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| February 2015 with me having just purchased the Austral 20 |
In no small part have I embarked on this blog for purely selfish reasons. In stripping my boat to its bones, I'm finding stuff that has laid buried and forgotten since the last of these boats were shipped out of the Adelaide boat yard where they were made. I need to record it before I forget it too, and I don't want to re-strip it to find out the stuff that I might need later - dimensions, weights, what lies beneath the GRP, the boat's basic construction, what hides in various cavities, where to get bits and pieces and so on. Depending on how rigorous I'll be in recording what I find, this blog could develop into the nearest thing to a kind of Haynes Car Manual. As I'm beginning to understand, sailing a boat is a small part of maintaining a boat, they say, and in the absence of any manuals, even any usable drawings, I'm having to make it up as I go along, hence the title of the blog.
But first, I'll back-track for some history and context. If I lose you in the details that follow, the main point I'd like to make is that I am not a boat-builder, nor an accomplished sailor - I just happen to like sailing, and I have a boat with needs. I am trying to meet them with one goal in mind - to get it back on the water. To this end, my solutions to the various problems with my boat are, frankly, fairly agricultural and cheapskate. I don't expect to win any maritime beauty pageants or races - I just want to tootle off into Moreton Bay and, perhaps, beyond, with some confidence that A) I'll get to where I want to go and B) I'll get back again. Maybe I'll be lucky enough to see a humpback whale, like the one I sailed past in September 2016 whilst off Cleveland Point. Maybe one day I'll be able to drop anchor and make a cup of tea on board. It's the small pleasures I'm after, not the big prizes.
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| September 2016 Humpback whale in Moreton Bay off Cleveland Point to the left of the other boat in the photo, and under the string/telltale on my boat |
My sailing resume is patchy, to say the least. My father was a Merchant Mariner and rose to the rank of Captain. At school, I opted out of the normal sports program and did a CSE (Certificate of Secondary Education) in Nautical Studies, which involved some theory and some messing about in boats in Christchurch Harbour on the south coast of England. Only now am I beginning to remember some of the stuff I learnt back then, in the dark ages before the internet. In 2007, my family jointly hired a catamaran bareboat for a holiday in the Whitsundays, which was immensely enjoyable. One of the most noteworthy aspects of this holiday was the stark contrast between our ability to park over an ocean full of fish and our utter inability to catch a single one of them.
During a previous period of unemployment, I got roped in to volunteering with Sails At Bayside via Peter (the main driving force) who had connections with the Anglican Church we attended. I think Peter rated my sailing skills higher than I, but they returned to me as a kind of muscle-memory whilst I messed about in the Nacra 4.5 sports boats with unsuspecting members of the public and other victims. I can proudly say that I've only dropped four participants into the wet stuff and capsized it once, but no one actually died, and I reckon that's not bad.
Then, in a period of weakness, my wife agreed to let me buy a boat. I did what everybody does, and which nobody should do, and researched the internet for the right kind of boat to buy. At the time, I was working on contract, so the internet-searching was the best I could do. Since then, I have come to understand that boats are visceral things that defy abstraction into facts and figures. In other words, they are just the kinds of things that the internet cannot cope with, which is why internet-searching will yield minimal returns to someone, like me, who decides to buy one having not owned one before. But, what was I to know?
I am a civil engineer by profession, and tend to see the world in terms of problems and solutions. In searching for a boat, I went through the constraints and opportunities. The main opportunity was that my wife was agreeable and this, I felt, should not be missed before circumstances changed. I was also in good health (and still am), and didn't want to put off my nautical ambitions until later age, when a buggered knee or back could scupper them. We also had a steady income with a small amount of disposable money. The main constraint was my apprehension and ignorance - I knew that buying a boat was much easier than keeping one, but had no clue about what the upkeep would cost, or even how often I would sail it. My Dad used to refer to "Gin Palaces" - boats that would spend all but three days' a year on their moorings, whose main occupation was providing a venue for cocktail parties and social climbing, and I neither had the cash or the inclination for one of these.
So, the scope of choice narrowed down to a trailer-sailer. I reasoned that, because it lived above sea level for most of its time, maintenance would be much simpler (i.e. cheaper). If my circumstances dictated, I could leave it for several months at a time knowing that it wasn't being slowly eaten by that highly corrosive compound commonly known as seawater, or being invaded by armies of its microscopic inhabitants. However, our car (a 10 year old Subaru Forester) wasn't up to towing much - it had a 1.4 tonne towing capacity, which seems a lot, but limited the choice of boat to something unambitiously small. Further, our driveway couldn't accommodate the two family cars, let alone the addition of a boat on a trailer.
In February 2015, A solution presented itself with the advertisement of the sale of an Austral 20 including the parking spot on the hard-stand at Wynnum. My rigorous research (I'd asked a couple of blokes at the Wynnum Manly Yacht Club) indicated that getting a parking spot could take up to 18 months, by which time my wife's affability could have turned, my job could have evaporated and my patience could have worn thin, so we bought it for $9000 and took over the rental of the parking spot. This also gave me mast-up storage next to a launching ramp (which, I had been informed by the internet, was a good thing) and saved me having to haul the thing on-road. To this day, I don't know what the combined weight of the boat and trailer are, but it probably exceeds the 1.4 tonne capacity of my car. The Austral 20 seemed a good choice in having good sailing characteristics (according to the all-knowing internet), which helped if just beat a Sunmaid 20 in a similar situation and at an almost identical price. The Sunmaid, however, had a galley, and my Austral 20 did not, which is something I had hoped to fix in the future (hence my small ambition of making a cup of tea on board). The galley-project is now further down the list of to-dos than it was back then.
The previous owner took us out for a short sail on a day with almost no wind, the main conclusion of which was that the boat did not sink, and most of the bits and pieces seemed to work as intended. He also told me lots of useful stuff about launching and retrieving the boat, which I promptly forgot. In between exchanging deposits and settling up, the keel cable snapped. It was an off-the-shelf steel wire cable, which probably came with the no-name Chinese winch that hauled the swing keel up to its horizontal position. I think the combination of winding it around small-diameter sheaves in the keel-box (which we will revisit shortly) and the inimical-toward-anything-even-vaguely-ferrous nature of the marine environment killed it. The previous owner promptly replaced the wire cable with a Dyneema rope, which is much more sensible, if not more expensive. Having recently taken the keelbox, sheaves and winch rope apart, I'm still not sure how he did it, but the solution worked well until the keel jammed, which wasn't the fault of the rope.
So, like a new Dad with a small child he doesn't quite know what to do with, I became the proud owner of the boat; my happiness untarnished by experience. It's name "Yakumin", was yet another one of its many mysteries that has remained to this day. I don't know what it means, nor even how to pronounce it. The least plausible, but most attractive explanation is that its a reference to a Hebrew or Yiddish song. The most plausible explanation is that its an Australian corruption of "You coming?", which prompts me, every time I think of it, to change it with a new coat of paint. The new-paint-project is even further down the list of to-dos than the galley, so I'll probably have to live with it for the time-being.
I don't regret my purchase of the boat; in fact I'm happy with it and there are some things about it that are truly elegant and pleasurable. However, next time, we'll find out why the word "boat" is rightly regarded as an acronym for "bung on another thousand".
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