Buy, Outfit & Sail: A Book for the Frugal Sea Gypsy

I've recently read through Cap'n Fatty Goodlander's recent book: Buy, Outfit & Sail,  not just once, but twice.  If you've ever even remotely entertained the idea of living the cruising life, this book is as good a place to start as any I've found.  Cap'n Fatty dispels the notion that you have to have a lot of money to acquire and outfit a seaworthy boat and sail it around the world.  While many other sailing authors have put forth essentially the same idea, few have done it in such an entertaining way as Cap'n Fatty.

The first time through, I read this book because it was full of new ideas and information that I had not seen all in one place before, and some not anywhere.  For example, unlike most other "how to get started cruising" books, Cap'n Fatty doesn't just talk about what kinds of boats to consider, he explains at length how to find them.  And not only how to find a boat - but how to find one for pennies on the dollar - especially those boats he says have a "ticking time clock" due to the current owner's need to get rid of them now due to various reasons.  And after you find the deal of a lifetime on the right boat, the outfit and the sail portions of this book will put you on course to get your vessel shipshape and keep her that way as you chase the horizon.

I read this book a second time not only to pick up tidbits of advice I might have missed the first time around, but mainly for the sheer entertainment value.  Cap'n Fatty is a natural-born storyteller, and this book is packed with fascinating glimpses of the amazing life he's lived at sea in a variety of boats.  Some of these tales will have you cracking up with laughter and some are so far out there you'll find them hard to believe, but no matter how outrageous the stories, somehow you know that Cap'n Fatty probably actually lived them.

The book is available on Amazon in Paperback or for Kindle.  For more information on this and Cap'n Fatty's other books, visit his website at:  http://fattygoodlander.com/home

Cruising on $500 per Month?

I first ran across the 185-page "Cruising on $500 per Month" thread on the Cruising and Sailing Forums from a link in a post on Boat Bits, a blog that often features observations on the cost of cruising and the cost of cruising boats.

That this thread could generate that many pages and 2767 replies (and still counting) is a testament to the amount of interest there is in the concept of low-budget cruising in these tough economic times.  What many of the contributors to the thread have pointed out is that despite what the glossy sailing magazines would have you believe, there are lots of people out there cruising and even voyaging all over the world on simple, low-cost boats they have either built themselves or refit after buying cheap in a market that is saturated with neglected used boats.

Having made the transition over the years from sea kayaks to cruising size boats myself, both by the refit route and the home building route, I understand the appeal from the point of view of someone who would never consider boats of this type if I had to buy new at today's prices.

One of the biggest considerations that keeps resurfacing again and again in this ongoing discussion is the size boat you need to go long-term cruising.  Again, if you believe the popular yachting press, anything under about 40 feet is unsuitable.  But among those who are actually making the break from land and seeing the world on their boats, smaller boats are not nearly as uncommon as the magazines would have you believe.  Boats in the 25-30 foot range are cheaper to buy, cheaper to refit and equip, cheaper to haul-out and maintain, and cheaper to dock if find the need to do so.  Plenty of designs in this size range are seaworthy enough to go anywhere you might care to go.  You might have to give up some of the comforts, but what is better - being slightly more uncomfortable while out there living the dream - or working year after year to get the bigger boat paid for and equip it with every modern convenience while never getting away from the dock?

Whether you want to try and live as cheaply as some on this thread advocate is another matter, but it can be done even today with the right boat and the right attitude, and some knowledge of which places to spend your time in and which to avoid.  After buying and outfitting the boat itself, the biggest expenses for cruisers on any size boats are almost always associated with shoreside conveniences and services.  You certainly won't be cruising on $500 per month if you plan to tie up to the docks of a marina every night, or if you want to eat most of your meals out in restaurants.  Cruisers wanting to travel in that style will need a monthly budget in the thousands of dollars, rather than the hundreds.  But if you don't mind doing your own cooking, and you're happier anchoring out in a secluded cove and rowing the dinghy ashore to ferry supplies to the boat, you can avoid most of the expenses that make the cost cruising so prohibitive in most peoples perspective.

