OK, here's the first stage ... a copy of all (3) of the posts that I had on the other iteration.
And more catching up
This is going to take forever. Part of the problem is that every
time I think of jumping on to put up a quick post I think: “then I’ll
have to do all that catching up, and it wont be in the right order …
blah blah” and it all gets to be too difficult. So I’m going to try to
fly through the catch up, just to get up to date.
I looked at three boats in and around LA. None were all that exciting, though one, a CAL 34, was priced pretty well, but was at the very oldest age I wanted to go with at 1978. I am, it seems, attempting to do this exercise with just below the sensible minimum of finances. There are several good boats around, at about $5000 over the maximum that I can scrape together.
I had seen a Yorktown 39 listed in San Francisico, and decided to go up and have a look. It’s about 560 km each way, so I figured I’d get away early and look at it that afternoon, flop into a motel that night and look at some other boats the next day. Nothing doing. Getting out of LA takes almost as long as the rest … no it doesn’t, it just feels like it. And it did blow my schedule.
Now I knew nothing about the Yorktowns. I had seem them listed and the descriptions were usually what you’d expect. Well, what I’d expect is probably more relevant, isn’t it? So I spent the night before reading up on them. Oh dear. It seems that most of them were sold as kit boats and the quality of the work done by the owners that finished them off ranges from oh-my-god-awful to that’s-brilliant … err … brilliant. On top of that the build-quality of the hulls, which were built by the factory as part of the kit process, varied widely. The chappy who set up the factory knew nothing about building boats. He was a 1950s TV actor. Of course he was.
The trip was uneventful though interesting enough as I realised that on my last visit to the US I had never ventured out of Los Angeles and Oxnard. So that was a good thing to do. The route that I … well, my GPS had selected went through miles and miles of orchard and other crop farming areas. I hadn’t ever thought that there were garlic farms, but there they were. And they had a sign out offering garlic wine for drinking. I didn’t stop. But I did realise at one point that this could be the country-side that Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath family was heading for. It is one of the recurring themes of my travels here that I often recognise names and places from TV, movies and books.
The boat turned out to be a difficult case to decide on. In the end it came down to my reservations about the hull build, and in particular the keel bolts. Now keel bolts are often a cause for concern. They spend most of theirs lives with salt water sloshing around them, and other rust-causing factors. If they are severely corroded it can cause really serious problems, and they are difficult and therefore expensive to fix. But corrosion wasn’t the problem this time. They were too thin. (All the old salts are laughing at this point.) Yup … the builder had compromised on the thickness of the keel bolts. They were about the thickness of my thumb, and I don’t have fat thumbs! And I could only find five of them And this on a pretty heavy 39 foot boat. They appeared to have lasted alright, but I just couldn’t get over the thought that there was a couple of tons of ballast hanging off the other end of them. And if the builder had gone for thinner ones to save a couple of dollars, then it’s a pretty sure bet that he had gone for shorter ones too, saving another five dollars. In the end I apologetically explained my reservations to the guy selling it, and he scratched his head and shrugged. He was more interested in what I was planning to do than with missing out on the sale.
It’s not unusual actually. I have always had “Oh wow, that great/awesome/insane” type responses when I answer the quite normal questions about what is an Australian doing buying a boat in California. It sometimes becomes quite a distraction from talking about whatever boat I’m looking at. In the end they have all wished me lots of luck and so on, even if I’ve already said that I don’t think I can use their boat for the journey.
So having passed on the Yorktown I rang the other boats that I had short-listed for San Francisco. Not one of them was still available. Nothing. Zip. Nada. “Oh … OK, guess I had back towards LA” in the morning I thought. Spent the night looking at boats for sale listings, and I came across a quite unusual boat, listed on eBay. A beautiful old steel ketch with an amazing history. It was, so the story went, built in Germany as a training vessel back in 1928. Then it tuned up in Poland after the war, where it was eventually acquired and restored by a group of Communist Party officials who then used it to defect to Denmark. The Danes impounded it and eventually it ended up in Oregon, 300 odd miles to the north of me. But not only was it a remarkable history, it was 56 feet long, ketch rigged and had been almost completely re-built a couple of years earlier. I shrugged and forgot about it. Back to LA I went.
