Besides the electronics (which most of the components didn't work, not a complete surprise) and a/c, an important aspect of learning the boat has to do with electricity. When you're at the dock the boat is plugged into shore power, in our case, two 30 amp lines. Once away from the dock, there are several options. There are basically three different batteries on this boat, one to start the engine and generator, a second battery or set of batteries to power the various electrical needs of the boat, electronics, refrigerator / freezer, microwave and lights called the "house batteries". There is a second set of "house batteries" as backup to the first. Some things on the boat run on DC power and some run on AC power so there is an inverter to convert the DC to AC. When the generator is running it produces AC to power the AC appliances and to power a battery charger that charges the batteries. Confused? So are we. But hopefully after helping the surveyor do the tests, we have a better idea of how it all works. It's a bit more complicated than a house.
We inspected the deck, all the stuff under the sole (floor below deck), all the rigging of the mast and the operation of pretty much everything on the boat. We found more things wrong than we anticipated.
Around 11:00 we left the dock and motored over to the boat yard to have the boat "hauled" so the hull could be inspected. This boat weighs 29,000 pounds. It is no small task to get it out of the water. The boat yard has a rather large piece of machinery to accomplish this. I'll tell you, the boat looks a lot bigger when it's out of the water. Here's a picture of what it looks like. To give you an idea of scale, that's Susan standing next to and mostly under the boat.
We found a few more things that needed to be fixed with the boat out of the water, the hull will need to be repainted soon and the lower rudder post bearing needs to be replaced. But structurally it looked very good.
An hour later, the boat was back in the water and we sailed it for the sea trial. The boat sails very nice. With just the mainsail up and trimmed properly the boat would sail straight with no hand on the wheel and without the autopilot engaged. We put the Genoa (the head sail or the sail in front of the mast) up and Susan took the helm for a bit. We were sailing along nicely and I grabbed some lines to coil them and then everyone started looking at me and telling me I had grabbed the wrong line. The Genoa was falling down. It wasn't me. Where the sail attaches to the halyard (rope that holds the sail up) came apart. It was exciting for a few minutes but then we got the Genoa folded up and stored away. No other excitement for the day. We sailed back towards the marina and then dropped the mainsail and motored into the slip.
There were some things we knew needed to be replaced on the boat but we found more during the survey. That's what it is for. Through the day both Susan and my emotions ran from "what have we got ourselves into" to "it's not really bad and we are getting a good boat for a great price". We went back and forth and didn't have a more settled position until the next day.
Are there a lot of things to do and repair? Yes, but after adding the cost of the needed repairs, it still looks like a good deal. Also, we plan to do most if not all of the repairs ourselves. This will mean we'll have some brand new items of our picking and we'll learn how it all fits together by getting our hands dirty. It will for sure raise the confidence in our own ability to handle issues that come up in the future.
We haven't made a final decision on the boat and there are a few things we're going to ask the owner to fix but at the moment we're leaning towards going forward with buying this boat. Stay tuned.
Brian
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