailing writer Ted Jones called “a seaman’s eye; he thought like the water through which he had sailed.” Commissioned to create an everyman’s sailboat, Gurney sketched a ­compact, almost blocky hull with a 22-foot-9-inch waterline and 4-foot draft. Half of its 5,000-pound displacement was in the lead keel, which balanced a mast 38 feet above the water, 320-square feet of sail, and the heft to carry a chute or big genoa. The hull was solid, hand-laid fiberglass, with teak brightwork to dress it up. It came equipped with outboard motors or, later, an inboard gas or diesel engine.

Step aboard, as I did on ­Jonathan Heller’s 1974 O’Day 27, moored on Lake ­Champlain in Burlington, ­Vermont, and you will first find a long cockpit with a ­tiller, an ample entryway and an interior that is surprisingly spacious, due in part to its 9-foot beam, with a fold-up table, stepped mast and 6-plus-foot headroom. According to Jones, writing in Professional Boatbuilder, an O’Day salesman complained about headroom in Gurney’s initial design. Gurney handed him a pencil and “asked him to draw where he thought the headroom should be.” If the cabin “appears to be a bit high,” Jones wrote, “that’s the reason!”

O’Day’s sales brochures for its first keel boat were hyperbolic: a “luxurious cruiser,” “big, airy sleeping accommodations for five,” “a truly superior yacht.” But at a sail-away price of under $7,000, the first O’Day 27s were an instant hit. By the end of their run, they cost $14,500.

By today’s standards, the boat’s galley and head remind me of a small ­camping trailer—adequate but tight. There’s an icebox, an alcohol stove and an ­optional shower (if you watch your ­elbows). One striking compromise is the absence of any ­anchor hardware. A bow ­pulpit was standard but nothing on which to hang a hook. Over the years, owners have also had to deal with water ­intrusion on chainplates.

The good news is that these boats can be had for a song, from $3,900 to $8,000, and that many parts are still ­available. Heller, a ­handyman, musician and father of a 3-year-old girl, purchased the boat for $7,000 from a college student who had been ­living on the hook. Still learning how to sail his yet-unnamed love, he plans to explore Champlain, a cruising ground “big enough to be challenging but not big enough to be scary.” The same could be said of the O’Day 27.

Journalist and author Jim Carrier is a CW contributing editor.

The post Classic Plastic: O’Day 27 appeared first on Cruising World.

It all started with a YouTube video on a rainy summer day in Jamestown, Rhode Island; I was 12 years old and had stumbled upon a channel called Wicked Salty. The videos, by a guy named Wes, depicted his adventures and the refit of a small sailboat in nearby Massachusetts. The endless horizons—and the self-sufficiency—depicted in the vlogs tickled my sense of adventure, launching my own dreams of a day when I might start a similar project.

Flash forward a few years to summer 2016, when I saw a cover story in Cruising World about nautical photographer and sailor Onne van der Wal’s extensive refit of a Pearson 36. Van der Wal not only wrote several stories about his various projects and challenges, but at the same time he documented the whole project through his lens. That part really set his project apart from all others, allowing me as the reader to become a part of the process. I now had a new goal: Fix a boat and record the whole project.

The Beginnings

Fast forward to 2019. I was now 17, it was the fall of my senior year. For my senior project at Tabor Academy, in Marion, Massachusetts, where I was also on the sailing team, I’d decided to tackle that long-anticipated boat refit. It would combine my love for photography (I’d actually met and even worked with Van der Wal by now, who was particularly encouraging), building things and sailing. I was decidedly excited about the idea. I was missing only one thing: the boat.

I reached out to everybody I knew who might know of a tired boat. Then, in class on a sunny day in early September, I got an email with the heading: “FREE BOAT! PEARSON 26, NEWPORT RI.” Oh yeah. I checked out the photos; she looked to be floating well enough. And I immediately thought to myself, Why not?

Not one to wait around, I introduced myself and my idea to the owner, a lively Newport native named Herb McCormick, who happens to be the executive editor of this magazine. A week or so later, my (skeptical) dad joined me to meet McCormick in person and check out the Pearson. She looked tired, but behind her faded, teal-green deck paint and slightly odd aroma, I could see the potential for adventure.

Sitting there on the starboard berth, all I could think about were the great projects and adventures to come. I had heard that Pearson 26s were sturdily built. The 1973 classic plastic had a ­solid-fiberglass hull, but other than that, it needed a lot of cosmetic work. As McCormick put it straightforwardly, the two best bits were the galley table and the head (a previous owner had owned a marine-plumbing business). Other than that, it needed quite the refresher. After I was done looking around, McCormick asked the big question: “So, do you want her?”

“Yes!” I respond.

I shook his hand. Just like that, I was a boat owner.

My introduction to boat ownership, however, was not sugarcoated. A couple of days after acquiring the Pearson, a 50-knot nor’easter barreled through southern New England, and an email from McCormick later that morning informed me that the headstay toggle had failed and the deck-stepped mast had gone over the side. Yikes. I thought all was lost, but McCormick and the harbormaster got the spar out of the drink and back on board, for which I am extremely grateful because it saved the project.

I was quickly learning that sometimes you just have to look at the bright side. In this instance, I realized I’d saved a few hundred bucks to unstep the mast. With my first incident under my belt, and many more storms coming, I knew that it was time to get the boat out of the water, and had her hauled and trucked to Brownell Systems in Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, which is close to Tabor.

With the boat on stands, it was time to start work, but I needed to find paint and other supplies. Luckily, early on I was introduced by Van der Wal to the incredible team at Jamestown Distributor’s TotalBoat (totalboat.com), specifically Kristin Browne and Mike Mills (it’s largely because of their partnership with the project that I was able to complete it on time and within budget). Their easy-to-use products, expert advice and endless support were paramount to my success. From the nonskid deck paint on the cabin top to the barrier coat at the bottom of the keel, I used TotalBoat products exclusively for the painting and refinishing, and I could not be happier with the results. With great supplies and a power sander in hand, it was time to truly get started.