Eventually I saw a 1982 Hunter 34 listed within my dollar limits. Had a look at it and was pretty impressed with the condition it was in. But it was a Hunter. There is a school of thought that says that Hunters are a bit too ‘lightweight’ for blue water passage making. It’s not about their weight though, it’s about the build quality and design. They are, I believe, possibly judged a little harshly. They are certainly adequate coastal cruisers, but I do have to respect the weight of older and wiser sailor’s opinions. But … I figured if I was super careful to avoid undue stress on the boat then I could get it home, and probably sell it for a small profit, and get back here with that little bit more capital that I’m lacking.
So I rang the guy back and lined up a date to do a ‘sea trial’. Buying boats here is usually split up into 4 stages. Initial inspection, Sea trial, Haggling and then Handshakes-and-signatures. Sometimes the Haggling stage is split into before and after the Sea trial. That seems a bit odd to me, but I have had brokers say they wont organise a Sea trial until an acceptable offer is made. The offer is, they assure me, ‘of course’ negotiable on the outcome of the Sea trial and survey. So what’s the bloody point, I wonder. But I’m not the one calling the shots, and that’s how it is sometimes done. In this case the owner was happy to arrange it without the formality of an offer.
The sea trial however couldn’t be lined up till 3 days later. So obviously I’m still browsing boat listings and eBay and so on. and I found myself thinking about that old steel ketch. On eBay. That no one had even bid on yet. Dammit. Next day I rang the Hunter owner, apologised that something had come up, and I’d be in touch in a couple of days. Rang the guy selling the ketch and jumped in my car, back up the same road I had just come down from San Francisco. Back through the orchards. passed the turn off to San Francisco. And into the mountain ranges that I didn’t even know were there. I came around a bend in there in front of me is a snow covered peak against a blue sky framed by hills covered in mountain pines. I laughed out loud because it was such a post-card image.
A while later I was driving through the southern part of Oregon, and had another “what does this remind me of?” moment. The scenery, the architecture the houses … oh, yeah, ‘The Bridges of Madison County’. A while later I came around a bend and there was a bridge-house over the river next to the ‘new’ road.
That’s enough for now, I guess. I’ve just spent over an hour trying to add three pictures to this post and I’m getting the sh… gosh, is that the time?
Apparently tens of thousands of users are really happy with Word Press to publish their blogs. I find it to be awkward, unintuitive and really really crap. (Yes, that is the technical term.) I’m going to investigate a new editing package.
I looked at three boats in and around LA. None were all that exciting, though one, a CAL 34, was priced pretty well, but was at the very oldest age I wanted to go with at 1978. I am, it seems, attempting to do this exercise with just below the sensible minimum of finances. There are several good boats around, at about $5000 over the maximum that I can scrape together.
I had seen a Yorktown 39 listed in San Francisico, and decided to go up and have a look. It’s about 560 km each way, so I figured I’d get away early and look at it that afternoon, flop into a motel that night and look at some other boats the next day. Nothing doing. Getting out of LA takes almost as long as the rest … no it doesn’t, it just feels like it. And it did blow my schedule.
Now I knew nothing about the Yorktowns. I had seem them listed and the descriptions were usually what you’d expect. Well, what I’d expect is probably more relevant, isn’t it? So I spent the night before reading up on them. Oh dear. It seems that most of them were sold as kit boats and the quality of the work done by the owners that finished them off ranges from oh-my-god-awful to that’s-brilliant … err … brilliant. On top of that the build-quality of the hulls, which were built by the factory as part of the kit process, varied widely. The chappy who set up the factory knew nothing about building boats. He was a 1950s TV actor. Of course he was.
