The vertical learning curve

We now have Bella Gatto in her new home at Vero Beach City Marina, after an uneventful delivery trip from Merritt Island and are ready to begin the process of fitting her out the way we want her and learning her systems and how to maintain them and in general making her our own. 

We felt a year would be plenty of time to get this done, and decided we would wait until we were done to finally retire, on the theory that the cash flow from having jobs would come in handy (boy, were we right on that point). Good old Skipper Bob had some advice on fitting out that seemed sound – make a prioritized list of things you want to get done before taking delivery, while on the hard, before your first trial cruise, and finally before embarking on your full-time cruising lifestyle. I remember him writing something like: “if your list doesn’t contain at least 100 items, you’re aren’t trying hard enough.” That’s crazy, I thought, Bella Gatto is in excellent shape and pretty well equipped, we just need some monogrammed towels for the head and some nautical cocktail glasses for the galley and we are pretty much good to go. But lo and behold, when we started the list, it grew and grew, page after yellow legal pad page. Every time we would cross one item off, we would add two more, from mast head to keel and anchor windlass to dinghy davit. 

Our first major item was replacing the 12v refrigerator, which we knew from the survey (and from the fact that nothing happened when you turned it on) was inoperative. We had gotten an adjustment to the sale price from the seller on that, and were lucky enough to find a good used unit that was the exact same model for a lot less than the adjustment. This seemed like a job we could do ourselves, as the unit was self-contained and all we had to do was pull the old one out, slip the new one in, connect two wires and presto. But of course it was not quite that easy. Looking at the (big) refrigerator and the (small) companionway hatch was the first clue. Only by taking every bit of trim and every removable part off the refrigerator and taking the door, hatch, and door frame off the companionway were we able to squeeze the old one out and squeeze the new one in. But when we hooked up the new unit, it ran like a champ! 

Victory, but a cautionary tale on how every little project would always be much harder than first thought.  We did some more little confidence building projects that not even we could screw up, like new dock lines and anchor rode and replacing all the incandescent light bulbs with LEDs. We hired out a couple of big important jobs, like overhauling the two little Yanmar diesels and the generator (for about the cost of a good used car) and then we needed to take a breath. How do a couple of novices really know what we need and want anyway? Then we hit on our own system, a variation of trial and error, with lots of error. We would take a little trial cruise here and there, break a bunch of stuff, fix that stuff, and repeat. Slowly, ever so slowly, the list started to shrink.
   
 Everyone says a key to successful cruising is leaning how to fix things and do maintenance on your own, so I tried to tackle as much as I could. I thought I knew something about maintenance and repairs, having owned our little trailer boat for so many years. If I could swap out a bilge pump with with my head shoved down a tiny access hatch and my feet in the air, it will be so much easier on bigger boat where there is more room for everything, I thought. Stop laughing! Of course I was too dumb to realize that bigger boats have a lot more stuff crammed into them, and all that stuff is in the way of the stuff you are trying to get at. And big boats have things like generators and AC units that I know nothing at all about. At least the previous owner had saved  the instruction and repair manuals for just about everything, and helpfully organized them by throwing them all in a canvas sack in the bottom of a locker where they could grow a protective layer of mildew. 

The learning curve is so steep as to approach verticality, but I am beginning to learn. One new thing I am learning about is cleaning the bottom. With a trailer boat, the bottom stays shiny and pristine, but Bella Gatto's bottom and particularly the running gear grows an entire ecosystem in short order, despite reasonably recent bottom paint. The Indian River Lagoon where she is docked is a fertile breeding ground for all sorts of critters, and I swear on a quiet night I can hear them glomming on to the hull. It seems a monthly scrubbing is needed to keep it in check. At least this is one task I am qualified to tackle – I have been Scuba diving since I was a kid, and I’m not afraid of dark creepy water. Plus I have a degree in marine biology, so I have the added advantage of knowing the Latin names of all the flora and fauna I scrape off her bottom.

What’s in a name?

          Before any trivia like fitting out or leaning our new boat’s systems, we of course had to ponder the vital question of what to name her. So many things go in to a good name…it should reflect the boats mission, the owner’s personalities, it should be lucky, and it should fit on the transom. It should not have any cutesy little puns involving the words Knot, Reel, or Nauti (Knot Reely Nauti was right out) and please, nothing crass like Empty Pockets or Mom’s Mink. 