The key to low-budget cruising and the gist of the thousands of posts on this thread can be summed up in a few points:

• Choose the smallest boat that will accommodate you and your crew and safely take you to the destinations you plan to explore.  Researching the proven voyages of others who have gone before you or are out there cruising now will point you to the best designs to choose from.
• Keep the systems on the boat as simple as possible and make sure you have the tools and skills to do all of the maintenance and most if not all repairs yourself.  Carry spare parts you anticipate needing rather than having to pay expensive shipping and import duties to get them later.
• Carry a hard dinghy with oars rather than an inflatable with an outboard, as it is cheaper to buy, build or replace, less likely to get stolen and can be equipped with a simple sail rig if desired.   
• Plan on anchoring out 99 percent of the time, wherever you go.  Good ground tackle is essential for this and should be your top priority in equipment purchases.
• Shallow-draft boats open up many more anchoring possibilities than deep draft boats, making it much easier to avoid marina fees in popular cruising areas where there are few good, deepwater harbors.  Shallow draft also lets you explore remote regions that see few if any other cruisers.  Such places are often much less expensive to spend time in, as the locals are not used to making profits off of wealthy yachtsmen in their big boats.
• Plan on cooking and eating aboard 99 percent of the time, and if you do eat out, go where the locals go rather to that to expensive tourist traps.  
• Acquire useful skills that you can use along the way anywhere you go.  Welding, sailmaking, diesel repair and similar skills can allow you to cruise indefinitely without having to wait until you have enough money in the bank to live off the interest.  Go now while you still have your health and enthusiasm for adventure.  

These are the main points brought out in this thread, though I'm sure I missed a few.  Many of the posts became painfully repetitive, with the same ideas rehashed over and over.  The discussion also led to quite a few arguments about choices of boats: especially the same tired old monohull vs. multihull debate.  But quite a few of those participating in the conversation extolled the virtues of Wharram catamarans, as well as shoal-draft sharpie monohulls - two of the boat types long-time readers here know that I post about most often.  My own choice of a Wharram Tiki 26 catamaran as the perfect boat for me to build and sail was influenced by the same line of thinking that led to this discussion - shallow draft and simplicity being top priorities.  

If you've got hours to kill, you can read the full thread on the forum and will probably find it both entertaining and informative.

New Life for an Old Town Canoe

A recent project that I've spent way too much time on is the restoration of a badly-damaged and well-worn Old Town Canadienne canoe. Here is the finished result:

This canoe belongs to my long-time canoeing partner, Ernest Herndon, who has paddled it many hundreds of miles on rivers and lakes of the region, frequently using it on his research trips in the course of writing such books as Canoeing Louisiana and Canoeing Mississippi. When we paddled the Pascagoula River System from the headwaters to the Gulf in order to co-author the book, Paddling the Pascagoula, Ernest chose his trusty Old Town, while I paddled a hand-built wooden sea kayak.

The Old Town Canadienne is a classic north woods canoe with recurved stems, tumblehome sides, and a large load-carrying capacity. It's ideal for long trips on big rivers and lakes, and can easily carry two men and all their gear and supplies for trips of two weeks or more.

Below, Ernest Herndon getting ready to shove off in the morning after breaking camp on a river sandbar. Here, you can see that the canoe is well-loaded with dry bags, duffel bags and all the other assorted gear needed for a river trip.

Ernest bought this canoe at a local Mississippi salvage store. The Old Town, along with many others in a shipment, came into the salvage store's inventory after suffering some significant damage in transit somewhere. When he first brought it to me back in about 1993, to see if I could fix it up, it looked like it had fallen off a truck at highway speeds. There were several major cracks in the hull, broken all the way through in places, and the aluminum gunwales were bent and even broken in one place.

At that time my boat repair skills were minimal. I patched the fiberglass, reinforced the broken gunwale with a strip of aluminum riveted in place, touched up the red paint with a spray can, and called it good enough. He used it like that for all these years, finally bringing it to me for a complete refit earlier this year. The canoe had lost much of its shape due to the bent and broken aluminum gunwales. The fiberglass patches were finally peeling off, and the floatation bulkheads in each end had broken loose from the hull. Below is a photo of it right before I began the work. It's hard to see all the problems in the photo. It looked much worse in person.

