Buying a boat continued

We’re getting to know downtown Seattle pretty well.  Yesterday we left La Conner just late enough to miss most of rush hour – that’s how well we know the place, we know when rush hour starts and finishes.  We met Don Fairchild at the Costco south of Qwest Centre and took him out to look at Gray Hawk.  For those of you who don’t recognize the name, Don is one of the foremost authorities on 2-stroke Detroits in North America.  In that capacity he sees mostly marine installations and since I knew he was going to be in Seattle anyway I asked him if he would have a look at Gray Hawk’s engine room with me.

I don’t think either the marine survey or Don & my mechanical survey turned up anything that we didn’t know already.  The boat is 30 years old so it’s no virgin.  It’s got old systems and some of them need some work.  The marine survey confirmed what we already suspected, namely that the boat is in excellent condition notwithstanding its age. 

The trip over and back to Seaview Marina was our first experience at sea on this size of a vessel.  Both of us and the boat handled it well.  The Naiad stabilizers are simply amazing.  The sea conditions weren’t bad when we left the dock but by the time we got home they were getting pretty snotty.  The stabilizers performed as advertised.  Without them engaged we were rolling through 30 or 40 degrees.  When we engaged the Naiads there would be a moment of hesitation while the gyro got orientated and then the boat would literally snap back to under a 10 degree roll.  You could easily feel the fins take control.

Jerry-the-surveyor did his woodpecker routine over the entire hull and pronounced it sound.  For those of you who don’t know, marine surveyors spend a lot of their time going tap-tap-tap with a small hammer over the entire hull, the interior scantlings and the interior woodwork looking for voids or rot.  I had expected to see at least some underwater fibreglass blisters because they are ubiquitous on hulls of this age but there absolutely were none.  He found a small amount of active interior rot and evidence of some previous  window leakage.  We already knew about the window leakage and I had assumed there must be at least some rot that we weren’t aware of so we really didn’t learn a lot from that. 

Jerry-the-surveyor had a few comments about the engines but the visit yesterday with Don was much more informative.  Lehman 120s (which is what we have for power) are dead reliable workhorses.  I’ve seen lifespans between total rebuild as high as 25,000 hours quoted and 12-15,000 hours seems to be a normal expectation.  That means that at 4200 hours on ours we shouldn’t have to budget any in-frames in the near future.  There are some unique maintenance requirements though, including a requirement to change the oil in the injection pump sump every 50 hours.  I doubt these have ever been changed which may explain why they are fairly hard starters now.  It sounds like even with regular pump oil changes the injection pumps would be due for a rebuild by now so that will be an early priority.

The other thing that the sea trial and haulout confirmed is just how massively built these boats really are.  I have heard many people say that their Defever will take way more than they can stand and I’m sure that will be true for us as well.  The picture above shows my Blackberry leaning against the fibreglass cutout saved from when the bowthruster was installed.  Seeing the boat hanging in the slings at haulout it was clear that there is just about as much boat underwater as there is above water.  Our captain for the trip remarked on how well the boat handled but also commented that it behaved like a deep draft vessel.  On his own boat he is accustomed to scooting the bow sideways with his bow thruster.  On ours he noted that it was much slower to respond to the bow thruster because of its deep keel but particularly because of its deep forefoot.

The next step is to get insurance in place and take possession.  Yesterday we made arrangements to have the boat hauled so that we can do some work on it in January.  There’s nothing major that needs to be done but there are some zincs that need changing, some coolant hoses that have deteriorated, I’d like to change the raw water impellers and I may pull the injection pumps and have them rebuilt.  It’s a machine so it’s going to need service.  My goal is always to do that as maintenance rather than as repairs.  Some days I’m more successful than others.

We need help

OK – not that kind of help.

