After a few months of unproductive visits to the boat almost 100 miles away, the time came to get her in the water and home.  When you buy a boat that is already stored for the winter, typically the previous owner will have the storage paid up until the spring or early summer.  Launch fees are typically included.  This was the case with Winsum Wind and it was a welcomed surprise.  I set a date of May 28th to go in the water and it seemed that I might be able to get it home without spending any money.

In my last post you saw the bilge water.  The marina told me it would be about 1 hour of labor to get it cleaned out and get the hoses blown out hopefully making the bilge pumps work.  At $80/hour I decided it was worth it to get that junk out of there and possibly have working pumps.  They got the bilgewater out and the electric pump worked, but the manual didn't.  So much for getting her home without spending money.

About 3 weeks from launch day it rapidly dawned on me that there were a lot of things that needed to be taken care of.  The bottom needed to be painted, I needed to locate all of the running rigging, get the sails up there and find any hardware needed to get the thing sailing.  The part giving me the most heartburn was that I had never powered the boat up.  I had no idea if the lights on the mast, bow, stern or in the cabin worked.  I had no idea if my radio worked or if the depth meter and log worked.  I suddenly felt panicked and needed to get up there and kick some butt.

I decided the first thing that needed to be done was getting bottom paint on.  That was needed before she went in the water and I had a week of free dockage after she went in the water before I had to leave the marina so I figured I could sort out the other stuff.  I did some quick research on bottom paint and decided that the previous bottom coating was VC-17.  My basis for this theory was that the paint on there currently was black.  This is not a very solid theory, but seemed logical.  The rule for bottom paint is that you can put a heavier paint over a lighter paint, but not a lighter paint over heavier stuff.  VC-17 is the thinnest lightest thing you can get and also the easiest to apply so I gambled and bought two cans of it.

I drove up to the boat and decided I could prep the bottom just with a hose and scrub brush.  I sprayed down the bottom and then proceeded to scrub.  After a good hour of scrubbing I decided to scrub the topsides as well.  A little tip, start your cleaning at the top of the boat if you intend on cleaning the whole boat.  All that junk on the decking or topsides just rolls down and sticks to your hull.  So I scrubbed it AGAIN.

The paint mixing was a hassle.  It wouldn't have been so bad but I cut open the plastic bag of copper powder in 10 mph winds.  It got everywhere.  It was on my hands, in my hair, in the bed of my truck and all over the puddles of water surrounding the boat.  Anyway, the paint went on super thin and was very easy to deal with.  You lose a ton of paint painting the roller tray which was frustrating, but I was able to paint both sides with one decent coat with two cans of VC-17 on a 29 foot boat.

When I was done, she looked great!

I felt much less nervous after getting this done because now she could at least go in the water without much worry.  The rest could wait at least a week before it had to get done.

After a week of thinking I also decided to have them install the manual pump.  The pump itself cost me $150 bucks and another hour of labor.  So much for getting the boat home without dropping any cash.  I also decided that since I didn't know whether or not the radio worked that I should buy a handheld.  This would give me communication even if we lost power or had to abandon ship.  I picked up a Standard Horizon s200 for $100.

After much dreaming, scheming, obsessing, searching, waffling, and saving I now own a 1970 Bristol 29.  I thought that I really knew what to look for when buying an older sailboat.  I read every buyer's guide and every book I could get my hands on.  The truth, for me at least, turns out to be that you don't know how to find a potential problem until you've had to deal with it as there's no real basis for comparison.  This of course varies by person, but I'm the type to easily overlook things until it's staring me in the face.  On the other hand, I'm also a person who tends to want everything perfect when I take on a project.  This will probably prove out to be an expensive combination in the end, but certainly one that will teach me a lot.  I'm only 5 months into good old boat ownership and I would take a whole different look at a potential sailboat purchase than I did 5 months ago.

I've already learned that a project list is a very fluid and dynamic entity.  At the onset, I started with some very superficial things like cushions and deck cleaning and now I'm down to nitty gritty things like removable mounting brackets for a bilge pump, new junction panel for the shore power unit, and the removal extranneous deck fittings.  The project list seems intimately linked with the discovery of problems.  When buying the boat I went in with very rosey glasses and didn't think much of the little things.  Since, I've come to realize that all of these little things really add up.  Every time I get on the boat I find five new things that need to be fixed.  It's a little bit disheartening, but I'm coming to see that certain things you have to live with and certain things you have to fix.

Below is a list of things that I've discovered since buying the boat that I had very little, if any awareness of going into the purchase:

Chainplate supports - I had an idea that these needed attention, but became aware of new things as I looked closer.  You'll see in this photo that the bolts on the fore lower chainplate (lower shroud) has pulled up some and then someone cranked it down to tighten it.  Note the unpainted threads on the bolt.

