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.
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.
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