It’s bad luck to change the name of a boat but SWMBO says that we are going to change it anyway.  The options are as follows:

Baylurker	Bayliner makes a spectacularly bad line of “value priced” multi-purpose boats.  As Malibu-snobs we have learned to look down our nose at Bayliners and I have dubbed them Baylurkers or worse.  The name however has some appeal for a go-slow boat that will spend it’s life lurking in bays.
Vamonos	Spanish – from the verb “ir” which means “to go”.  Vamonos is the plural present tense of ir.  Grammatically the correct usage would be “nos vamonos” or “we go” but “vamonos” said alone means “let’s go”.
Bethia Jewitt	In our family tree the entry for the birth of one of the children of my G.G.Grandfathers reads “Born on board Bethia Jewitt of Saint John, N.B., Thomas Waters Com., at anchor between the north and middle Chincha Islands on the coast of Peru.”  That phrase has always stuck in my mind so it seems appropriate to name our boat for the historical boat.
Something else	Feel free to suggest something in the comment section but before Doug suggests it, HMS WTF III is out of the question.

I’ve signed up for some online polling software just in honour of the occasion.  I don’t know how many times it will let you vote – I hope only once.  And we might as well make it clear up front that while we will likely go with the results of the poll we will retain the right to come up with something completely different.

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey.

Ooops

We were sitting in the brokers’ office yesterday afternoon, in the process of writing up the offer.  They had already told us that the owner was living aboard his new 65 footer but we thought they said that boat was on Lake Union.  There was only the two of us, our broker and his wife who is also the secretary and the senior broker in the office. 

The door to the office opened and someone walked in carrying a small duffel bag.  He opened the conversation by saying something to the effect of “maybe I should drop the price on that thing again.”  I happened to be looking directly at the senior broker and I could tell he wanted this guy to go away and go away RIGHT NOW.

Wanting a customer who walks through the door unannounced to leave isn’t unheard of.  We had a couple like that.  One of them in particular everyone would head for the shop so that whoever was the last man standing at the counter would have to deal with the nonsense that was certain to come out of his mouth.  Another was so miserable (and so sickly) that I had standing orders that if he dropped in the yard with a heart attack nobody was to call 9-11 until we were absolutely certain he was dead. 

So it wasn’t impossible that this unannounced stranger was just a pain in the ass customer that the brokers would rather not see but it somehow didn’t seem like that was the case.  He looked around the office, saw that we were there and that the brokers were obviously busy and continued by saying “I’ll just have my shower and come back.”

After he left the brokers tried to pretend that nothing had happened but one of them said something and I asked if that had been the current owner of “our” Defever.  “Yep”.  “I guess we should lower our offer in that case.”

So it wasn’t a complete surprise about an hour later when we learned that he had accepted our offer.

We’ve been doing a lot of reading about big boats.  Some of what we read appears to be extremely useful.

When docking a boat the trick is to get the dock and the boat moving at the same speed.

A very very good day

We left the bus around 9:30 this morning.  I had a minor meltdown before we left because effing Messysloth hadn’t printed the maps I asked it to last night.  I carefully selected 5 different map views in Microslop Streets and Trips and sent each of them to print.  I should have looked at them last night.  Instead of the carefully selected views that I was expecting what I found this morning was five copies of line by line directions from La Conner to the Seattle waterfront.

With that annoyance behind us we headed into Seattle and were fortunate enough to miss the morning rush hour.  We must have been right on the tail end of it.  We did have one minor miscue -

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-- just a little to the west of where the “B” is on the map there’s a fairly confusing maze of ramps and we inadvertently ended up in some underground parking cave that is guarded by an overly officious toothless person.  He rather rudely turned us back.  I said something to Marilyn about how he could have been a little more understanding because what we had done likely happened at least 100 times daily and sure enough, before we got turned around, another woman had arrived by making the exact same navigatory error that we had.

Once we got clear of Mr. Official we proceeded to Elliott Bay Marina which is represented by all the boats lined up at “A” above.  We spent around an hour on “Gray Hawk”, the 2nd of the two 43 foot Defevers that we came out here to look at.  She’s moored almost exactly where the “A” on the map is located.  We always said that eventually we would go onboard a boat that would just scream out “this is  the one” and sure enough, that’s exactly what happened this morning.  The engine room was perfect, everything tagged and neat.  The boat was clean.  There’s some really good electronics on it including a side scanning sonar which is a forward looking depth finder that sweeps from side to side to paint a wide picture of the ocean floor.  It has factory installed active “Naiad” stabilizers.  The current owner has moved on to a 65 foot boat but his meticulous care is evident.  The foredecks have been replaced with fibreglass and the portholes don’t leak on this one.  They could stand being replaced but there is no water damage in the master stateroom. 