We were after something classy but not too pretentious, but not so classy that no one gets it. I remember the cautionary tale of the intellectual gentleman who named his beautiful new sportfisher Bucephalus, after Alexander the Great’s beloved war horse, upon whose mighty back he conquered the known world. Super classy and literary and all that, and a great name for a hard-charging offshore fish machine. But the owner kept the boat in the deep south, where there were far more fans of Hank Williams Jr. than of ancient Greek history. The poor fellow was driven to despair by the procession of dock walkers hollering up to him on the flybridge “Hey, you misspelled Bocephus!”

After much deliberation, we settled on Bella Gatto, Italian for “beautiful cat”. The name had it all – It reflected Jayne’s Italian heritage, gave a nod to our sea dog Bella, and had a touch of irony when applied to the slab-sided hunk of fiberglass that is the Endeavour Trawlercat (say what you will, WE think she is beautiful).

Honey, let’s buy a boat!

In a couple of years, the boat fund was getting fairly substantial. Time to go shopping. Our cruising plans in retirement were pretty typical – we wanted to do the Great Loop, spend a lot of time in the Bahamas, and migrate snowbird style up and down the east coast. From those plans, we made a list of the attributes we wanted our ideal boat to have. We wanted shallow draft and well protected running gear. We wanted low bridge clearance and walk-around side decks. We wanted good economy at displacement speed but also the ability to cruise 10-12 knots at need. We wanted a boat that could live independently at anchor without too much reliance on a generator. And the list went on and on.

In closing in on the ideal boat for us one of the best books I ever bought was Ed McKnew’s Boat Buyers Guide to Motor Yachts and Trawlers. It was a 2006 edition, but the boats in our price range were older than that anyway. Paging through the book looking at descriptions and floor plans, we made a list of boats that fit our criteria. Then off to Yachtworld (www.yachtworld.com) to search for those models, with the search filtered by our geographic area and price range. We spent close to two years kicking hulls and wasting the time of many a patient yacht broker. At the end of the process, we knew the model for us – the Endeavour 36 Trawlercat fit our needs to a “T” and examples were available in our price range. Endeavour made twenty six of the 36 Trawlercats from 1998 to 2005. Every so often we would see one pop up on Yachtworld and we would go see her. But now when we went to look at a boat, we were looking with checkbook in hand. We of course fell in love with the very first candidate. After doing the offer/counteroffer dance, in what seemed like the blink of an eye we had a deal, for a whole $1000 less than our price limit. A bit dazed, we arranged for the survey and sea trial.

The survey was a bucket of cold water in the face for two rookie buyers who already loved the boat and thought she was perfect. Of course no boat is perfect, and any 17 year old boat is going to have some deficiencies. But the survey process did provide time for reflection, and we came to realize perhaps in our enthusiasm we had been a bit hasty. When we looked at the list of things we needed to go to get the boat cruise ready, including major items like a tender and adding a generator, we had to admit we had bitten off more than we could chew financially, and we reluctantly decided to pass and wait for the next opportunity.

That next opportunity popped up sooner and closer to home than expected. On Craigslist, of all places, I found another 2000 Trawlercat 36 for sale in Merritt Island, just an hour or so up the coast. We were very reluctant at first to consider a boat on Craigslist. For newbies like us, a for sale by owner deal was intimidating, with no broker to hold our hands and guide us through the process. But we quickly built a rapport with the seller and together we made it work do-it-yourself style. I downloaded a standard Offer to Purchase form off the web, and we modified it to fit a private party sale. We agreed on a deposit to accompany our offer and how to handle it, and we were able to come to an agreement on price over the phone. 

And just like that, less than a week after passing on the first deal, we had found an almost identical boat, better equipped with a tender, generator, and more modern electronics for an agreed price of twelve thousand dollars less. It was a rebound relationship, but we were in love all over again! Our offer to purchase was of course subject to sea trial and survey, and of course the survey came back with some deficiencies. But our recent experience with the first deal gave us a more realistic picture of what to expect from a survey, and at least some vague idea of how to proceed from there. Lacking a buyers broker to negotiate with a listing broker, we prepared a letter to the seller listing the survey items we wanted him to address. When we came to agreement on those, we both signed the letter, which we incorporated into the Offer to Purchase, and we set a closing date. We were able to find an online site (www.marinetitle.com) to search the title and lien history on the boat but it still felt like a leap of faith when we went up to Merritt Island with our cashiers check in our hand and our hearts in our throats to conclude the deal. At least our transaction was  less complicated than most since the boat we were buying was state titled rather than documented, so we did not have to navigate that process. We did not finance the purchase, so that removed another layer of complexity from the deal.

Expectant parents were never prouder as we made all the arrangements for insurance and dockage and a hundred other details before we could bring baby home. The first step to becoming a cruising couple was done!