Category: Preparation

David and I have had the pleasure of “rebuilding” two boats together.

Old Pru was boat college if there ever was one. This boat had a lot of issues; a few of them include lots of leaking, the engine had been submerged in salt water and didn’t run, the fuel system needed replumbing, and there was old diesel in the fuel tank that looked like maple syrup. Through a lot of time spent working on her, we did end up getting her sailing, and we stopped the leaking with some very fine silver duct tape around the windoze. She really was a sturdy boat to sail, and the layout for a 36 was made for a couple to cruise comfortably. We sold her in late 2018 when we bought the Sabre 36, “Mid Pru”.

Flash forward to 2021 and our boat search, we finally came up with a list of what was important to us in a cruising boat:

1. Should be a boat within 20 years. We knew we’d pay dearly for a boat this new, but having less needs and more simple maintenance was the thought.
2. Must have 2 sizeable cabins so we can comfortably cruise with another couple. And let’s face it, our friends are not all small either, so we couldn’t have a “guest” cabin that was only 4 feet wide.
3. Must have a separate shower from head. You don’t want to get the toilet paper soggy every time you shower. That’s just gross.
4. Should have an easily accessible berth. The Sabre 36’s V berth was high. We jokingly talked about putting a trampoline under the berth to get in and out of it.
5. Must have a swim step. This makes it easier to get in and out of the dinghy. Neither boat before had a swim step, so you had to step onto the ladder from the dinghy. If we are going cruising, this is important.
6. Must not leak, have major trauma, have an engine with low engine hours, and have been well-maintained.
7. The engine must be accessible from all sides. Old Pru’s engine was in the floor, and that made it really difficult for David to maintain. See what I did there? I wasn’t going to lay on the floor to work on it.
8. Must be a well-built boat. This really narrowed the field. We love Sabre quality, but you pay for it. That leads me to …
9. Must be resellable. I firmly believe that if you spend money on quality, if you have to sell that item, it will resell. This is why we stay away from mass-produced boats, because there’s so many of them on the market, we will likely have trouble reselling. Selling a boat is hard enough as it is, so why would you make it harder on yourself?

With this list, it didn’t take long for us to realize we were looking for a Sabre 402.

We had first seen a Sabre 402 at Dustin’s KKMI-based shop a few years ago. The boat layout is almost perfect for a couple cruising, the galley is perfect, and the boat hit all of our requirements. This boat is also featured in Ferenc Mate’s “World’s Best Sailboats”, so it shouldn’t be hard to resell if we need to. The boat is also designed by Jim Taylor, who has done a lot of award-winning designs. He knows how to design boats.

In the last post, I did a basic “catch up” of the few months post-lockdown and how we find ourselves in Port Townsend, Washington at the end of 2020 and most of 2021.

In January of 2021, David starts school at the Port Townsend School of Woodworking. March 2021 begins the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding. All through David’s many months, he’s been getting up very early, and after bringing me coffee in bed, he is on Zoom running personal training sessions and every morning stretch classes. Then, he goes to school all day, and comes home and often cooks dinner. How I got so lucky in the husband department after so many years of being with losers is beyond me, but I’m lucky!

Since our Sabre 36 sold in February, we start looking for a new boat in March.

The real estate market is hot hot hot, and you can’t find houses to buy. As soon as one is listed, it sells and usually for way over asking price. This is the same situation in the boating market. The pandemic and social distancing has caused people who probably shouldn’t even be buying boats to buy boats. Some people are selling houses and dumping ALL of their money into large sailboats they move onto, go sailing around the world, only to realize they don’t know how to sail as soon as they own the boat. Other people are taking basic sailing classes and thinking they now have the ability to sail in the ocean. All in all, it’s crazy, and because of that, 36′ boats are almost non-existent to buy.

Let me clarify that. 36′ boats that we WANT are almost non-existent. There are still plenty of Catalinas, Hunters and Beneteaus to be had out there. And since we have a 36′ slip in Port Hadlock, that’s what we are looking for.

In April, I contact the marina and ask if we can be put on their waitlist for a 42′ slip. As luck would have it, she says, “I just had a 42′ slip open up today, do you want it?” Well yes, yes we do. Suddenly our options have opened up.

Or have they?

We keep our eyes open now for larger boats. The various boats we looked at include:

• Ohlson 38 – BEAUTIFUL, but at only 11′ beam, a bit too thin for us.
• Sabre 42 – local, but looks like a blown-up version of the last boat we had, and doesn’t really do much for either of us.
• Spectre 41 – could be a perfect boat for the PNW, but this one is in San Diego and the aft berth is not large enough.

