Get thee behind me…..Daryl !

Putting all of the not so great ideas together and calling it a plan.

The ‘money shot‘ picture (title photograph) is courtesy of Daryl Foster this morning.

Most nights now I wish my head had an off switch so that I could stop coming up with really stupid ideas and instead get some sleep – some nights though it’s worth following an idea down to it’s logical conclusion and and that’s where I am today with the Passagemaker and potentially an already built Skerry. I think it’s a post-stroke feature that however physically tired I am when I hit the sack my mind just pings awake and starts fizzing with ideas. Possibly it’s because my mind gets too much stimulation from the internet and my own writing project and partially it’s because my mind is always full with the next great idea. The thing with most of my great ideas is that I get a little nugget of utility from them even when I scrap most of the idea, anyway, I don’t worry too much about any of my notable mental fails because there’s always a new one waiting in the wings to clobber me at Oh dark something-thirty.

The current fizz of great ideas I wrote about in my post ‘synchronicity’, that led me into a quick rescue/refit, which is now functionally complete – i’m just waiting on a sail and some parts for the trailer. That led me down a long mental track that started with the germ of a seed of an idea which itself begins with a sea story from one dark and stormy night at anchor in my little Hunter Liberty ; that must have been around 2016 shortly after I acquired the Liberty and has recently bloomed again, as a potential plan and project and is something that i’m writing about most every day.

As a quick recap the basic idea started with seeing a small pram bowed dinghy being used that night as a camp cruiser and the bloke rowing it made a simple bushcraft style camp near to where I was anchored. Being both a sailor and former bushcraft instructor I wondered about having a boat that I could use to do something similar myself, except at the time I was having my own very different kind of adventures with the Liberty : if I have my dates right then that same year was my first channel crossing with the little Liberty and the whole thing culminated with me living aboard and cruising around western and southern Brittany for 110 days in 2019.

For a blog there’s lots of potential for me doing yabba yabba so i’ll try to not bore you all and sum up the various posts and bonkers plans to give you a kinda-sorta summary of where I am now. The starting point then is that I was finishing the Pathfinder and had one stroke, was in hospital for a while but then took the big Pathfinder down to Falmouth for it’s first sail and sea trials : at the end of that is when I had the second and significantly worse stroke. As I said earlier that’s when I announced my intention to leave sailing and focus on other things but then folks around me suggested that I would benefit from having a small boat project to work on, engage my mind and get outdoors again. That takes us up to the Synchronicity post and resulted in me not going from one big boat to no boat but ending up with one big one to sell and a small one to rescue and refit.

The day that we went out to see and buy the Passagemaker is also the first day I saw the Skerry and thought what a sweet little boat it was ; owner Daryl offered it to me on the spot but with buying the Passagemaker I neither had funds or space for a third boat. A lot then happened because having the Passagemaker made me start to think about having a slightly larger boat – “we’ll need a bigger boat” was my slightly bonkers idea on that one but then I came down to earth a bit and when I realized I would have a load of compatible boat gear (rig, sail and trailer) I thought that another full build might be on the cards. My plan was then to acquire a CLC kit for the Skerry and build a modified version and once again our man Daryl reminded me that there was a neat little Skerry already built plus he pointed me at the Inside Waters blog and his modifications which look a lot like what I intended to do : the Skerry designer even approved of what Galen had done with his boat and certainly solved the major problem which was that of having a small boat that I could sail, row, camp from and yet sleep aboard when necessary.

Common sense and practicality then broke out ! , for sure I could build another boat but once again it would take funds and a given amount of time : instead of a full build what I would rather be working on is the modifications and it wouldn’t take much time and effort to do the ‘destruction’ phase of modification. As of late September 2024 iv’e pretty much decided that I will buy the Skerry, get the Passagemaker down to the waterside and do some autumn and winter sail/camps and then move everything around in our yard to create a working space for the Skerry project.

Photograph from Chesapeake Light Craft’s own site.