The Games Begin

It was the moment I’d been waiting for. Like a deer prancing in a forest, I bounded into my bright-white Tyvek suit, strapped on a respirator, and flicked the switch that got the random orbital sander whirring. My first project, refinishing the port cockpit locker, was underway. Man, it was hot, dirty work…but a weird part of me loved it. For hours in that tight locker I sanded and sanded off the old, flaking paint, revealing a clean surface begging for fresh paint. I then cleaned the area with a shop vacuum and did the surface prep before whipping out my first can of gray bilge paint. I happily rolled on the epoxy paint, stepped back and admired my work. Painting a sail locker is a small feat, but the sense of accomplishment was awesome.

Next up were the coachroof windows. When I got the boat, both of them leaked quite a bit. I talked with a neighbor, who had the same issue on his Pearson 36, and he told me my best bet was to remove them, scrape out the old sealant, and replace them using new sealant. The windows on the Pearson 26 are a fairly simple design, with a piece of glass sandwiched in a pair of frames, one inside and one outside. After unscrewing and removing everything, I scraped off the old sealant and used a whole tube of TotalBoat Seal around the inside of the window before inserting it back into the cabin. The windows leak a lot less now, although in a really heavy rain, I do get a small drip. But I will call it a success.

The boat’s main bulkhead in the little saloon was decorated with a dark brown, fake-wood vinyl veneer that really made the cabin feel small and out of date. To fix this, I applied three coats of white paint that made the cabin much brighter and feel like home. I was starting to get places.

But my favorite project was installing a new sound system, which I had purchased at West Marine. Before installing the new speakers, I needed a new electrical panel to wire them to. I decided to install the panel right next to where I was going to install the stereo. After wiring up everything, flipping the switch and seeing the panel light up (yes!), it was time to install the bumpin’ new speakers. Conveniently, there was already an old, broken system in place, so when I bought the new one, I made sure it could easily fit into the existing locations. To install the stereo, I used a duplex cable run to the electrical panel and the negative bus. I then plopped the new speakers in place of the old ones and—voilà!—I had music to work to!

Moving on, one of the most useful skills I learned during this project was how to repair a sail. My mainsail had many small holes and tears in the tack that needed to be fixed. I reached out to Ben at Sperry Sails in Marion, Massachusetts, to see if they could assist me in the process. With the guidance of a loft worker named Grey, I began work on the repair. To make the necessary patch, I traced the Dacron and then cut it with a hot knife. Then, for the first time ever, after a quick lesson, I attacked a sewing machine.

To my helpers, my lack of ­experience was quite obvious from the beginning.

For my first row of stitches, I had the machine in reverse and just decided to feed the sail from the back, thinking to myself, Hmmm, this is odd, but never figuring out why. After a few minutes, Grey caught on to my mistake and helped me literally turn things around. From then on it was pretty smooth sailing, with no injuries or breakages to myself or the machine. Now when my sail needs repair, I will have an idea of how to fix it.

Another satisfying job was ­sprucing up all the varnished wood on the boat. Most of the varnish down below looked OK, but it needed a few refresher coats. I was loaned the space in a loft at Tabor used for work on the school’s training ship, SSV Tabor Boy, so I removed all the wood from the interior and refinished it there. I sanded everything with 320-grit to scuff the surface before the first coat, and then brushed on three coats of TotalBoat Gleam 2.0 gloss varnish. Next was two coats of Gleam 2.0 satin varnish to give the interior a soft feel. The only wood in really bad shape were the companionway slats, hatch and grab rails. For these, I used a heat gun and scraper to remove all of the original varnish, exposing beautiful wood underneath. I proceeded to sand with 180-, 220- and finally 320-grit sandpaper before applying the Gleam 2.0 gloss varnish. The final result was glowing wood inside and out. Sweet.

By now it was March, time for spring break, and my plan was to spend a couple of weeks in Bermuda at my classmate Felix’s home there. Of course, soon after arriving, COVID-19 began to really descend on Boston, and flying back to New England felt unsafe. A week later, the first cases were diagnosed in Bermuda, and the country suspended all commercial travel indefinitely. We took advantage of this incredible opportunity to do online schooling for the next 60 days in Bermuda (thank you, Cutler family!).

I did accomplish one project for the boat. With the help of Felix’s dad, Alec, I learned how to carve wood and fashioned a new nameplate out of a piece of Bermuda cedar from a 250-year-old building that once stood on Front Street in Hamilton, the country’s capital. The cedar has an incredible smell, and with a coat of varnish, the new nameplate (and the boat’s new name) absolutely glowed in the sunshine: Why Knot? Why not, indeed.

Final Stretch

When I first hauled Why Knot?, it was clear that the entire boat needed to be repainted from the bottom of the keel to the top of the cabin. It was also apparent that the keel needed some attention because you could see rust from the 2,200-pound cast-iron foil showing through the bottom paint. Before addressing what would become one of the most physically demanding projects, I talked to a sailor who had had the same issue with his keel. He recommended a heavy wire brush from Harbor Freight and a good angle grinder for the job. Done.

I ground all the way from the bottom of the keel to the keel/hull joint, and applied caulk where necessary. Once I got to the joint, I replaced the grinder with a sander and razor blade to scrape out and replace the old sealant. I then used two rounds of TotalFair epoxy fairing compound to fair the keel, leaving me with a smooth surface. I whirled up the sander and gave the keel a final sanding with 80-grit paper to roughen up the surface before an application of TotalProtect, a two-part epoxy barrier coat. I applied three coats of the paint, allowing it to become thumbprint tacky in between coats. Once the barrier coat had dried, I gave it a quick sand, and then proceeded to sand the entire bottom with 80-grit and repainted it with red Spartan bottom paint.

I was now in full painting mode.

Next was the waterline and hull, on which I used WetEdge topside paint. While I was sanding off the bottom paint, two faint lines in the hull appeared, revealing where a boot stripe should have been. I followed the lines and taped off the area, then painted a white boot stripe using the rolling and tipping method. This was my first time doing so, so working on a small area was good for practicing the technique. The one-part topside paint is wicked convenient because there is no mixing involved and it rolls on very evenly. The result was a glossy white boot stripe that is extremely durable.

