Sep 07 2020
What would I do differently?
Karen and I have been tentatively considering maybe possibly one day doing another trip with the kids, if we could afford it (so, never). But it has got me thinking about sailboats and the ocean again, and I can’t help but think of what I would do differently.
Travel with friends
One of my biggest regrets in life—all of life not just boat life—is that I didn’t coordinate with my best friends…somehow…in order to live in the same town. The same thing goes for our last boat trip. We ran into various wonderful crews during our trip, and we exercised an ethos for always staying independent ourselves, and also not feeling like we were imposing on the independence of others. Why didn’t we do more buddy boating? Well next time, if there is a next time, we’ll find people we like and latch on to them and follow them everywhere. Not quite to the level of being boat stalkers… but maybe just shy of it. Having like-minded friends makes life worth living. This will be especially true with a family of three evolving boys. If we find kids that they enjoy spending time with, that’s gold. It’s worth abandoning preconceived itineraries to stick with friends.
Catamaran instead of mono-hull
Next time around, we would prefer a catamaran. Catamarans are not as seaworthy as the equivalent mono-hull: noted, granted, and considered. If we anticipated being in any sort of bad weather, I would want the safety of a mono-hull. However, if we stick to the tropics, as we did the first time (after getting from San Francisco to Mexico), we could avoid dangerous weather. A catamaran is much more comfortable than a mono-hull. First, no side to side rocking. The difference in comfort that this provides can’t be overstated. Rocking in anchorages makes for unpleasant sleeping. Second: no heeling. Sleeping, cooking… doing whatever, at an angle while on passages is challenging and uncomfortable. Being flat on a passage is awesome. Second: catamarans have huge real estate both in the cockpit and the cabin, where everybody spends their time, and both areas are more elevated with better light and views. In both the cabin and cockpit there can be a large tables surrounded by couches, which makes time at anchor (which is most of the time) so much more pleasant. There are more cabins as well, which means space not only for our family but also for friends to join us. Four cabins is typical, which is far superior for a family trip as opposed to a two-friends-and-a-wife crew. Also, it sails considerably faster, which means less time on passage and more time living at anchor.
The disadvantages of a catamaran. As mentioned, it is less seaworthy. It is harder to find one that is ready for bluewater cruising, since fewer people do it. It is more expensive for the same waterline length. There are two engines to maintain. Most of the ones available for purchase have four heads. FOUR heads. One head is enough to maintain, four is plain stupid. But that’s for the chartering crowd—four cabins, four couples (or families), and no one wants to share a head. It can’t fit in standard slips, so it costs far more to keep it in a marina—if you can even find a spot.
Plan on keeping the boat
In retrospect, I have no idea how I managed to successfully motivate for all the boat work and upgrades that we did, when we were only planning on using the boat for a year and then selling it. Where is Syzygy now? Do the current owners appreciate all the work we did? Probably not.
And now we’re thinking (vaguely) about doing it again. What if we had had the financial freedom (i.e. be loaded) to put Syzygy on the hard and keep it? We certainly acted, in working on the boat, as if it was going to be entirely for us forever, without regard to what any imaginary next owners might have wanted. If we had been able to put Syzygy on the hard in Australia, we would be simply planning logistics on when, rather than considering starting from scratch. We probably would have taken a trip or three already. Granted, we didn’t have the option then to keep it, financially. But it’s hard to think of buying another boat and putting sweat and tears into boat work (which is absolutely inevitable) without being able to benefit from our investment (of money and labor) for decades rather than a year or two.
Fishing
I’ve never been a fisherman. Fisher? Fisher-man? I was planning on learning how to do it before our last trip, but by the time I finished up with boat work I was too burned out to read any more books and learn anything new. Fishing seemed like more work to me. Consequently, we never really did much fishing, caught hardly anything. Friends were fishing off the stern while sailing and spear fishing in anchorages, and eating fresh fish all the time. We at fresh fish too, but always caught by someone else (usually locals). I spent tons of time snorkeling all over the place, but didn’t have a spear gun and had little interest.
Next time, we would fish and we would eat plenty of seafood that we caught. I would take a nice spear fishing setup and gear for the stern, and learn how to use them, and practice, and eat fish.