The trip was uneventful though interesting enough as I realised that on my last visit to the US I had never ventured out of Los Angeles and Oxnard. So that was a good thing to do. The route that I … well, my GPS had selected went through miles and miles of orchard and other crop farming areas. I hadn’t ever thought that there were garlic farms, but there they were. And they had a sign out offering garlic wine for drinking. I didn’t stop. But I did realise at one point that this could be the country-side that Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath family was heading for. It is one of the recurring themes of my travels here that I often recognise names and places from TV, movies and books.
The boat turned out to be a difficult case to decide on. In the end it came down to my reservations about the hull build, and in particular the keel bolts. Now keel bolts are often a cause for concern. They spend most of theirs lives with salt water sloshing around them, and other rust-causing factors. If they are severely corroded it can cause really serious problems, and they are difficult and therefore expensive to fix. But corrosion wasn’t the problem this time. They were too thin. (All the old salts are laughing at this point.) Yup … the builder had compromised on the thickness of the keel bolts. They were about the thickness of my thumb, and I don’t have fat thumbs! And I could only find five of them And this on a pretty heavy 39 foot boat. They appeared to have lasted alright, but I just couldn’t get over the thought that there was a couple of tons of ballast hanging off the other end of them. And if the builder had gone for thinner ones to save a couple of dollars, then it’s a pretty sure bet that he had gone for shorter ones too, saving another five dollars. In the end I apologetically explained my reservations to the guy selling it, and he scratched his head and shrugged. He was more interested in what I was planning to do than with missing out on the sale.
It’s not unusual actually. I have always had “Oh wow, that great/awesome/insane” type responses when I answer the quite normal questions about what is an Australian doing buying a boat in California. It sometimes becomes quite a distraction from talking about whatever boat I’m looking at. In the end they have all wished me lots of luck and so on, even if I’ve already said that I don’t think I can use their boat for the journey.
So having passed on the Yorktown I rang the other boats that I had short-listed for San Francisco. Not one of them was still available. Nothing. Zip. Nada. “Oh … OK, guess I had back towards LA” in the morning I thought. Spent the night looking at boats for sale listings, and I came across a quite unusual boat, listed on eBay. A beautiful old steel ketch with an amazing history. It was, so the story went, built in Germany as a training vessel back in 1928. Then it tuned up in Poland after the war, where it was eventually acquired and restored by a group of Communist Party officials who then used it to defect to Denmark. The Danes impounded it and eventually it ended up in Oregon, 300 odd miles to the north of me. But not only was it a remarkable history, it was 56 feet long, ketch rigged and had been almost completely re-built a couple of years earlier. I shrugged and forgot about it. Back to LA I went.
Eventually I saw a 1982 Hunter 34 listed within my dollar limits. Had a look at it and was pretty impressed with the condition it was in. But it was a Hunter. There is a school of thought that says that Hunters are a bit too ‘lightweight’ for blue water passage making. It’s not about their weight though, it’s about the build quality and design. They are, I believe, possibly judged a little harshly. They are certainly adequate coastal cruisers, but I do have to respect the weight of older and wiser sailor’s opinions. But … I figured if I was super careful to avoid undue stress on the boat then I could get it home, and probably sell it for a small profit, and get back here with that little bit more capital that I’m lacking.
So I rang the guy back and lined up a date to do a ‘sea trial’. Buying boats here is usually split up into 4 stages. Initial inspection, Sea trial, Haggling and then Handshakes-and-signatures. Sometimes the Haggling stage is split into before and after the Sea trial. That seems a bit odd to me, but I have had brokers say they wont organise a Sea trial until an acceptable offer is made. The offer is, they assure me, ‘of course’ negotiable on the outcome of the Sea trial and survey. So what’s the bloody point, I wonder. But I’m not the one calling the shots, and that’s how it is sometimes done. In this case the owner was happy to arrange it without the formality of an offer.