With some rolling and tipping practice under my belt, it was time to paint the hull. To prep the area, I sanded off the old paint and taped off the area to avoid any possible drips. I used two ladders with a plank in between to reach the top while painting. With the help of my dad, we painted the hull with three coats of flag-blue WetEdge paint. I am so thrilled with how it came out. The combination of red bottom, white stripe and blue hull is a lovely, classic color scheme for a lovely, classic plastic.

Back on deck, there was still major work to be accomplished. From the moment I’d first stepped aboard, removing the faded-­green deck paint was on the top of my to-do list. Everything that came into contact with it was bombarded by green pigment. To solve this problem, I sanded off all of it and repainted it with two coats of light gray TotalTread nonskid deck paint. Watching the deck turn from green to gray really made the boat feel close to completion.

The final exterior painting job was painting the coachroof and cockpit. The old paint was quite dull and needed refreshing. I rolled on and tipped fresh, glossy, white WetEdge paint. After many weeks of sanding, painting and more sanding, I was thrilled to see the finished product ready for launch. I will never forget the first time I stood back and took a look at Why Knot? after finishing it all, seeing her glisten in the sun, begging to be splashed in the ocean.

With the painting complete, the nameplate installed, and new standing and running rigging and lifelines from R&W Rope in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in place, it was time to launch and christen her, which took place after trailering her to nearby Fall River.

There was absolutely no wind, but we had a strong outgoing tide in our favor, so my family towed me to Jamestown with our Boston Whaler. As we rounded the north end of the island, the wind began to fill in, so I set the sails and sailed her onto our mooring, where she spent the rest of the summer. From there, we took a few Narragansett Bay day trips to Mackerel Cove and an overnighter to Potters Cove on Prudence Island, along with many sails with friends and family. Why Knot? sails as good as she looks. I couldn’t be more excited for the adventures to come.

Stuart Wemple has matriculated to the University of Denver, where he is currently a freshman. Here at Cruising World, we think it’s safe to say he has a bright, bright future.

The post New Life for an Old Boat appeared first on Cruising World.

It’s never a great start to a very early, very windy Saturday morning when your phone vibrates and the identifying caller ID is “Newport Harbormaster.” But that’s how my weekend commenced early last October.

Gulp. “Hello?”

Tim Mills, who runs the waterfront show here in my Rhode Island hometown, always gets right to the point. Apparently, the deck-stepped spar on “my” Pearson 26 (more on this shortly) was no longer, um, erect. Something bad had transpired when it was gusting 50 overnight. The good news was that, with the shrouds intact, the rig was still attached to the boat, though largely underneath it. Coffee was immediately required. Followed by a quick dash to my yacht club, the Ida Lewis YC, and a launch ride out to the boat in Brenton Cove.

The launch driver, Griff, is an old mate. “Well, that doesn’t look good,” he said. Thanks, Griff. And the water’s still wet, right?

I’ll diverge here for a moment, for there is a backstory to all this. Well, actually, a front story. Because this is a tale all about moving ahead.

The vessel on which I gingerly stepped aboard, though obviously on my mooring, was no longer technically mine. (Sorry, Tim, I was meaning to mention it.) Nope, I’d decided to search for something new this winter, which meant I needed to divest myself of the Pearson. Now, I hate to admit this, but the poor little boat had not fared particularly well under my stewardship. I’d acquired it for basically nothing from a friend when I got my mooring, and had used it primarily as a swim and lunch platform. I decided to try to give it away, to someone more worthy of realizing its potential as a nice little Narragansett Bay weekender. I was hoping to pay it forward, as it were. Naturally, I took to Facebook.

This is where the story takes a happy turn because, through a friend of a friend, I made the acquaintance of one young Stuart Wemple—a talented, sailing-crazed student at Tabor Academy, where he’s on the sailing team, and who was looking for an interesting senior project. Stuart hopes to someday pursue a career as a yachting photographer. He has as a mentor one of the best—local shooter extraordinaire Onne van der Wal, who, perhaps not coincidentally, completely overhauled an old Pearson 36 a couple of years back, which he documented thoroughly in these pages. Stuart reckoned that fixing up the old 26-footer, and recording it all on his blog with photos and updates, would be a cool winter project. And at the end of it, he’d have himself a sweet little cruising boat.

Kismet, no?

Stuart and his dad, who was probably rightfully suspicious of the entire enterprise, had shown up and taken a look, deemed it a not-impossible task, and we’d sealed the deal with a handshake.

All that had transpired a week or two earlier than the unfortunate, untimely dismasting. Once I got on deck, it was quickly apparent that a failed headstay tang was the culprit (it had been one bouncy night), but other than that, luckily, no other damage had been incurred. Somehow, I had not burst Stuart’s bubble. But, man, it was clearly time for him to take the reins.

First, of course, I had to get the mast out of the drink. Which proved to be quite an interesting puzzle, insofar as I’d never given much thought to such a scenario. But an assistant harbormaster showed up on a big RIB (this would likely be a far different story otherwise), and with a labyrinth of lines strategically placed, we slowly and incrementally inched it skyward. At just the right moment, Griff appeared on the launch with a couple of club members he’d unsuspectingly hijacked, and we all grunted the thing on deck, and I lashed her down.

Whew.

Stuart took all this news a lot better than I would’ve, I reckon. Shortly thereafter, he rounded up the boat and almost immediately made some real progress, which he dutifully recorded in fine fashion on his blog.

And thus, the next ­chapter for an old classic plastic begins. Praise Neptune! And I believe there’s one thing we can all agree on: She’s in a much better place now.

Herb McCormick is CW’s executive editor.

The post Off Watch: Bye-Bye Boat appeared first on Cruising World.

It’s a dim, drizzly morning, and the truck that bore Kraken from Florida awaits us at the entrance to the ­marina. For all that I’ve officially lived in New Jersey most of my life, I’ve never berthed a boat here, and it seems strange.

