What I have learnt from building a boat vs what I learnt from running ‘budget’ boats.
I thought that it might be pertinent to start off my posts in 2024 by returning to my often explored theme of sailing on a small income so……
Regular readers and visitors will know that this is a recurring theme with me and that I thought I had found the bottom of the barrel with my thoughts about a different kind of sailing or maybe one with a different emphasis. For those that haven’t come across that post it’s this one here and is based almost entirely around a small craft that we walked past nearly every day while we were on holiday in north Norfolk. https://dirtywetdog.co.uk/2023/09/18/stripped-down-boating/
Here, as a reminder, is the little Lugger, like a duck punt, that we saw in the creek below Blakeney village during that trip.
Just to put this post in context, that one came on the back of a camping trip in Norfolk and soon after my unsuccessful first trip out with the Pathfinder ; the result of that being best described as a crisis in confidence about my own future as a sailor. In brief, I considered that maybe I am past my sell-by date as a sailor because if there was any failure in that trip it was a failure of preparation and a failure of my endurance in not difficult although unpleasant conditions.
Once again I feel that i need to ram my tongue firmly in my cheek (not those cheeks darlings) and talk about ‘identity’ as with the current obsession with identifying as something other than male or female……well I have identified as an outdoorsman of one sort or another for most of my life and I wonder if that is slowly slipping away from me as age creeps up on me and I no longer have the basic toughness and endurance to do even relatively easy trips. Maybe I should self identify as a ‘has been’ .
Joking aside I do feel that my outdoor endurance has diminished greatly and I wouldn’t now contemplate the kind of trips I did even a decade ago – I wouldn’t, for example. take on long canoe portages or plan a multi day hike in the high mountains of the Sierra Nevada. I even wondered recently whether I would feel up to taking on the kind of sailing passage I made just 4 years ago when I had a cold and wet ride to Brittany – even back then it took a couple of easy days in the cabin to recover.
I have to admit to a fair amount of soul searching (a lot of bum scratching then) about my future as an outdoorsman/ sailor and whether, for example, I should continue with or abandon my current project. I had already come to the conclusion that I may be finishing the build of the wrong boat for my project and even ,briefly, kicked around the idea of setting the Pathfinder aside – onto the back burner perhaps, and getting on with building what I felt to be a more ideal boat, in my case that would have been a sea going dory or maybe even a LongSteps (JW) design.
The main reasons why I didn’t stop and change project is that it would take me two further years to build a decent Long Steps and say 6 months to do a competent CLC (Chesapeake light craft) dory and secondly from something that Dylan Winter said years back : something along the lines of that the ideal boat isn’t the one you daydream about but the one that already sits on your mooring or perhaps on a trailer in your back yard. As I write, my Pathfinder is within a testicle hairs breath of being complete to ‘sailaway’ standard so I may as well get some use out of it. I may as well admit now to a near complete loss of enthusiasm for my potential sailing project with the Pathfinder and in fact had the ideal opportunity to put it aside while I got on with other, more essential, work. I’m back on the job now and it’s really a work ethic and discipline, rather than youthful enthusiasm that’s getting me through the work that needs doing.
Good and bad decisions.
So, although I have doubts about my choice of boat to build I still maintain that it was a good decision to go ahead and build a boat because I spent 2 years fully mentally engaged with the project and learnt a lot from the build. I would go so far as to say that the everyday problem solving and practical work changed me in ways that I can barely comprehend – except perhaps that my work concentration improved and my engagement with other builders increased and improved ; strange then that that involvement and engagement has failed quite dramatically.
I was thinking recently that if I made a good decision to build a boat in our back yard then it’s also true that I made a poor decision in selling my previous boat and not only that but I got absolutely stung in the sale. Recently, when I was roughly accounting for two and a half years work I came to the unsurprising conclusion that I could have easily kept that boat, done a complete refit, bought a trailer and new engine and still spent less hard cash than I have with the build. My conclusion about building a boat is that it isn’t a cost effective way to get a small boat on the water for a small budget – far more effective I think to buy something cheap and already complete and give it a winter’s work and refit.
Yes, I would still have the problems that were already happening at the end of my time with that boatyard and would still have been paying a boatyard fee every month – that’s the one good thing about being here plus my journey to work (on the boat) is a matter of walking 30 yards down the drive. For sure I would have had the hassle of changing boatyard and the problem of getting there without personal transport but I would still have the boat that took me across the channel, was able to slip into shallow water, was warm enough (with it’s Pansy stove) for cold winter nights at anchor and so on.
Going back to our man Dylan Winter for a moment – he was partially my inspiration for owning the little Liberty – he started his explorative voyaging around the UK coast with what even he described as a ‘crap boat’ and from memory sailed the first 5 seasons in that boat before acquiring the Minstrel. Again, if memory serves, he paid £2,5000 for the Mirror Offshore and that’s the kind of theoretical budget I played around with in my first forays into the subject of getting on the water on a budget.
At the same time as I started on my own boatbuilding project I would do my day’s work and then come inside and start writing : most days I would tap out a few paragraphs about what I was working on and most weeks that would go into a blog piece with a set of new photographs and people seemed to enjoy that. What I was working on as well was my version of the late Maurice Griffiths first booklet intended to be sold from railway station news stands (Sailing on a Small Income). Griffiths wrote that first book some time in the 1920’s and one of the main problems he always had was the low availability of small and seaworthy boats – he was also struggling it seems with a low and insecure income.
When I came to write my own version of that section of his book I found that the situation is almost completely opposite – that older small boats are either being destroyed as having no value and no interest or are sold on for very low prices on modern buy/sell sites such as Ebay : some readers may remember. pre Covid, my regular trawl of Ebay and writing up budget boats that I found. If I was being smarter with my budget than I am in building a boat I would today be searching out something like the little Achilles 24 complete with trailer that was on sale for around Dylan’s budget for the ‘Crap boat’. Once again, yes, I would be in the same problem of needing a space in a boayard and be at the mercy of a less than careful (shall we say) boatyard manager but equally I am now far better at doing practical work quickly. I might also have a more suitable boat for life in my late 60’s which is something I don’t feel I have right now…..if there is a lesson here it also that we need different things in boats as we age.
Best wishes Y’awl.
Dirty Wet Dog, the great adventure. 