The sea trial however couldn’t be lined up till 3 days later. So obviously I’m still browsing boat listings and eBay and so on. and I found myself thinking about that old steel ketch. On eBay. That no one had even bid on yet. Dammit. Next day I rang the Hunter owner, apologised that something had come up, and I’d be in touch in a couple of days. Rang the guy selling the ketch and jumped in my car, back up the same road I had just come down from San Francisco. Back through the orchards. passed the turn off to San Francisco. And into the mountain ranges that I didn’t even know were there. I came around a bend in there in front of me is a snow covered peak against a blue sky framed by hills covered in mountain pines. I laughed out loud because it was such a post-card image.
A while later I was driving through the southern part of Oregon, and had another “what does this remind me of?” moment. The scenery, the architecture the houses … oh, yeah, ‘The Bridges of Madison County’. A while later I came around a bend and there was a bridge-house over the river next to the ‘new’ road.
That’s enough for now, I guess. I’ve just spent over an hour trying to add three pictures to this post and I’m getting the sh… gosh, is that the time?
Apparently tens of thousands of users are really happy with Word Press to publish their blogs. I find it to be awkward, unintuitive and really really crap. (Yes, that is the technical term.) I’m going to investigate a new editing package.
Catching Up.
So let me start by apologising for the late start. Thing have been
happening and one way or another I haven’t been in a position to do the
bloggy stuff. But hopefully I can rectify some of that.
First up, any readers that aren’t familiar with the background of ‘Project Sinbad’ should probably hike over to the section titled ‘History’, which will, when I get around to writing it, fill in the back story a bit.
Now, how far back do I have to go to bring “Sinbad Mk II” up to speed? Let’s see … flew out of Melbourne on the 28th of September, no misadventures to report. Got through the US arrival process with a minimum of stress (as far as these can be stress minimal), had a minor argument at the car rental place …
Car rental businesses. For goodness sake! Travellers, my advice is to be wary of those two-bob (or two-bit, as my current national hosts would say) internet sites that promise fabulously cheap car rentals. On arrival you will find that the car rental company has quite different ideas about what “all inclusive” or “zero excess” means. I was, for instance, offered “medical and vandalisation cover”, because the ‘regular’ insurance wouldn’t cover the costs if somebody graffitied the car. But I couldn’t get it without the medical, which is why it cost some outrageous amount per day. And I didn’t need medical, because that’s what I have travel insurance for. Then there was some other optional cover that it was “illegal to drive without in California” said the smiling assassin behind the desk. “Then it’s not really optional, is it?” I pondered in a fairly loud sotto voce. “Oh, we can’t make you take it”. Welcome to America. Oh and the zero excess comprehensive on the car … doesn’t cover damage to any other car, thing or person that you might catastrophically intersect with, prang into or run over. In short it might cost more to book it directly with a car rental company, but you’ll be more likely to know how much it is going to cost.
Anyway … off to my super-cheap (inernet booked) hotel I went in my rented-from-one-company-but-owned-by-another-company Dawdge Avenja. The Dodge, I must say, was a pleasant surprise. With 50 thousand plus miles on it it was still in remarkably good order. No, seriously, I’m not being sarcastic. It was a nice, medium sized good looking, comfortable car to drive, with reasonable performance and decent fuel economy. I liked it so much I bought the company.* But it was owned by one of the major rental companies (starts with H) and I rented it from another company. I assume it was owned by H because the key ring said so, and it had one of H’s branded GPS devices in it. Which I didn’t order, so didn’t pay for. But turned it on out of curiousity when I couldn’t find my hotel, and it worked. Found my way to the hotel shortly thereafter, thanks H.
The super-cheap internet booked hotel was exactly as advertised. Not the worst I’ve stayed in, before or since. The only downside was that it was right next to the freeway, so traffic noise was a tad intrusive, but not horrendously so. It was clean, it had a bed, and it didn’t have bars on the windows. It’ll do me.