And the shape-shifter on the trailer in front of me is even stranger. My husband, Tom, and I bought the Kaiser Gale Force 34 in 1990 to cruise the world while we let the recession of the late 1980s sort itself out. Here she was, back in our possession after 25 years away. Most of the deep-ocean sailing we’ve done has been more recent on Oddly Enough, a Peterson 44 we sailed from Florida through the Panama Canal to Borneo, halfway around the world, over 10 years. Her voyage also started on the back of a truck, going the other way to Florida for a major refit.

This time our refit started in Florida but needed to be continued close to where we are caring for my elderly mother and can drive down for an afternoon’s work.

Once Kraken is set up on jack stands, we climb onto her decks and sort out gear. When we bought her back, she was full of other people’s stuff; at least two sets of owners appeared to have left all their combined kitchen gear, books and clothing. Much of the clothing we removed this past summer in Florida, our hands sweating as we rifled through woolen sweaters and scarves left by Canadians. We also found odd bits of gear that went back to our original tenancy: a maintenance log updated through scattered years; jacklines I made up for our passage to the Caribbean; mosquito screens designed for the hatches.

But stranger than that is the way Kraken weds fluidly with Oddly Enough. The Peterson 44 is a center-cockpit boat, and the distance from the companionway stairs to the inside hatch on the anchor locker is not much longer than Kraken; the extra 10 feet are largely taken up by the aft cabin and deck. By instinct, down below I try to turn past the companionway steps to the low passage aft—which of course isn’t there. Kraken doesn’t have even a quarter berth; her interior ends with the fridge and battery bank. Yet their classic interiors are remarkably similar. Unlike, say, if Kraken were a catamaran or a more modern sloop.

I wouldn’t do this in a house, not in the same instinctual fashion, but a boat becomes an exoskeleton when you live and sail on her for years. She’s this shell we cross oceans on, trusting to keep us safe. Every inch of Oddly Enough was familiar, and my body knew how to shift itself to intimately navigate the space. You’d never get this on land, where your home doesn’t turn on its side so the curve of the hull becomes your support space, or threaten to go farther so the ceiling becomes wall. Sailor bodies and boats are bound by muscle memory. On Kraken’s deck, I have to relearn a topside configuration that lacks a side deck outside the cockpit and to climb out of the cockpit through a narrow gap.

But by day three of clearing out, Kraken begins to emerge from other people’s stuff. As the interior space—where we will (hopefully) one day live again—emerges, my brain pings with hints of familiarity. I still can’t for the life of me think how I ­organized myriad ropes without a ­dedicated locker as I had on Oddly Enough, let alone where we once kept towels and bed linens, which wouldn’t even be an issue on a completely unfamiliar boat because everything would need to be designated anew.

Trust at sea is amorphous, not ­something you can point your finger at and say, “That’s why I have it.” Trust in a boat grows over time and experience. The trust Tom and I had on Oddly Enough was rooted in a matured sense of her as a being, not just an object. I don’t mean we thought of her as some kind of demigod, but rather that she existed in her own right, with survival goals and even comfort requirements that we shared in.

As I teeter around on and in Kraken’s winter-cold hull, banging my toes into corners, I have to remind myself that I once owned her, that I sailed her. Yet gradually it’s like getting to know a cat you’ve been away from; you stroke her fur, feel her bones, remember how to elicit a purr. I open cabinets, run my fingers over sheets and halyards, ­familiarize myself with star cracks in her thick deck gelcoat that were there years ago. And I remember.

We didn’t cross oceans on Kraken, but what I remember most is her surprising agility and sailing capability despite having a full keel and traditional shape. This is what attracted us; Tom wouldn’t go off in a risky boat, and I didn’t want a double-ender like a Westsail 32, which Kraken superficially resembles, so we compromised. I grew up a small-boat racer, and sailing anything comes more easily than motoring. On two memorable occasions, Kraken’s ability to sail surprisingly closehauled allowed us to get to a safe anchorage—one on our first foray out of Chesapeake Bay, and later at the end of our time on her.

In Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, author Laurence Gonzales describes an elaborate system involving the hippocampus and other areas of the brain that creates “an analog of the world and your motion, position and direction of travel within it. It works in concert with other systems to locate you in your mind.” The hippocampus is associated with memory, and cells involved in such navigation are constantly being reprogrammed. Any time you visit a new place, your brain tries to make a new map. “You create not just routes but maps of areas of your environment, such as a room, your house, or your whole neighborhood.” These are known, Gonzales says, as mental maps, and their creation and re-creation affects a person’s ­ability to act at times when the organism has to respond to a changing situation under stresses like weather, fatigue, ­dehydration and anxiety.

Routine life on a sailboat is not subject to undue stress, but especially on the open sea, at any moment circumstances can switch and turn the environment hostile, requiring a sailor to act and react. Making a mental map is what I did on Oddly Enough. You can’t make a mental map of what would happen in a storm or a serious accident, but having a detailed one of what you would use to face it—your sailboat—is important. This, as much as anything, might be what we talk about when we say we trust a boat. If I’m below off watch, and a stay breaks, I’m more likely to be able to rush on deck safely without tripping on cockpit coamings and make rapid ­decisions about saving the rest of the rig if I don’t have to examine my surroundings to figure out what the hell is going on.

It’s almost a cliché that a sailor thinks their own boat is the most beautiful. Our first season in the Bahamas on Oddly Enough, we were dinghying past the entrance to a hidden anchorage and saw the unmistakable transom of a Gale Force 34. Noting her distinctive terra cotta canvas, we recognized Kraken through binoculars. No one answered our knock, so we motored in a slow circle, drinking her in. She was, and is, a beautiful boat.

Beauty isn’t everything, and we didn’t cross oceans on Kraken. Though we bought her with dreams of ­circumnavigation, she ended up feeling too small, and I wanted a wheel instead of a 9-foot tiller. After several years in the Caribbean, we joined the northward migration back to the States to make money and buy a bigger boat. Now we are downsizing, and giving Kraken a second chance. In an odd way, this move fits with Gonzales’ thesis about memory maps. We looked at other boats in the size range we wanted, but each of them would have taken time to get to know, as well as refit work. I don’t want to take that time now. I look forward to my first day on the water when I can start ­crafting a relationship and turn Kraken into an exoskeleton. Then she too can become a being, which happens to a boat only when she is in a relationship with humans.