The only cure for the gunwale problem was to get rid of the aluminum rails and rebuild the boat with inwales and outwales made of ash. I started with the inwales, scarfing them to length, then gluing on spacer blocks to the inner sides so they would have, in effect, scuppers all along their mid-length to allow easy dumping of water by turning the canoe on its side.

I first cut away the aluminum rails at the ends and glued in triangular blocks of solid mahogany to serve as a termination point for the inwales, as the extreme ends of the fiberglass hull were too irregular and rounded to carry the inwales all the way. I then removed one aluminum gunwale first, leaving the other one in place to maintain the shape, while the first wood inwale was clamped and glued in place.

After both inwales were fitted and glued in, the outwales came next, in two separate steps. You can see the scuppered inwales in the photo below.

The new ash gunwales imparted much rigidity to the tired old hull, bringing out its true shape and fairing the wobbly sheer that had been so distorted by the fatigued aluminum. I have no doubt that the boat will have an entirely different and better feel to it once it's in the water again.

Below you can see the detail at the stern, which is identical to the bow. The hull sides are sandwiched between the inwales and outwales of ash, and the mahogany end blocks finish out the bow and stern. Note that Ernest wanted me to replace the Canadienne graphic with the more appropriate for him, Mississippian.

A big part of the job I did not photograph step-by-step was the repair of the fiberglass damage and the filling and fairing of the hull. It was, as you would expect, a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, but in the end proved worth it. The hull exterior was then painted with four coats of Interlux Brightside in "Fire Red".

Four coats of spar varnish on all the ash and then the application of new vinyl graphics for the Mississippian name and the Old Town logo completed the job. Tomorrow, I'm meeting Ernest at the nearby Pearl River, where we'll break-in the new refit by paddling the canoe from Hopewell to Georgetown, a river trip of about 10 miles.

Grampian 26 Review (Part One)

Below: My Grampian 26 the day I bought her:

Readers of Good Old Boat are already aware that the current issue of the magazine features a boat review of the Grampian 26, written by Gregg Nestor. I picked up this issue with interest, as reviews of this popular Canadian design have been few and far between - and, of course - because I owned and sailed a fine example of this vessel for six years. I've been planning to write about my experiences with this particular good old boat for quite some time. So I have now decided to begin a multi-part series on how I came to own, refit, cruise and ultimately lose the boat I named Intensity.

I found my Grampian 26 in the late summer of 1999, when I drove to the Tampa/St. Petersburg area with cash in hand and intentions to buy a different boat, a Bristol 24. The Bristol seemed like a good deal from the seller's ad in the Florida Sailboat Trader, and from what he told me in our conversations on the telephone. As it turned out, this particular example of that fine design had seen better days, and was far from being ready to make the trip back to Mississippi on her own hull. I had to pass on it but I was in Florida to buy a boat; with all my gear in the truck , money still in my pocket, and a block of free time available to sail home. I was determined to find a cruising sailboat that I could purchase and make ready in a reasonable time frame. I called about several boats in my price range (about eight thousand dollars max) and went to look at more than half a dozen.

Most of these boats were either too run-down for the asking price if they were big enough to meet my needs, or too small or lacking in sea going quality if they were in great condition. I looked at a Kenner Privateer 26, a Colombia 24, a Pearson 26, an Albin Vega 27, and a couple of custom built boats. None were up to the 450 nautical mile trip from Tampa Bay to the Mississippi Sound without a lot of work and expensive upgrades. Since the Gulf coast north of Tampa is an area of extensive shallows many miles out from shore, following the coastline in series of day trips was not an option in a boat of this type drawing 3 feet or more of draft. The first leg of the trip would include a 160-mile offshore passage from Anclote Keys to Appalachicola Sound, so needless to say, I had to be picky about choosing a boat that could do this with reasonable safety.

