Episode 43: Small things that make big differences

Today was my second trip as a solo sailor. I hasten to add that I hope others will join me, but I would rather reduce the number of witnesses to the obligatory rookie mistakes in my early trips. 

Last Sunday, I poked my nose out of Manly Harbour, saw the dark rain band approaching and decided to head back rather than trying to find clear skies on the other side. This proved to be a wise move as the clear skies did not arrive until about Tuesday. Today I got the sails up, with a single reef in the main, and ventured as far as Green Island. The wind then veered south and decided to get boisterous. Thanking my single reef, I furled the jib, turned tail and scurried back to Manly harbour at a fair clip.

Heading out today, I found the boat easy to sail. The Cygnet 20 has less gear than my other boats; no winches, no travelers, not even a backstay. To tack, you simply push the tiller away, let go of the job on one side and bring it in on the other, whilst simultaneously regaining control of the tiller. The fewer adjustments might leave you behind a more tune-able boat but, as the boat trotted along at about 6 knots today, it did not seem to miss all the fandangles of my previous boats.

Last Sunday, I found some of those little things that made a big difference. I accidentally lodged the safety circlip under the mast as I stepped it. The mast of the Cygnet 20 is mounted in a tabernacle on the cabin roof with a hinge about eight inches above the roof. This arrangement stops the mast squashing the gaff and boom against the cabin roof when it is lowered, and it reduces the mechanical effort to lift the mast. When raised, there is a half-inch safety pin that goes through holes in the base of the tabernacle and a corresponding hole in the mast. Normally, it is a snug fit. This time, it jammed. I mistakenly thought it was because it was a new boat, so I persuaded the safety pin through the holes by tapping it with a pair of pliers (not having a hammer handy). When it came to putting the safety circlip into the safety pin, I realized my mistake – the circlip was jammed under the mast, pushing it upwards so that the safety pin obstinately resisted my attempts to insert it. I had to borrow a proper hammer and drift to get the safety pin out again so that I could re-lower the mast, retrieve the circlip, re-step the mast, re-insert the safety pin (it went in much more easily, this time), and fit the circlip. The photo below shows the tabernacle with the safety pin inserted from the left and it is almost hidden. If you squint hard enough, you might just be able to make out the tiny circlip on the bottom right of the tabernacle, where it should be. Such a small thing took about half an hour to put right.

Bungs. Always check that you have screwed them in before launching. I launched today before I had screwed them in. I remembered just as I was maneuvering the boat off the trailer. It only cost me about 10 minutes to get the boat back on the trailer so I could pull it up the ramp, screw the bungs in and relaunch. 

A four-step step ladder saves heaps of energy and time. With a trailer sailer, the time and energy spent launching and retrieving can be measured by the number of times you climb on and off the boat on its trailer. Not having the climbing agility of an African leopard or a gibbon, I have found the ladder invaluable. It also enables me to reach the top of the mast, when it is lowered, to fit the covers.

Incidentally, I received a couple of compliments on having the best covers in the fleet. I ordered them with the boat, and Tim the Trimmer did a truly excellent job. I must have been in my teens when I learned the value of good covers. I was playing guitar in various youth groups and bands and always coveted the better instruments. One of my guitars was a cheap Spanish, and as it slid off my shoulders, onto the back wheel of my push-bike and onto the road with a sickening twanging noise, I came to the realization that even the nicer guitars get pounded when they don’t have good covers or cases. Ever since, I have learned to reduce the budget for the instrument so that I could afford a hard case, and so preserve the paintwork and varnish. The boat was a huge step up in budget from my early guitars, but the principle of good covers remained. Hopefully, they will protect the boat from the Queensland sun. I had wondered if the additional $5000 or so was worth it, but I don’t doubt it now. They fit like a glove, and they are much, much easier and quicker to fit than the rubbishy tarps on my previous boats. Less time and energy wrangling covers means more time and energy on the water. Maybe we can count the covers as a not-a-small thing, but they make a big difference.

In future, I hope to take my wife out. And, maybe, our new dog, Bea, who is a Golden Retriever, now 20 weeks old and teething. My favorite photo of her is shown below. She will not go out on the water until she improves her body coordination.

Sandpiper's tablernacle, seen from the front. The tiny circlip is at the base of the mast on the right

Single reef outbound from Manly

Sandpiper's fabulous covers

Bea learning where the ground is

Episode 42 Naming and Launching Sandpiper, my new Cygnet 20

 It has been a long wait, about 18 months since I paid my deposit to Blue Water Cruising Yachts. The build started in September, due for completion before Christmas, but problems with getting the trailer certified pushed delivery back to January. In late January, I drove from Brisbane to Newcastle  and hauled the boat back. On the journey, some folks complimented me on such a handsome boat. How did it go, they asked. About 95 km/hr, I said as it sat on its trailer at a roadside stop.

Unrelated to the boat, except as a means to haul it, I found something about my Ford Territory that I did not know before. It seems a certain tyre mart with Mart and T and Jane and Bob in its brand name, did not know it either. When replacing the tyres on an all-wheel-drive, make sure they are the same brand. Not just the same type, but exactly the same brand. I had arranged for said tyre mart to replace two of my tyres with the same tyres I already had. Something went wrong in the booking and when I turned up on the Saturday, they said they didn't have them. No problem, they said, we will just fit these more expensive tyres to the front and leave the 3-month-old good ones on the rear. When I drove off, there was a thudding that felt like I was hitting a speed hump every second or so. So, instead of leaving on the Sunday, I drove home and returned the car to the tyre mart on Monday morning. The tyre mart checked everything but could not find the problem. Satisfied that my wheels would not actually fall off on the 1700 km round trip, I ventured forth and found that I could avoid the thudding if I abstained from cruise control. I got back safely, with the boat, and asked Moreton Bay Ford to diagnose the problem. A big shout to Moreton Bay Ford for looking at the problem and diagnosing the power distribution was the problem - the different brand tyres were tracking just differently enough to trigger an attempted power distribution, hence the intermittent thudding. The tyre mart swapped out the "wrong" tyres and the thudding stopped.