Ann Hoffner and her husband, photographer Tom Bailey, are rebuilding a soggy rudder this winter and plan next spring to launch Kraken, their Kaiser Gale Force 34.

The post New Boat, Old Boat appeared first on Cruising World.

There comes a time in every sailor’s life when they are ready to purchase their first serious boat. A first boat should be able to teach you about boat ownership while you’re having fun, but won’t break the bank while doing it. Hopefully your first boat will hold its value until the time that you are ready to move up to a larger one.

When I was ready to find my first boat, I kept an eye out for something above 24 feet but under 28 feet. In my opinion, that length gives you a boat that is not a weekender, but allows you to go cruising for a week or longer. My search did not take long after doing some research that supported what I already suspected. The Cape Dory 27 was everything I wanted and a little more.

When Cape Dory Yachts was in business, they forged a great reputation for building sturdy vessels that are safe at sea, simple in layout and easy to handle thanks to the skill of legendary yacht designer Carl Alberg. The CD27 has a stellar reputation for being a no-nonsense, bluewater capable boat that was built without compromise. When I was trying to decide on a boat to purchase, many boats came up that fit most of my prerequisites with the exception of reputation. Cape Dory’s motto was “A Standard Of Value.” This holds true to this day.

You can find CD27s priced between $5,000 and $12,000, depending on what condition they are in. I had a budget of under $9,000, so I ignored the perfect specimens. A CD27 priced at $5,000 will probably need new sails or a re-power. A good starting place to find one listed for sale is capedory.org.

The CD27 has a basic 12-volt system with a house and a starting battery. A simple breaker board allows you to control the basics — cabin lights, running lights, anchor light and VHF. The engine that was most popular in the CD27 is the incredibly reliable, single-cylinder Yanmar YSM8. Clocking in at a whopping 8 horsepower, with an 8-gallon fuel tank, this gives you a steaming range of 100 miles at 1/3 gallon per hour. It’s plenty strong to do what you need to do.

The CD27 sacrifices some interior space to a large cockpit, but that cockpit is perfect for those daysails when you want to bring a few friends along. Accommodations include the large V-berth and two single port and starboard bunks amidships, with the portside doubling as a settee. I have found that even with space for four, overnighting with three people is more realistic because you can store everyone’s gear on the empty bunk. Due to the lack of a quarter berth, there is a ton of storage space under the cockpit for swim ladders, snorkeling gear, fenders, a grill, sails and dock lines.

Where the CD27 really shines is where it counts — under sail. It is such a simple boat that you might feel like you are sailing a very heavy dinghy at times. With incredible handling for a full-keel boat and very surprising speeds off the wind, especially in heavier air, the CD27 is sure to please the purist sailor. These boats came stock with Barlow size 16 non-tailing winches, so if you plan on singlehanding, I would recommend the addition of a pair of self-tailing winches and a roller furler for the genoa. When I bring friends sailing, they usually comment on how fast she is and also how nimble she behaves when we weave around moorings for the mandatory “harbor tour” after the more relaxing bay sail. She balances perfectly upwind with very little weather helm if you reef at the right time. Off the wind, the CD27 scoots right along, and is able to pass boats much larger and heavier. To say a CD27 is fun to sail is an understatement.

A native of Newport, Rhode Island, Eben Horton has now found his perfect second boat, Kaya, a Columbia 30.

Specifications

The post Classic Plastic: Cape Dory 27 appeared first on Cruising World.

From the first time that I ever laid eyes on the Peterson 34 on the Honolulu Craigslist, I liked what I saw. She had sexy lines, a huge double-spreader rig, a tiller and a spacious, functional interior. Very clearly, the late-1970s racer/cruiser deserved a closer look. A quick trip over to SailboatData.com outlined some compelling basic details, namely the fact that the boat had a 50 percent ballast ratio and an underbody that belied her stellar upwind performance and all-around seaworthiness. A few more online searches revealed that the Peterson 34 was born from an impressive and storied pedigree. Essentially a production racer/cruiser version of a very successful mid-’70s racing yacht named Ganbare, she was one of designer Doug Peterson’s breakthrough designs; a model that would stand the test of time and help cement his reputation as one of the best yacht designers of all time.

Honolulu, and Hawaii in general, has a pretty hit-or-miss sailboat market. Situated a long and generally easy passage downwind of California, Hawaiian harbors tend to collect a lot of the West Coast’s discards, for better or worse. With a steady supply of new boats showing up and a relatively stagnant level of demand, good boats can oftentimes be had for cheap. Quiver (then named Seabiscuit) had sailed in from California via Tahiti 15 years earlier. Lovingly owned by a couple from Kaneohe, she had been on the market for a couple months when I came knocking. After offering the owners ten grand and the promise that the boat would get well used, I was genuinely stoked on the proposition of smashing around Hawaii on a solid, powerful racer/cruiser that I could afford to purchase.

Less than two years prior, I had been out there doing it on a small boat, cruising across the Pacific on my engineless Cal 2-27 Mongo. Like Quiver, I had also purchased that boat somewhat impulsively on Craigslist, though in Tacoma, Washington. I bought Mongo for $4,000 in September of 2012 and eventually sold her in Opua, New Zealand about 2 1/2 years later. Each time that I looked at my new boat, Quiver, my heart stirred. I didn’t know what, I didn’t know why, and I didn’t even yet know where, but I firmly held onto one undeniable truth: We would be going places.

Living in the surf mecca that is Hawaii and having a very capable cruiser, the boat represented to me a vessel that could be filled with surfboards and taken on amazing surf-focused adventures. When one talks about “living the dream,” that’s mine. Grab a couple mates, load the boat with boards and sail somewhere incredible. Rock up, drop the hook and paddle out into perfect surf. Rinse, rest, repeat. By the time that I had the boat berthed in Haleiwa during the peak of the winter season on Oahu’s famed North Shore, Quiver was born. Not only was the boat filled with an extensive “quiver” of surfboards and stand-up paddle boards, but the name represented so much more. She was my shelter and my sanctuary, she was my hobby, my cruising boat, my occasional racing yacht, and a loyal friend. Through some of my darkest hours of love and loss, the boat was everything to me; she truly represented the whole quiver, hence the name.