It’s about this time that we start nailing down what’s important to us in a cruising sailboat.

Since the time David and I met, we’ve both been talking about going cruising. We came to the relationship independently wanting to cruise. My job is conducive to cruising too. Things start to line up, and we realize…

WE ARE IN OUR MID-50’s, and

IT’S TIME FOR US TO START HEADING TOWARDS THIS GOAL.

Or, as my uncle says “If not now, when”.

And that’s when we start coming up with the idea of what makes the perfect boat for us.

For everyone on this planet that is aware of the word “Covid”, the years 2020 and most of 2021 have been life-altering.

Just a quick rundown of what’s happened since the last post that was on this site:

• Sunday, March 8, 2020 – David and I purchase a Columbia 5.5 so we can race in the estuary, 3 people, with our friend Aaron.
• Friday, March 13, 2020 – I learn of this “tsunami” of Covid heading our way, and move my desk, computer and monitors back into our 1-bedroom condo. Unknown to David at the time, this was also his last day at work. Ever.
• Monday, March 16, 2020 – Covid lockdown in the Bay Area. We’ve been told we shouldn’t be leaving our homes, we shouldn’t be sailing, we shouldn’t be seeing our friends, and it’s impossible to find toilet paper suddenly. Within a week, David starts running stretch classes online, and I continue to work. In a 918 square foot condo with a fantastic view, we set up a studio for David in what was our dining room, and my office is between the living room and the kitchen. We work like this for 5 months, together all the time, both listening to each other work.
• Late March, 2020 – We start sailing our Columbia 5.5 together on the estuary. Around that same time, we start drinking more wine every night, because there’s nothing else to do but watch TV and drink wine.

April 2020 – David’s dad dies of Covid-19. Later that month we attend our first Zoom “funeral”, where David’s brother has taken dad’s ashes to the Gulf in Mississippi (where Ed was from).

May 2020 – Impromptu estuary races start, and we start sailing more on the estuary. We still have our 1987 Sabre 36 in Point Richmond, and we’re still working full-time out of our small condo in Point Richmond. We also start having regular happy hours with our friends on Zoom. Some friends are more Zoom-friendly than others.

At some point we start having weekly outdoor dinners with our friends Dustin and Holly, where we find a grassy area, bring a grill and our own food and wine, and sit 10 feet away from each other for dinner. This silly act became the high point of our lives!

August 2020 – Early in August, David is just finishing his 8a morning stretch class and I’m still reading the news. I say to him, “I have an idea.” (I do not know where this idea came from, but it was a weird shot in the brain.) I say, “hey, you’re always semi-jokingly talking about going to wooden boat school when you get older and retire. How about we sell out of the Bay Area, sell our condo, and move to Port Townsend (WA), and you can go to wooden boat school?” We were also betting on the fact that we were in a real estate boom that was just getting hotter by the minute, and we were living in a condo that was difficult to resell (we’d tried the year before so we could upgrade into a larger place). He calls a couple of people, and by noon that day we were ready to go. Never mind that David had never been to Port Townsend, it seemed like a good idea right? David applies for the Marine Systems intensive program, and we list our condo on the market again. We list it with the top seller in the complex, we stage it like she tells us to, and we move onto the boat. In late August, we go on a road trip to Port Townsend, and we discover a maritime culture and a beautiful quiet environment. Why not? On our way back from Port Townsend, the condo sells – full cash offer, 10 day close. We sign the contracts sitting outside of a cafe in Crescent City, and head back to Point Richmond to get things moving forward.

October 2020 – We arrive in Port Townsend, move into our massive Victorian rental in Uptown, and enjoy the next 2 weeks of weather… it was truly convertible weather… and then suddenly, just like that, the sun started going down at 4p and coming up at 930a. And it was dark. For many months. And it rained. For many months. It even snowed.

Two weeks after our arrival in Port Townsend, my mom and stepdad also arrive here and buy a house. We decide to wait on the house purchase, even though we are keeping our ears to the ground. Housing prices here are climbing, primarily due to the influx of Bay Area people. Plus, we’re still not sure we’re staying.

We continued to have happy hours with our friends, and weekly Zoom “dinners” with some of our closest friends, and still do to this day.

Read the next post on searching for sailboats… because that’s where we are now!

Meet our new (to us) but barely used Fatty Knees dinghy, “Dear”.

