Syzygy Sailing

We’re sailing aboard Syzygy, a 1978 Valiant 40, one of the hardiest and smoothest bluewater cruising boats ever built. She was built in Bellingham, WA, by the Uniflite company. Bob Perry designed the Valiant 40, and due largely to his success with this particular boat he became one of the world’s most well regarded modern boat designers.

Our boat is hull number 201, making it the 101st Valiant 40 ever made. Syzygy spent most of her 30 years in the pacific northwest, where the original owners sailed and chartered her out of Seattle. The second set of owners sailed her down to mexico to cruise warmer waters, and she eventually ended up on the hard in San Carlos, Mexico, where she sat up on stands in a dusty dry storage yard for a few years before we discovered her using yactworld.com (the definitive site for finding a boat).

The Valiant 40 is a cutter-rigged sloop. A sloop is a single masted boat with one foresail (the jib). A cutter is a single-masted boat with two foresails (jib and staysail), and the mast is moved aft in the boat to make room for the extra sail area up front. Our boat is cutter rigged, with a jib and a staysail, but the mast is centrally located in the boat, as in a sloop. Hence, “cutter-rigged sloop”. The advantage of our sailplan is that we can use just our jib and main and have a true sloop with balanced force fore and aft of the mast, but we also have the option to fly our staysail instead of (or in addition to) the jib. This can be particularly handy in heavy weather.

While Valiants are famous for their solidity, quality, and performance, they are also infamous for their heinous blister problems. A certain range of hull numbers suffers from these insidious little monsters, and our boat was built right in the middle of that run. It is speculated that the blisters are caused by the fire retardant resin that Uniflite was using in their fiberglass layup, but no one knows for sure. The blisters are usually only cosmetic–I have never heard of a boat sinking as a result of blisters. In some extreme cases, though, a blister can get so large and deep that it shows up on both sides of the hull, and when it gets that bad I think it must be impossible to avoid a repair. Some boat owners have had their entire hull stripped and glassed over, barrier coated, bottom painted, only to have the blisters come back. Our boat had just such a bottom job in 2005, and as of yet no blisters have returned. Fingers crossed!

Although the line drawing shows the bottom part of the keel as the lead portion (foam above it), we were cursed with a different, earlier version of the keel, in which the forward half is lead and the aft half is foam. This gave us some problems, as the join between the two cracked and we had to do some fiberglass work on it while it was out of the water. Something to look out for if you’re thinking of buying a valiant . . .

For a 30 year old boat, Syzygy is in excellent condition. The woodwork down below is pristine; the deck is dirty chipped and worn, but nothing that tender care can’t repair. We bought it already loaded with bonus cruising equipment–monitor windvane, cockpit autopilot, watermaker, dinghy with outboard, dodger and bimini, tow generator, SSB, two 85W solar panels, hot water heater, diesel forced air heater, 4 anchors, liferaft.

We bought Syzygy with an awareness of how much maintenance it required: most everything is operational but undependably so, which is to say that it all worked the first time we touched it, but there are myriad minor, lurking problems below the surface. The engine is a good example–it seems to run fine and we haven’t touched it yet. But there is a diesel leak somewhere that has put a few quarts into the bilge, it tried to overheat on us once, the oil cooler and heat exchanger are alarmingly corroded, and for some undiscernible reason the electrical ground on the motor mount is corroding at a prodigious rate. Every major system has similarly lurking issues that we intend to address before a problem arises.

Valiant 40 Specifications:

LOA (length overall): 39′ 10.75″
LWL (length on waterline): 34′ 0″
Beam (width): 12′4″
Draft (depth): 6′6″
Displacement (weight): 22,500 lbs
Ballast: 7,700 lbs
Sail area: 772 sq ft

Additional Information

1. Current Maintenance Log for Syzygy

2. Lengthy discussion of detailed state of syzygy

3. Three published reviews of the Valiant 40 (all pdfs)
review of the Valiant 40 by Jack Horner
review of the Valiant 40 by John Kretschmer
review of the Valiant 40 by Chris Caswell