With stiff trade winds pumping around 300 days per year and high, volcanic peaks that tend to funnel both the breeze and the seas, sailing across the channels in Hawaii is difficult for most boats, and downright treacherous for some. One of the criteria that I looked for when deciding on a new boat was that I wanted one that excelled upwind and could make progress into gale-force headwinds. With her deep, lead fin keel and solid ballast ratio, Quiver absolutely crushes uphill and has lived up to the Peterson 34’s reputation as an upwind “freight train.” Many of my friends sail tubby double enders and their predicament was oftentimes the same: Since they couldn’t sail good upwind angles, they instead waited for lighter air or an atypical wind direction so that they could motor, reach or run across the channel. With a reef or two in the main and the no. 4 jib, Quiver could seemingly go anywhere in the islands at almost any time. And has. Frequently.

Right off the bat, however, I had a major scare with the boat when a rigging component on the headstay failed as a result of living inside a roller furling drum that was not draining water properly and was instead promoting corrosion. Extremely lucky to not lose the rig, I measured all of the shrouds and ordered all-new standing rigging from my buddy Logan at Rigworks in San Diego. Those guys have helped me remotely rig a few boats now, and I was stoked to get her up and going again in short order. Along with the rigging, I added two solar panels, an autopilot, LED lighting, an inverter and some other basics to bring Quiver up to a good, livable, basic cruising standard.

As far as I was concerned, it was the roller furler that had nearly brought the rig down. I am generally not a fan of roller furling on boats this size (for far more reasons than I have room to explain here) and wanted a hank-on boat from day one. When more funds became available, I stripped off the furler in favor of a bare headstay and then called up some of my favorite sailmakers to help me trick out my sail inventory. First, I enlisted the Ullman Sails loft in Honolulu to convert the two good jibs that came with the boat into hank-on sails. This effectively gave me a good light-air genoa and a fairly tired but serviceable 110 percent headsail (not an overlapping sail but one that filled out the foretriangle nicely). With two good headsails, I then called up my pals at Ullman Sails in Newport Beach and Quantum Sails in Point Richmond, California, and purchased a new, small “blade” jib (about 90 percent) and a new storm jib. Counting that sail, I then had what I refer to as jib no. 1, 3 and 4: the full quiver of jibs.

A lot of good jibs and a good mainsail are wonderful to have, but when the breeze goes aft, or in light air, I like to put up a spinnaker. Quiver came with a good (if slightly undersize), thick asymmetrical cruising kite that I am a big fan of. Lashing the whisker pole down to the toe rail at the bow using small-diameter Spectra, I jury-rigged a pretty effective little cruising bowsprit that worked perfectly. Based on the success of the prototype, I scored an old boom section off a small boat and made a more permanent cruising bowsprit. Completing our sail inventory up forward, my boys at the Ullman loft in Newport Beach again came through in a big way, this time with a nice used J/105 racing spinnaker that really maxes the boat out on downwind sail area and should be our secret weapon when cruising in light winds.

With my inventory of headsails sorted, I had to deal with the mainsail, which had been a problem since day one. The main that came with the boat — despite the fact that it’s in perfectly usable shape — was a sail that I never fell in love with. It’s a bit blown out and ugly, and I wanted a third reef, among other upgrades. Once again spreading the love around to various sailmakers, I contacted my pals up at Ballard Sails in Seattle and ordered a new, super beefy, triple-reefed mainsail. With reef lines that are led to the cockpit and a Tides Marine Strong Track mainsail track that makes getting the main up and down exponentially easier, changing gears on Quiver is now a very manageable task, even for just one person and off the breeze. A nice mainsail, a versatile hank-on headsail inventory, a good mainsail luff system, and two easy-to-use A-kites have completely transformed the boat.

At some stage during this whole process, I realized Quiver would be capable of far more than trips through the Hawaiian islands and even across the Pacific. And I began to plan for a voyage around the world.

Any bluewater cruiser, delivery captain or shorthanded sailor knows the importance of good self-steering. Early on, when I was first intending to sail to Tahiti and back, I lined up a cheap, used Navik windvane. Once I began preparing for a circumnavigation, I decided I really wanted a brand-new Monitor windvane. I called up the good people at Scanmar International, and they took great care of me and helped me get a new Monitor, which I have named “Tanguy” in honor of Vendée Globe sailor Tanguy de Lamotte, who now lives in the Bay Area. For my electric autopilot, I hooked up with renowned San Francisco-based solo sailor Brian Boschma and scored one of his Pelagic brand of autopilots, which has been named “Loick” in honor of the legendary French sailor Loick Peyron.

With three solar panels and a wind generator on a boat that sails well and has minimal power requirements, the goal is to access remote surf sustainably while using an absolute minimum of fossil fuels. With a westabout route that should be mostly reaching and off the breeze, including a lot of trade wind sailing, I hope to make most passages with no motoring whatsoever, just like in the days of little, engineless Mongo. Unlike Mongo, however, Quiver is a bit more grown up in her systems and energy requirements. First and foremost, there is a very high-efficiency Engel DC refrigerator that is always on. As well, I have just installed a Katadyn PowerSurvivor 40E watermaker. Like the fridge, she’s on the smaller side of units on the market, but ideally suited for the almost fully renewable-powered 34-foot sailboat.

I set off last January bound for the Marshall Islands, which took 17 days. Heading to the Marshalls was the quickest, most direct route around the world from Hawaii. From the Marshalls, it will be on to Micronesia, and Guam before flying back to the West Coast for some work to restock the cruising kitty. During this first season of cruising — and most of my journey — Quiver should be in position to score world-class surf at a variety of remote locations that are very much off the beaten path.