Leaks -- I think of boats and leaks together as not good, but I'm finding it's an unfortunate reality of boats, particularly older ones.  I really don't know the extent of leaking on this boat as it's currently on jack stands in a parking lot.  I know it leaks from somewhere up above as after a rain storm the head gets full of water.  I've inspected the interior of the topsides and haven't found any evidence of this water coming from the chainplates or the hull-to-deck joint.  I've heard that the B29 has an open masthead and is subject to leaks in the mast step where the wiring goes through the cabin top.  The previous owner drilled a hole in the cabin-top liner in the head to keep water from building up too much and it appears as though that is where the water in the head is coming from.  I'm fully expecting to find many more when I get her out on the water.

Pumps -- In my opinion, which isn't worth much, the only thing more important than hull integrity on a boat is the ability to remove water from the interior.  Winsum Wind is equipped with two fixed pumps, one electric and one manual along with a simple plastic pump that can be taken anywhere for quick water removal. Neither the fixed manual pump nor the electric pump can remove water from the bilge.  After inspecting the bilge area I found that the bilge water was full of murky gunk and chunks that are likely clogging the hoses.  It is my hope that these pumps function, but simply need to be cleared of gunk.  I'll be able to update that answer very soon.  Here is what my bilge looks like:  WARNING - The following content may be disturbing to some viewers.

I think I'd take a drink out of the Milwaukee River before that.

Electrics --  This is an area that I'm still uncovering as you read.  There are so many things run on this boat.  Someone hooked up a cheap flexible solar panel in the aft lazarette and the wiring runs darn near to the bottom of the boat.  There's a shore power unit, a fancy battery charger and AC/DC inverter, battery isolator, battery bank switch, electric water pumps, AC 120 outlets that look suspect, lights and unterminated wires hanging everywhere. I have so much to track down and I don't even know how I would have tested everything before purchasing.  I don't even know that a surveyor could properly test the amount of electrics that some boats, including this one maintain.

There's much more I know of, and a whole lot more I don't know of.  I'll be adding more as I discover them and hopefully you'll start to see some progress in repairs rather than just posts about all the things that are wrong.

After learning to sail, the next phase was to find a boat.  I'd had enough of crewing aboard other people's boats.  While it's great experience, it just isn't the same as having my very own boat.  I don't know if it's because I long for the freedom of being able to go out on my own, or if it's the same anxiety I get when I go out with strangers for a night on the town without my own car and being stuck at the mercy of other people's ambitions for the evening.  I like to think it's just because I have long since dreamed of single-handing and spending nights under the stars instead :)

I began my research into the right boat by doing some searches on the Internet about single-handed sailors.  The first site I came across was http://www.atomvoyages.com.  James Baldwin wrote all about his sailing adventures in his Pearson Triton named "Atom" and I was hooked.  I read everything he recommended and studied up on a lot of other sailors similar to his style.  The cruising style of Baldwin and others like him is to find affordable, old, sturdy boats with full keels, heavy displacements and shallow drafts.  The reasons are many and very logical for this style of boat.  I will not go into the reasons here as you may as well read it where I read it: http://www.atomvoyages.com/articles/boatlist.htm.

After reading through a lot of his material and researching each and every boat on his list, I came to realize that I learned to sail on a boat designed by the grandfather of these boat designs, Carl Alberg.  The Milwaukee Community Sailing Center has a large fleet of Pearson Ensigns which are spectacular little boats.

This pretty much sealed the deal.  I had sailed on some racing boats like the J/24 and the Merit 25 and didn't like them one bit.  The light displacement and flat bottoms made for an unsettled feeling in the water and made me seasick in rough seas.  I was going to find myself a nice heavy displacement "Good Old Boat".  I had no idea it would take the amount of time and compromises that it actually wound up taking.

Early on in my searches I had thought that a Pearson Triton would be a natural best choice.  There were plenty online, but most of them were on the East coast.  No problem!  Right?  I'll just have it hauled home!  Wrong!  While the cost of trucking the boat half way across the country is enough reason to not do it, you have a ton of other costs and considerations.  You have to fly to the location to see the boat, pay for accomodations, food, car rental and then find a local surveyor as I would want to do with a saltwater boat in the elements all year long.  Not only that, but you have to ready the boat for transport yourself.  This means getting it hauled out, fluids drained, everything stowed, and on and on.  Pay someone to do it all for you or fly out there again.

Okay - I need to find a boat on the Great Lakes and the closer to home the better.  Somehow I stumbled across an old Pearson Commander sitting right in my lap here in Milwaukee.  I called up Gene and he told me to come have a look.  I went to see it in a snowstorm and it was a challenge getting up the ladder and aboard.  It's a neat old boat, but unfortunately needed a little more TLC than I had to give being in school and with a pregnant wife.  I thought a lot about the boat and almost talked myself into it a few times, but eventually swung the other way.