I could go on but the point is that mechanically the boat appears to be very sound.  It doesn’t have all the liveaboard toys that some of the others on our short list do – things like washer, dryer, dishwasher.  But it was priced at a point where we could afford to add those things if we decide we need them.

The boat was listed at $115,000 when we first saw it online.  Compared to other Defevers we had looked at we thought that was a very reasonable price.  Then about a month ago the listing changed to $99,500 and we were actually worried that it might get sold before we got out to look at it.  Today the broker was dropping broad hints that the owner would look at lower offers so we made an offer substantially below the current asking price.  I guess we should have gone lower because the owner accepted our offer while we were having a wonderful lunch on the waterfront.

The standard boat buying procedure is seriously loaded against the seller.  You have to feel sorry for the poor sap.  Having agreed today to a price substantially below his asking price (and in this case way south of what he thought the boat was worth as little as a month ago) he now has to suffer further negotiation after what is called a survey.  The survey amounts to an independent appraisal and our offer was accepted contingent on both a mechanical and marine survey being acceptable to us.  So that means that we will now hire both a marine and a mechanical surveyor who will go over the boat looking for reasons to further reduce the price.  At the end of the survey if the buyer isn’t willing to remedy any defects that the surveyor uncovers we have the right to back out of the deal or renegotiate the price.  Like I said – the system is loaded against the seller.  We do have to pay for the survey and to have the boat hauled to do the survey so the process isn’t completely lopsided.

We registered for the Pacific Marine Expo last week.  It will be a lot more fun now that we are likely to actually be boat owners by the time we attend the show.  Stay tuned – the fun has only barely started.

Going where we aren’t wanted

When we were wandering around the Wyoming range looking for Jensen’s ranch we eventually headed up a trail and found ourselves looking at an R-CALF gate sign.  It turns out that Jim is an R-CALF director but of course at O-Dark 30 I didn’t know that and I instantly had visions of this  lonely lost Canuck wandering uninvited into an R-CALF yard and getting told where to go and how fast to get there.  Or worse.  It might have turned into “whatever happened to Bob?”

I never met Jim but I’m sure he’s a decent well-intentioned guy.  R-CALF on the other hand has been a major trade irritant and sometime embarrassment to USDA.  During the BSE nonsense R-CALF was able to convince some old half asleep judge in Montana to pass repeated injunctions to prevent Canadian cattle from entering the US, in complete defiance of the science-based measures that USDA and Ag Canada had agreed to.  That’s all behind us now because once the US started looking to see if they had any BSE in their herd not surprisingly it turned out that they did.  It would have been pretty bloody surprising if it had turned out any other way since we have had a North American cattle industry since the cowboys started chasing cattle and Indians across the range. 

We left Jim’s ranch around 4:00 on Monday.  We had intended to stay until Tuesday morning but one of the ranch hands suggested that we should bug out early because the weather was about to go to hell.  The forecast didn’t actually look that bad but he said it was going to get really windy and we didn’t want to stay around to see if he was right or not. 

We got to Cody that night and got a fairly early start out of Cody on Wednesday morning.  About half an hour out of Billings I noticed a truck behind me flashing his lights at me.  That’s never good.  As I started to slow down he passed me and pulled in ahead of us.  Before we got out his wife ran back to tell us we had a flat tire on the trucklet.  If only it had been so simple. 

Once again we discovered a busted front axle complete with the same sick looking mess dragging underneath the front of the truck.  Almost exactly one year after our incident in Oregon we had exactly the same failure, on the other side of the truck.  I have no idea what is causing the problem.  We pulled the truck for 4 years with no problem but this past year has been a nightmare.  Both sides of the front end were rebuilt within the last year so there is no excuse for a bearing failure this soon but that is exactly what happened.  The shop that we towed it to in Billings has suggested that perhaps the alignment is not being correctly set up for towing.  That is possible I guess but it still doesn’t explain why we were able to tow with no problems for the first 4 years.  Whatever the cause we left the truck in Billings and came on to Seattle without it.