In addition to surfing, I hope to use the extensive quiver of media kit on board, as well as my new degree in multimedia to create compelling video content to help fund the journey. In the end, I hope to complete a three-year surf-focused westabout circumnavigation via Cape Horn, some of it solo, and some with friends and crew.

To me, both offshore sailing and traveling have always produced an indescribable feeling where I feel as if I’m living and operating on a higher plane of consciousness. Combining the two and going cruising just makes too much sense for me not to. Voyaging creates the days that are etched deeply into my memory in this world of 15-minute news cycles and information overload. Unplugging from what we call reality and chasing that higher level of living is what constantly draws me back. My journey through life is (mostly) the culmination of conscious decision making and the resultant experiences. Every crossroads is followed by a choice, and at this current juncture, I have chosen to go sailing. Again. Aloha.

At press time, Ronnie Simpson had departed the Marshall Islands bound for Micronesia and Guam. For more on his travels and to check out his underway blogs and videos, visit his website.

Surf’s Up

Quiver has been optimized for offshore work and is ready for my planned three-year westabout circumnavigation via Cape Horn, visiting distant surf locations along the way.

The post Classic Plastic Refit for Offshore Voyaging appeared first on Cruising World.

I needed a place to live. I’d been in a cabin on a rural peninsula in Maine for 6 years, but it was time to go. The cabin was owned by an ­octogenarian who, years earlier, had been the mistress of a wealthy sailor. She and her lover had sailed around the world together, and while anchored one evening in the late 1970s, they noticed a piece of property with a battered “For Sale” sign on a tree.

They bought the property. It was a 15-acre hillside overlooking the harbor to the west, open ocean to the south and Acadia National Park in the distance. They retired from full-time cruising, and they lived aboard while building the ­cabin. They spent years together there, hosting parties and welcoming what cruisers found their way into the isolated harbor.

The sailor eventually died of cancer, and the mistress stayed on at the cabin until she grew too old to live there. She bought a town house, and the cabin sat empty until I moved in, eight years later. I stayed as caretaker and resident author; she was a lover of books, and we became good friends, and we’d drink wine and eat crackers, talk about books and boats and life aboard.

Slowly, I was deciding that when I moved out of the cabin, I was going to move onto a boat.

She died six years later, and her son quickly sold the place. True to my decision, if a bit late, I began looking at boats. I didn’t have much time to find one, and although I’d done a fair amount of boat-repair work and had worked aboard a lobster boat, I knew next to nothing about sailing.

My price range was around the ten-grand mark. Finally, I found a Tartan 34c. She was in the water in Nahant, Massachusetts, across the bay from Boston, and the seller had recently dropped the price to $10,900. I drove down and looked at her.

When I boarded Jade for the first time, she was in rough shape, but not as bad as I’d expected. She was on the far side of the mooring field and was rocking in a ­relatively heavy swell. My 70-year-old mother had come along with me, and she was quickly verging on seasickness, so I didn’t look the boat over as closely as the others I’d looked at, and that’s probably why I bought her.

Two weeks later, I returned to the yacht club in Nahant in an antique Subaru with a derelict skiff strapped to the roof. I had with me a clam digger from Down East Maine called Pete and my 15-year-old ­border collie, Henry. I brought the clam digger because he knew how to sail — though he’d sworn off every boat larger than a canoe years ago — and I brought the dog because he kept having near-death episodes every time I left his sight for more than a few hours.

It was hot and muggy. The clammer hadn’t left his corner of Maine for years, and he wasn’t happy about driving on an interstate, or about me getting us lost in Lynn, or about having to lurk around the yacht club with an old dog on a leash.

The test sail went smooth enough, but the clammer was anxious and hungry and not sure about the boat or the boat’s owner. Once back in the harbor, I let the owner bring her in. We approached the float, and he leaned down to shift into reverse, but there was nothing: no forward, no reverse, only the engine chugging away as the boat slid through the water, seeming to actually gain momentum. The float was off the port side, but dead ahead loomed the big concrete wharf, just high enough for the hull to wedge beneath.

The clammer stood on the foredeck with a line. The boat zipped helplessly onward. I looked at the owner, who appeared shocked but somehow nonchalant. He could either hit the float, the wharf or the rocks to starboard. I saw the clammer hesitating, debating on whether or not to make the jump, which was too far to attempt — I envisioned his feet missing the dock, his torso catching at the ribs. I was about to yell “No!” when he leapt, line in hand, and made the dock with a single foot, toppled in a heap but managed a few fast wraps around the cleat.

I was wet with sweat, not sure about any of it. The owner ducked down below and got the nut and bolt back onto the shift linkage and came up smiling. I followed him to his house, signed the biggest check I’d ever signed, and it wasn’t until well after dark that we were aboard my new boat, settling in for a night on a mooring, the lights of Boston glowing across the water.

I didn’t know this, but the clammer hadn’t sailed a monohull since he was a kid sailing dinghies 50 years earlier, nor had he sailed anything since the invention of GPS. We left Nahant at daylight on a broad reach with 15-knot winds. We were sailing what was not only my single largest investment, but what would also be my home — and it was slowly sinking in that I had no idea what I was doing.

Henry, the dog, was old and senile enough to be oblivious, and he was the first to fall into a routine, which basically consisted of eating. Although he’d spent plenty of time in a canoe, he’d never been to sea before; he’d led a cattle dog’s life in Montana. We spoiled him with sandwiches and potato chips, and other than the occasional tip-over, he quickly turned into a boat dog.

Somewhere off Cape Anne, the clammer began trusting the Tartan — and the GPS — and he relaxed, a bigger grin smeared across his face than I’d ever seen on him. We passed a couple of ocean sunfish, a few minke whales, and when the wind dropped out, we didn’t start the engine, just kicked back in the sunshine and enjoyed the roll of the seas.

We had just enough wind to sail through the first night, staying 25 miles off Portsmouth, then Portland. We passed a small city of boat lights, a fleet of either tuna fishermen on anchor or squid jiggers fishing through the night, then an eerily large freighter heading for Portland. The following afternoon, we cleared Monhegan and steered for Matinicus’s harbor.