My experience of registering the boat and trailer in Queensland is best described as a necessary evil. I don't envy the clerk as he tapped various numbers and codes into the computer, but it was a tedious 60-minute wait to get charged the registration fees of $513. And, this was after I had to pay a Queensland inspector $220 for a trailer safety certificate and HAVRAS because the NSW certification did not count. Obviously, what is safe on the roads in NSW is not safe in QLD. That, or the bureaucrats found another way to justify their jobs. With the registration, I could tow the boat from my home to the Wynnum Manly Yacht club, where its parking spot was waiting.

Launch day was fun, if I draw a discrete blank over my attempts to get the mast up in the morning. A few friends and family joined us at the Wynnum Manly Boat ramp as the Reverend Jim Stonier blessed the boat, and my wife named it. I named it Sandpiper, after the Mirror dinghy that I had build with my dad as a teenager. That boat finally fell to pieces, and I kept one of the gudgeons as a memento. This boat was of a far superior quality. After the formalities, I took some of the guests and their kids on a brief circuit in the marina. In launching and retrieving I made the obligatory rookie errors, but I am glad to report that no one actually died.

Naming the boat

First launch into Moreton Bay

Episode 41 Tallying up the costs

How much does it cost to own a boat?

The question is often asked by folks interested in buying a boat, but not having any experience of owning one. It is, of course, impossible to answer definitively, but it is possible to conjure up a working budget. This post is intended for the prospective boat-buyer as he or she ponders the possibility buying and maintaining a first boat.

My limited experience tells me that the more expensive unknowns are not what many prospective boat-owners think. The costs van vary widely, depending on whether the thing that is bought is really appropriate for the task that it is bought for. Also, it really helps if you know who to turn to to get what you need, be it someone who can do boat electrics, or someone who knows how to service marine diesel engines. The mounting costs of these two issues alone prompted me to part ways with Bolero, but a more experienced or connected owner might have successfully rescued the situation for fewer dollars (and I truly hope that was the case with Bolero’s new owner). 

The harsh reality is that boats do indeed reach the end of their serviceable lives and it is worth lodging the fact immovably in one’s field of view when presented with a seemingly irresistible deal on an old boat. End-of-life occurs in a kind of mythical parallel time-space continuum that has some vague connection to the one inhabited by our boats. Theoretically, it occurs when the work required greatly outweighs the value of the boat but it commonly gets shunted back into its parallel universe by as much sentiment as much as putting the old family dog to sleep. 

Many GRP boats are now 30 to 40 years old. Contrary to the promises of vendors and agents, they are not indestructible, and the problems begin to compound, especially when subjected to the kind of cack-handed maintenance that I lavished on my boat following, it seems, the tradition of most of its previous owners. Such abuse became apparent in the myriad of different size screws and screw-head-types that were holding the windows to the hull, as if one of the previous owners had a jar of every screw that had been left over from every DIY job imaginable and then used a random-number generator to select them for insertion into the holes in the window frame that, incidentally, were widening at different rates according to the level of contact between the dissimilar metals of the aluminium frames and steel screws. The rats’ nest of wiring, where some wires were simply twisted together and covered with self-adhesive insulation tape was, frankly, jaw-dropping. I was willing to sort through the 12-volt electrics, but it would have been another project on top of all the other projects that could have occupied all my weekends for the rest of my days on earth. I was grateful that the new owner took the boat off my hands knowing the scale of the work ahead of him.

The following table has a rough tally of dollar costs that I spent in owning Bolero. I trust it might be useful as a guide to how much it costs to own a 40-year-old 28-foot sailing boat. I am sure I missed some items, like the the anti-fouling and repair to the rudder. My sums worked out at a little under AUS$1000 per month, which sees a reasonable working estimate budget for someone considering a boat of a similar size and age. There is no such thing as a cheap boat.

Date	Cost	Description
Oct 2019	$20,000	Initial purchase
Oct 2019	$685	Surveyor's fee
Jan 2019	$1,940	Slipping
Oct 2019	$2,647	Marina fee
Oct 2019	$2,704	Batteries, propellor, depth sounder, slipping
Aug 2020	$365	Boat registration
Aug 2020	$80	VMR Marine Assist
Aug 2020	$513	Yacht club fee
Aug 2020	$605	Repair to boom bag, replace anchor chain and mainsail halyard
Aug 2020	$780	Insurance
Feb 2021	$704	Sundry parts for Bukh Diesel Engine
Aug 2021	$2,762	Marina fee
Aug 2021	$565	Yacht club fee
Oct 2021	$307	Upgrades for category rating for St Helena Cup
Nov 2021	$929	Sundry parts for Bukh Diesel Engine
Dec 2021	$3,410	Recondition Bukh Diesel Engine
Dec 2021	$689	Replacement engine exhaust elbow, thermostat, misc parts
Jan 2022	$597	Make a new engine bay floor
Aug 2022	$555	Yacht club fee
Aug 2022	$12,000	Gross sale price
Aug 2022	$4,400	Agent's commission, including GST
Aug 2022	$7,600	Net sale price
Total costs	$40,837
Net costs	$32,837
Number of months	35
Cost per month	$953