Boat equipment and work thoughts
On construction projects, I would avoid fiberglass-covered plywood; I would use FRP (fiberglass-reinforced polyester) sheet. For example, on the backing plates for through-hulls. Why I thought that the time and effort to fiberglass over bits of plywood was a good idea, compared to simply buying the already-waterproof fiberglass plate, is beyond me. I can’t believe we made water tanks out of plywood and shit tons of fiberglass and epoxy. That was stupid. We should have hired a welder to come in and fix the existing stainless tanks. That was one of the first jobs we did and we had no idea.
I would skip the watermaker, just carry enough to carry through. We never ended up needing it, despite spending plenty of time at sea and in remote anchorages. Too much maintenance and super expensive. Of course, that’s after ripping out all the pressurized fresh water system, using foot pumps for everything, plumbing a salt-water foot pump to the sinks, and using a bucket of freshwater for shower rinsing (no freshwater showering inside the boat). I would do the exact same over again, in that regard. With three boys? No way we would let there be pressurized fresh water access on board.
I would insist on at least 1400 Ah of battery capacity, 400 W of solar, and a wind generator, just like we had on Syzygy, together with all of the same electrical savings we implemented, e.g. LED lighting, efficient fans, efficient refrigeration, etc. The ability to live normally without having to run a generator was crucial. I do NOT want to be that boat that’s running a generator in the anchorage.
We would get a rock-solid reliable outboard for the dinghy (right away, rather than half-way through the trip), and also some paddleboards or a kayak for multiple easy transport options back and forth from shore. With a whole family (maybe more than one family on the same boat?), everybody needs to be able to get back and forth from shore efficiently.
We would get one heavy, oversized anchor for daily use. The weight of the anchor made a big difference in the holding power, and a catamaran has considerably more windage than a monohull. Weight of the boat is not as relevant as the windage. Nobody cares if their anchor holds when there’s no wind—a pile of chain hanging straight down to the bottom will do it. What matters is when the wind comes up, the force with which that tries to push the boat away is the primary consideration. Then we would also have a lightweight Danforth for kedging off, and one more medium-sized anchor if we needed to do a stern anchor. No massive fish-hook storm anchor.
Safety
We would have man overboard tracking devices/alarms for all of us to wear on passages. The biggest emotional hurdle to another boat trip for me is the nightmare of one of the kids falling overboard and being lost in the ocean. I can’t even handle the thought of it, my mind rebels when it even comes close, and yet it is a real risk. On passages, I want a reasonably-sized device that will mount to the inflatable life vests that has a) a proximity alarm that is tripped if it gets too far away from a base station b) a radio beacon sending out coordinates to a reception system on the boat, so that we can simply turn around and go to the waypoint. This technology is not even remotely far-fetched today, so if it doesn’t exist already, or by the time we go, I will design and build something myself. I’m not talking about a personal locator beacon, which transmits to the satellite and is not helpful for the boat that is a few hundred yards away. I’m thinking something like the AIS transponder; it would have a built-in GPS and would transmit the coordinates digitally over VHF and would be picked up by the existing AIS system on the boat and the location dumped on the chart.
I would also advocate for rigid lifelines. Or whatever you call them when they’re rigid. Spring for the cost of the stainless steel tube to get it done, and have a welder come weld them straight to all the stanchions. The flexible lifelines were annoying to deal with and were not as safe as rigid stainless tubing would have been. It seems a small price to pay for the dramatic improvements on deck.
I would again use the identical KiwiGrip non-skid for the deck surface. It was easy to apply and provided superior stick to the textured fiberglass which is the state of the deck when it comes off the assembly line. I would mask the existing texture pattern and put down KiwiGrip on all the existing texture.
Looking back on the modifications we made to Syzygy, I’m quite proud. We did some awesome stuff. The lavac toilet plumbing was crucial. I have a hard time imagining anything else. I really do think that I would rip out the old plumbing wholesale, and put in a new Lavac toilet and new hoses and valves etc, leaving only the existing holding tank, on any boat that we bought. I hate the smell of “boat head” and I shudder at the thought of dealing with literal shit while in some paradise. I want it easy, clean, and maintenance-free, and if I have to spend a thousand dollars and a week worth of work to get it that way, that’s a price I will gladly pay for this particular aspect of boat work. But I would only do it to one head for the whole boat. And I would rip out the other three heads on a catamaran, replacing them with whatever. An extra office area. A spare storage closet. Another set of kids bunk beds. A workshop. Just about anything is better than extra heads to have to deal with, it’s insane to me that catamarans put four heads in pretty much standard (and makes me question whether a catamaran is really for us, if that’s a priority in the boat design).