So that was my second Sunday morning in the same day written off, and I was a tad bleary-eyed, so I gave myself the third half of the day off. Next day I tracked down a cheap pre-paid phone service, and started calling the brokers on my short list and some of my contacts from Sinbad Mk I.
Unlike Mk I though, most of the boats had sold since I short-listed them, and the brokers had nothing similar to suggest. Hmm … things have apparently changed in the US boat market since I was last here, I thought to myself, as comfortable as ever with stating the bloody obvious.
I’m off to bed now. I’ll pick this up again soon. No really, I will. Probably.
* No I didn’t. That was a joke referencing some old TV advert.
First up, any readers that aren’t familiar with the background of ‘Project Sinbad’ should probably hike over to the section titled ‘History’, which will, when I get around to writing it, fill in the back story a bit.
Now, how far back do I have to go to bring “Sinbad Mk II” up to speed? Let’s see … flew out of Melbourne on the 28th of September, no misadventures to report. Got through the US arrival process with a minimum of stress (as far as these can be stress minimal), had a minor argument at the car rental place …
Car rental businesses. For goodness sake! Travellers, my advice is to be wary of those two-bob (or two-bit, as my current national hosts would say) internet sites that promise fabulously cheap car rentals. On arrival you will find that the car rental company has quite different ideas about what “all inclusive” or “zero excess” means. I was, for instance, offered “medical and vandalisation cover”, because the ‘regular’ insurance wouldn’t cover the costs if somebody graffitied the car. But I couldn’t get it without the medical, which is why it cost some outrageous amount per day. And I didn’t need medical, because that’s what I have travel insurance for. Then there was some other optional cover that it was “illegal to drive without in California” said the smiling assassin behind the desk. “Then it’s not really optional, is it?” I pondered in a fairly loud sotto voce. “Oh, we can’t make you take it”. Welcome to America. Oh and the zero excess comprehensive on the car … doesn’t cover damage to any other car, thing or person that you might catastrophically intersect with, prang into or run over. In short it might cost more to book it directly with a car rental company, but you’ll be more likely to know how much it is going to cost.
Anyway … off to my super-cheap (inernet booked) hotel I went in my rented-from-one-company-but-owned-by-another-company Dawdge Avenja. The Dodge, I must say, was a pleasant surprise. With 50 thousand plus miles on it it was still in remarkably good order. No, seriously, I’m not being sarcastic. It was a nice, medium sized good looking, comfortable car to drive, with reasonable performance and decent fuel economy. I liked it so much I bought the company.* But it was owned by one of the major rental companies (starts with H) and I rented it from another company. I assume it was owned by H because the key ring said so, and it had one of H’s branded GPS devices in it. Which I didn’t order, so didn’t pay for. But turned it on out of curiousity when I couldn’t find my hotel, and it worked. Found my way to the hotel shortly thereafter, thanks H.
The super-cheap internet booked hotel was exactly as advertised. Not the worst I’ve stayed in, before or since. The only downside was that it was right next to the freeway, so traffic noise was a tad intrusive, but not horrendously so. It was clean, it had a bed, and it didn’t have bars on the windows. It’ll do me.
So that was my second Sunday morning in the same day written off, and I was a tad bleary-eyed, so I gave myself the third half of the day off. Next day I tracked down a cheap pre-paid phone service, and started calling the brokers on my short list and some of my contacts from Sinbad Mk I.
Unlike Mk I though, most of the boats had sold since I short-listed them, and the brokers had nothing similar to suggest. Hmm … things have apparently changed in the US boat market since I was last here, I thought to myself, as comfortable as ever with stating the bloody obvious.
I’m off to bed now. I’ll pick this up again soon. No really, I will. Probably.
* No I didn’t. That was a joke referencing some old TV advert.
Testing … testing … can you hear me?
Well it’s not much of a blog yet, but it’s up. Over the next few
days I’ll try to get a bit of a summary of where the project is up to,
and how it got to be there. Assuming I can figure out what all these
buttons do, of course.