I was staying at my brother's house near Tampa during all this searching, and was beginning to get frustrated after several days of running around all over the bay area looking at boats that consistently disappointed. I was about to give up when I made a last drive to Clearwater to look at yet another one and while walking down the dock noticed a "for sale" sign on a very clean and almost new-looking boat that seemed just the right size. From the new paint, crisp green Sunbrella bimini and sail covers and varnished toerails, I assumed this boat would be well out of my price range. There was also a new-looking Honda 9.9 outboard mounted in a cut-away on the transom. I was actually looking for the simplicity of an outboard-powered sailboat, as I did not want to mess with the complexities of an inboard diesel. The one feature of this boat I did not like was the pedestal wheel steering, but everything else just seemed right. Despite my fears that this boat was well out of reach of my limited boat-buying budget, I called the number posted on the sign.

The owner was out of state on vacation, but at last I reached him after talking to other boat owners on the dock. It turned out he was an employee of the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, which was why the boat was docked there alongside various donated boats in run-down condition. I learned that the boat was a Grampian 26 - a Canadian design that I knew nothing about. I called my experienced sailing friend in Winnipeg, Lawrence Pitcairn, to ask his advice regarding the design. It just so happened that he had the issue of Practical Sailor in which the Grampian 26 was reviewed. He read the entire article to me over the phone. The editors of this publication strive to be as objective and unbiased as possible. Like all boat designs the review, they find the faults, but there was a lot they liked about the Grampian 26. Excerpts from the review that caught my attention included:

"The Grampian 26 was heavily built and, happily for their owners, no chronic problems have surfaced in the nearly quarter century since the first boat was launched."

and

"In the past 24 years, this Canadian boat has been spotted in waters around the world. During one notable voyage an owner sailed from Lake Ontario to England and the Mediterranean, then returned to Canada via the Caribbean. Several of these boats have made good the trip through the Intra-Coastal Waterway to the Bahamas and the Caribbean, returning to their ports with a contented crew."

Designed by Alex McGruer, the Grampian 26 specs sounded good as well:

LOA 26'0"

LWL 21'9"

Beam 8'4"

Draft 4'3"

Ballast 2,600 lbs.

Displacement 5,600 lbs.

Sail area 325 sq. ft.

Like the other boats at the dock, the Grampian had come in as a donation, (someone's tax write-off) but the employee who was the current owner took a liking to her and decided to rescue her himself. He was in the process of a complete rebuild from the inside out, using Don Casey's excellent book: This Old Boat as a manual. Work completed thus far included most everything on the exterior: new Imron paint on the topsides and decks, a new professionally fabricated rudder, a custom stainless steel bow pulpit and anchor platform/bowsprit, recent bottom job, new bimini and sail covers, and a like new Honda 9.9 outboard. The inside had been gutted of the original cabin sole and furniture, and bulkheads stripped down to the bare plywood. All new wiring had been completed, including cabin lighting, fans, shore power charging system and top quality DC and AC switch panels. The owner had obviously poured a lot of money and time into this boat. The reason for selling? He was about to get married and his wife didn't like to sail. (I wonder if this has ever happened to anyone else?)

It was a lot more boat with a lot more stuff included than I would have ever expected to find on my budget. But best of all, I didn't even have to spend everything I brought to buy this boat. The price was $5000 firm. I couldn't believe my luck. All this for just five grand. I didn't even consider argueing price and immediately said I would take it. The only condition was that I wanted the boat hauled out so I could inspect the bottom before I handed over the cash. The owner agreed and I had to wait a couple more days until he returned to Florida, then we motored over to the Travelift at the boat yard next door to the aquarium. The haul out proved that he had done what he had said was done below the waterline. After seeing the keel and knowing for sure what was under the bottom, I felt confident I could sail this boat home.

Just when I had been about to give up, I had found everything I wanted and more in a small cruising sailboat. Money exchanged hands and I was the proud owner of my first cruising sailboat. My free time was running out, however, and there was still much work to be done before I could untie the dock lines and sail away.

(Next Installment: Moving aboard, making ready for sea, and sailing home)