Along the way we had a great visit with Skip and Maria in Helena.  Skip and I got to know each other through a bus-related online forum and we had met briefly a few years ago.  On Tuesday night we parked in their yard and had a great visit with the two of them, one of their daughters and two grand-daughters.  They also have a serious amount of livestock, most of which we met.  George hasn’t quite recovered from the smell of strange cats and dogs on my clothing.  I tried to trade him for a better cat but Skip wanted too much difference so we are still stuck with him.

Yesterday we made it to exit 106 on I-90 in Washington.  We spent the night in a Love’s truck stop and then came on into Seattle this morning.  We parked on a Wallyworld lot and tracked down a rental car.  It turned out that Enterprise had an office about a mile from where we were parked so we walked over and picked up the car.  Then we got moved up to our Thousand Trails campground at La Conner and settled into the exact same spot we were in last winter.

Of course when we were this close to the boats we couldn’t resist trying to look at one.  Neither of us really thought that anybody would be open on Remembrance Day but we drove into Anacortes anyway.  We have two 43 foot Defevers lined up out here that are the main purpose of this trip.  We have a “short-list” with roughly 40 boats on it that we would look at but of those boats only about 25 are in the Pacific Northwest.  Of those about half are Defevers in various lengths.  We think the 43 foot Defever is the shortest boat that I can stand up in.  Much as we’d both like the extra space in something a little longer we think that in the long term we will appreciate not paying moorage for the longer boat and not having to maintain a longer boat.

We got lucky – the brokerage office was open.  Actually it seemed like a lot of businesses down here were open today.  We had a good look at “Koala” despite not having taken along a flashlight or icepick.  Both of those are important tools for boat shoppers.  The flashlight for obvious reasons – there are a lot of dark corners onboard.  The icepick is important to check for rotten wood.  Today I was able to identify rot without the icepick.  Defevers are known to have problems with leaky portholes and this one was no exception.  The three portholes that you can see at the extreme aft of the photo above have leaked into the master stateroom.  It wouldn’t be a big task to fix the leaks.  The rot would take a bit more work.   This particular boat has obviously been neglected but the price clearly reflects that.

Tomorrow we go to look at a stabilized 43 foot that appears in the photos to be very well maintained.  Pictures can lie as we discovered when we went out to Vancouver earlier this fall.  Stay tuned.

The middle of nowhere

We waited out the weather in Buchanan.  It seemed like the snow was never going to leave, and it didn’t, but at least the roads got mostly cleared off.  We finally left about 9:30 on Tuesday morning.  We had planned a much earlier departure.

On Monday afternoon I got the truck pulled in behind the bus and hooked up.  We tidied up the yard and tried to leave everything so that the village can get on with mowing the grass because that is what we expect to be happening before we get back there.  We were up early Tuesday morning planning to be in Regina by mid-morning but it didn’t work out that way.  When I turned the key we got a distant “RRR” from the back of the bus and nothing more. 

It was my own fault – I’ve known for some time now that the batteries were on their last legs.  We bought the bus close to 7 years ago and the batteries weren’t new then so they really didn’t owe us anything.  We also really didn’t need the headache of dealing with them on Tuesday.  Two and a half hours later, with the assistance of battery blankets, battery charger, block heater and proheat we just barely got started.  Then I was afraid to shut it off, and with good reason.  When I finally did shut it off in the early afternoon in Regina it just barely started again so I knew it was time to do something.  I had visions of shutting it off at the customs shack and then not getting it started. 

We got to Swift Current about 5 minutes before 5:00 and pulled into the Cat dealer.  I figured that would be the most expensive place to buy batteries but that they would also likely have a pair of 8-Ds on the shelf.  They didn’t.  But the guy at the counter was super helpful and he immediately phoned some little auto parts shop in town.  They had a pair of batteries for about 1/3 of what I thought they would cost so he told them that we would be right over and they stayed open waiting for us. 

We didn’t bother trying to install the batteries Tuesday night because we were already late for supper with Al and Gail.  Al fed us very well when we finally arrived – thank you again Al – and then on Wednesday morning he and I stuffed the new batteries into the compartment on the frenchy-bus.  It sounded much happier when I turned the key that morning and even better when it started right up as we were leaving US Customs.  They were training a new girl so she had to come onboard and snoop through our fridge for salad supplies for their supper that night. 