She kind of fell into our laps. We had a nutshell pram that I didn’t particularly care for as a dinghy – it felt unstable, didn’t have a motor mount, the dog didn’t like it, and it needed a centerboard (which had broken a few months ago). It didn’t tow very well either, which made it not really fun to take over to Angel Island, or anywhere else, for a weekend.

Anyway, our good friend Michael said he had a friend who had this dinghy sitting in her backyard that was collecting dust, and she wasn’t using it. She had bought it a few years back, sailed it once in Tomales Bay, and never again. At 8′, it came with the full sail kit. This dinghy new with the sail kit was $5500+, and we nabbed it for $1700! The sail kit folds up into a nice little package that fits into one of the lockers on the boat, which makes it super portable as a cruising dinghy. And, it’s incredible stable and solid, and even has classic New England lines.

These little dinghies are very popular on the east coast, just like the Sabres, so the two are a good match. You can read more about them here and Cruising World did an interesting article about inflatables or these dinghies back in 2013 here. We do have an outboard motor that came with the sailboat, but we’re not likely to use it, even though Dear has a motor mount.

Once we have her cleaned up next weekend, I’ll measure the transom, get the name ordered, and affix it myself.

We’re looking forward to many weekends and weeks “cruising” in the Bay, offshore, and who knows where else. Another piece to the puzzle.

We bought Prudence, our 1986 Sabre 36 CB, in December 2017. I’ve been remiss in putting up a blog, though it’s been on my mind a lot. I wanted to be open about what we were spending, upgrading, and our future plans for our boat, but I never did get around to putting the site together until now.

A little background for those that don’t know… I met David in December 2013 right after the America’s Cup in San Francisco had come to a close. David and I were both very active in the sailing community, but he being an avid racer and me being an avid cruiser, never did we meet. I’m not embarrassed to admit that we met on Match.com, even though 100 of our “closest friends” never did put us together. He had a 1978 Islander Freeport named “Prudence” (aka “Old Pru”). Prudence was actually a beautiful boat underneath all her projects. Between 2013 and 2017, David and I spent countless hours on her, working towards making her a proper living boat as well as sailing the heck out of her. I guess it became a bit of an obsession, and we enjoyed working on it together. I started to refer to her as “Boat University”. The breaking point on our love for Old Pru came when we found the “final leak” we had been chasing, and it was the portholes. Replacing the portholes because a massive project requiring Tyvek suits and grinders, and finally David was willing to let that relationship go and move on to a new healthier boat.

We fell in love with Sabre sailboats when we went cruising in Maine with David’s brother Mike and his wife Amanda. Amanda’s dad has a Sabre 38, and we spent a week with them sailing in and out of coves up the coast of Maine. Add to that both of our backgrounds with New England and it was a good match again. When Old Pru fell out of favor, we started looking at newer boats, focusing on Sabres in particular. It’s very difficult to find Sabres on the west coast, as they are hand-built and well-loved on the east coast.

We found “New Pru” in Seattle in December during a particularily long downpour, and she didn’t leak. Looking back, it may have been that one thing that really drew us in initially (well, that and the fact that she was an untouched, original Sabre, with no modifications at all other than having been maintained properly). We bought her (previous name “Austral”) in mid-December, telling each other she was a joint Christmas gift. I also had managed to sell Old Pru as a project boat in a 48 hour timespan at the end of November, with my primary objective of getting her out of our slip to get ready for a new boat that was for sure going to be here any day.

New Pru was delivered to KKMI from Seattle by truck in January. It was such an odd thing seeing our sailboat sitting on the back of a truck in the middle of one of our major roads around the corner from us. She spent a month in the yard getting new bottom paint, new thru-hulls (they were also original), new lifelines, new stern name applied, and a bunch of other small things just to make her ours. We had a christening party in the yard. Finally, she was splashed and arrived in her slip at Richmond Yacht Club at the end of January.

We’ve spent almost every weekend either sailing her or working on her, though there’s not a lot of work to do on her. I think after 4 years of the constant work on Old Pru, it felt like we needed to continue, but moving a paper towel rack or installing a hook aren’t really big projects. In the 10 months we’ve had her, we’ve only had to do one larger project, and Boat University kicked in again. It was a great experience, and we’re both glad that we worked together to replace the shift and throttle cables. We learned a lot about the aft end of the boat, and how it’s all put together.

We’re very happy with our new boat. Here’s hoping I can continue with the blogging from here on out, and updating when we do something consequential (or at least consequential to us).