That’s when I found out that the clammer, while comfortable at sea, wasn’t so suave in anchorages. Apparently, his sailing experience consisted of at-sea work; the other members of the crew took over when they neared shore — and people — and those kinds of problems.

We dropped sails and motored into the small, tight anchorage. I’d never motored — or anchored — any boat over 20-feet long. The clammer, cursing technology, went forward to deal with the windlass while I piloted us through the tight mooring field.

When he was ready with the windlass, I asked where we should set the anchor, and he froze. After another loop, I asked if we should pull alongside the other sailboat in the harbor, maybe ask for advice. He glared at me and said, “No way.” We had a moment of hating each other, then I found the biggest open spot I could, yelled to drop the anchor and waited as tons of chain evacuated the boat. We were just thinking we’d actually pulled it off when the guy on the neighboring sailboat yelled and waved his arms and told us there was no anchoring allowed — the moorings were on cables, and the anchor would hook the cable. We had to rent a mooring, he said, as if everyone knew such things.

The following night, we rounded the Petit Manan lighthouse and made it home in the wee hours. It was thick fog, moonless; visibility was something less than five feet. The clammer braced himself on the foredeck with a flashlight while I tried to remember the lay of the mooring field. Somewhere on the edge of the moorings, we both knew, was a derelict quahog car — a large wooden float once used to purge quahogs before market — that would be extremely difficult to see.

Fog dripped from our faces, swirled in the flashlight beam. We made headway speed only. Then suddenly, eerily, we heard a plop. Then another. The clammer hollered something I couldn’t make out. Then more plops and wings and another yell, and through the flashlight and fog came first a band of cormorants abandoning ship, then the quahog car, a few short feet ahead.

I threw the tiller handle over as far as it would go, and the boat swung hard to port. The clammer braced himself on the pulpit. The vision of the cormorants, like the Batman symbol in the sky, raced through my mind as the half-­sunken wooden structure slid by not an arm’s length from my new boat.

But our mooring was a few boat lengths from there, and I knew where I was.

I was afloat in the first home I’d ever owned, tucked in the harbor below the cabin that the sailor and his mistress had built when they’d long ago sailed into the little harbor. Their adventures aboard had led them to that cabin, and that cabin had led me to adventures aboard.

Former Montana guide Jon Keller is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Of Sea and Cloud. He divides his time between his sailboat and his Down East cabin.

The post My First Cruising Boat appeared first on Cruising World.

Robert Perry was a high-school sophomore taking mechanical drawing when he spotted a sailboat on the cover of Popular Boating magazine. It was a Chesapeake 32, designed by Philip Rhodes. “I had never seen anything quite so beautiful designed by man,” he would later write. “To my eye there was not an ugly line on that boat. This design is the specific design that made me determine to become a yacht designer. I wanted to design things that beautiful. Still trying.”

Perry, a celebrated yacht designer in his own right, still speaks with awe at the memory of Rhodes’ pinup. Like a model with all the right curves, the Chesapeake 32 reportedly has been used in ads to sell Top-Sider shoes, Rolls-Royces and Hawaii’s Crazy Shirts, and has even graced the cover of Vermont Life.

In fact, when you ask owners why they own one, the word beauty is usually in their first sentence. They often mention how proud they are rowing away from a mooring. “Beauty of proportion,” is Perry’s technical explanation. Only later do owners admit to limitations, and high among them is maintaining that beauty.

Rhodes designed the boat for George Walton, a Maryland yacht broker, and 95 boats were produced between 1960 and 1965 by two Danish yards, Danboats and Sanderson. The boat combined the classic Rhodes sheer lines — a spoon bow, a traditional low cabin house, a dip amidships rising gently to long overhanging stern — in a fiberglass production boat that retained the old-time look of a wood yacht.

The boat was laid up with heavy, thick fiberglass, encasing a short lead keel and, in the practice of the time, embedding the chainplates. With an 8-foot-9-inch beam, a 4-foot-9-inch draft and 3,750 pounds of ballast, the Chesapeake 32 displaced 11,500 pounds.

RELATED: Another Look at the Rhodes Reliant

It sold under a number of names, including the Rhodes 31, the Danboat 33, the ISL 33 and the Cabrillo 32. The price in the 1960s was a substantial $14,900 ($108,000 in today’s money), but that included dishes and glassware for six!

While Newport, Rhode Island, is chockablock with beautiful boats, a 1961 Chesapeake 32 stood out when Morgan Everson went looking for a coastal cruiser. “I bought it from a guy who had spent 20 years refitting it to a T. I fell in love with the lines, and the owner wanted to see it go to someone who would take care of it. I completely understand now, and I wouldn’t let this boat go to anyone who wasn’t going to keep her in Bristol condition,” she said.

“The brightwork is rewarding, but there is a lot of it,” said Everson’s husband, Jay. “If you don’t keep it up every spring, it doesn’t look good.” The couple, who work in the Newport marine industry, charter Hypatia, their Chesapeake 32, for wedding photo shoots.

Sailing, the 32 balances well but doesn’t like to go close upwind in a short chop. “If you crack off 10 to 15 degrees on a reach, she’ll do it happily,” Jay said. It can be wet, with some weather helm on some points of sail, and slow in light air, according to owners’ comments on SailNet.

Most of the original boats have been modified and upgraded with added hatches, stoves, refrigerators, electronics, wheels instead of tillers and small diesel engines in place of the original gasoline engines.

The Eversons have pretty much left the interior as it was when they bought it. Inside, “you can tell it was designed to look good first, and the creature comforts were secondary,” Morgan said. Storage is limited, except in the cockpit lockers, and access to the engine is a challenge.

“We have to be efficient with our stuff,” she said. “In reality, it is perfect for weekending. It’s simple, but perfect for two people and two dogs, which is what we are.”

In recent years, boats have been advertised from $8,500 for an engineless project to as high as the $40,000s. As of this writing, yachtworld.com lists a couple of them for sale around $30,000.

Jim Carrier is a CW ­contributing editor.

The post Classic Plastic: Chesapeake 32 appeared first on Cruising World.