After stocking up the customs fridge we headed straight south through Billings, Montana and Cody, Wyoming to here.

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Its pretty lonesome country.  We arrived about 9:00 and then wandered around in the dark looking for the place.  Nobody seems to have heard about putting their name or address on their mailbox and even the mailboxes are few and far between.  We finally ended up on a dead end trail that stopped at the gate of an Encana pumping facility.  As we were unhooking the night watchman showed up but he didn’t have a clue about who lived where.  He did very helpfully send us off in completely the wrong direction because he thought there were some ranches that way.  After about a half hour search in the little truck we stumbled on an unmarked lane, headed up it for about half a mile and then finally came to a sign for the ranch we were looking for.  Even then the sign was ambiguous enough that I kept on driving for another couple of miles just to make sure it was the right place.  Its a lot easier doing those reconnaissance trips in the micro-truck.  Along the way we had to dodge dozens of sleeping Angus cows because this is all open range country.  Fortunately they are big on Texas gates – some of them are a little narrow but evidently the ones we crossed were strong enough to carry a bus.

Once we found the yard then we had to find the bus again and get it moved to the ranch yard.  The owner is in Pennsylvania and his cell phone was dying when I talked to his wife late in the afternoon so we didn’t bother trying to phone them.  As it turned out there is actually a ranch hand living in the yard (with his border collie puppy named Stetson) but he didn’t hear us drive into the yard, drive around looking for a level spot, drive out, return with the bus and park the bus.  Stetson barked a couple of times but he’s a puppy so apparently Kevin didn’t pay any attention to him.  He’s a really cute puppy and a real cuddle bug too.  Once he figured out that we were friends he has been a regular guest.  He and George had words so now they just look at each other through the window.

Buying boat stuff

We don’t have a boat yet but we’re starting to accumulate stuff for it.  When we unpacked the cube van Marilyn sorted out a set of Silver Birch dishes for eventual use on the boat and we also set aside whatever other kitchen wares we came across that seemed like they might be useful.  We’ve been watching ebay for silverware but so far haven’t pulled the trigger on a set.  The set we use now came from Quartzsite so maybe we’ll find another set there this year.

For some time now I’ve been looking for a set of radio headsets.  I wish we had bought them years ago because they would have made backing into tight spots a lot easier over the years.  At some point we’re going to have to communicate while docking and headsets sound like the class way to go.  The alternative seems to be a lot of yelling and waving of arms which doesn’t look good at the best of times and is particularly declassé onboard a fancy boat.  But most headset systems are bloody expensive and some of them are right out of this world expensive.  Then I stumbled onto a cruisers’ forum and got a whole bunch of good information off it, including a link to Cruising Solutions which is where I found the headsets.  We had to wait until we could get our mail forwarded and then we had to wait some more until we remembered to buy some 9 volt batteries but Marilyn came home with a pair of them today.  And they work pretty damn good.  They’re not perfect but they were only 70 bucks after all.  And no radio solution is going to be perfectly clear.  The inverter on the frenchy-bus throws a lot of static so the bus isn’t the best test but even on the bus they are more than useable. 

The cruisers’ forum also pointed me to something called OpenCPN which is an open source chart plotter. 

I’m more than a little skeptical about open source software.  I got talked into using the open source alternative to Microsloth Office a few years ago and it caused me no end of grief.  In fairness to that suite, if anyone else is inclined to use it, you could likely do reasonably well with it as long as you never had to collaborate with anybody using Microsoft Office.  As it was, going back and forth from Open Office to Microsoft Office, eventually my spreadsheet files got to the point where they were unusable in either software. 

OpenCPN appears to be a lot better software.  Of course my knowledge of chart plotter software is pretty limited so maybe its pure crap and I just don’t know it.  But in the meanwhile I’m having a lot of fun playing with it.  The US government supplies excellent charts for their entire coastline free of charge.  That is not the case in Canada.  In fact the charts are so expensive from the gummit of Canada that it may actually be cheaper to buy chart plotter software in order to get the charts.  Some of the US charts overlap Canada so for the time being I’m making do with them.  Since we don’t have a boat there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of urgency on acquiring a complete set of charts.