Now I'm thinking, "these old boats are all going to need so much work and more attention than I can give".  I sailed on a Catalina 30 and really loved how roomy the interior was so now I set my sites on one of those.  Not only are they expensive, but they are not the greatest construction, have lots of problems with leaks, and have a fiberglass liner throughout restricting access to the hull and hiding all sorts of potential problems.  This is all notwithstanding that a 30 foot boat with an 11 foot plus beam sails like shit in anything but the calmest of seas.

Okay, I want a good old boat that I can afford that doesn't need much work.  I subscribed to all the theories about engines, layouts, rigs, hull designs, and you name it and decided that a Cape Dory was the answer.  Newer boat of solid construction with a great design.  Call up Gene again who's got a nice CD 28 on his list of brokered boats.  Diesel engine, full keel, good sized cockpit, dual settee layout.  V-berth is useless for anything but storage and the windows are so tiny I feel like I'm closed in a box, but still I could handle this.  Foiled again!  I didn't have that kind of money.

Next I decided that a Cape Dory 25 was perfect.  Outboard motor, small enough to fit on a trailer and sitll a pretty good design.  I found one for sale and took her out for a sea trial.  The outboard was ridiculously loud.  My wife would never stand for this.  She sailed beautifully though!  Went below and good lord is this thing cramped.  You don't realize how important standing headroom is in a boat until you get in one that doesn't have it on a rough day at sea.  Nice boat, but still not for me.

About this same time I was also seriously looking at a Pearson Ariel.  She was a great looking boat, but everything was original.  The decks needed to be redone, the keel void was leaking goop even though it was out of the water for several years.  I loved the boat and really felt like it was the one, but it just wasn't.

I stumbled across a Bristol 29 just around the time I decided to hang up my boat shopping shoes for the winter.  I figured I'd look at one more boat.  I went up and had a look and she was in much nicer shape than all the other "Good Old Boats" I'd seen.  New paint, new winches, new sails and all sorts of other extra gear.  She needed some cleaning up, but not bad.  I went home and didn't really have a dying urge to buy her, but felt like it was a nice boat.  A couple of weeks passed and I started thinking about the layout.  It was a dinette and I wasn't (still am not) really fond of that.  The boat also had an atomic 4, but so did almost every other boat that I looked at other than those with outboards and those things are friggin loud!

What the heck, I'll put in a lowball offer and see what happens.  If he rejects, I'll just see what's around come spring and if he accepts then I got me a boat!  Well, I got me a boat!

I've long been fascinated by the water and boats.  When I was 14 I tried to build a boat in my parent's garage.  It was made of 2x4's and 1/2" plywood.  When complete, it was too heavy for me to lift even with my father's help, so after some hard lessons learned, we turned it back into the scrap wood it was before.

As I remember, I began dreaming about sailboats at about the age of 18.  I had read or seen something on television about Lord Howe Island off the eastern coast of Australia.  For whatever reason I fixated on this place and decided I would one day sail there in my own boat.  I moved out to Los Angeles around this time and eventually on to San Francisco.  Along the way out there I met Lance, who did the Queen's Cup with us this year and was the best man at my wedding.  We talked about boats and dreamed about living aboard, but it was little more than talk.

After running out of money and patience with my girlfriend at the time, I moved back home to Wisconsin.  I returned to school and eventually moved here to Milwaukee in 2001.  By this time I had a stable career, and life was beginning to take hold of me a bit.

After coming back home and readjusting to life in the north perspectives and plans changed.  Lord Howe Island lost its allure after reading about the difficulties getting through the Panama Canal, and the fact that the island itself is not altogether exotic or of historic significance.  I have long been interested in ancient history and have read numerous books on various subjects.  There's something amazing about being somewhere where so many significant cultural events occurred so many years ago.  Over time my sailing dream evolved into touring the Mediterannean.  There is so much history there and so many things I feel a person should see before leaving this Earth.  I've since reset my sailing plan to be a 1 or 1 1/2 year leave of absence from work and sail solo across the Atlantic, meeting my wife at Gibraltor and touring the sites of the ancient world at our leisure.  No schedules, no hotels.  We'll just go where we want when we want.

It seems as though the ties that bind are a fabulous motivator for grabbing hold of your dreams and making them happen.  With a car payment, and a 9to5 I decided to learn to sail and put this dream that had been bouncing around in my head for so long in action.  I began at the Milwaukee Sailing Center and found the classes incredibly valuable.  I knew it would be a slow process and I'm in no huge hurry.  I plan to get a seaworthy boat and fix her up as best I can.  I will take some extended cruises on it and see what happens from there.

I have been in Milwaukee since 2001 and have continued to sail a little more each summer, save for this last season as my little girl Katie was born.  Her needs combined with school, work and a household left little time for sailing, but this coming season should prove different as Katie will be a bit older, I will be done with school and we'll have a better handle of our household projects.

SEE YOU OUT THERE!