One Grand Boat.

The one grand or one thousand sick squids worth of boat – lets take it from there.

Hi everyone, I hope you’re all well and welcome to 2025. With this post normal blog activity resumes…….

Historically now, one of my favorite threads to write and work on here, has been my low-end price point posts about which boats we might be able to acquire for a given cost. I set the whole thing at what I considered the average working person could put into something as frivolous as a sailing boat for leisure use – in short, a small cruising yacht.

The original price point that I worked around was £2000 because that was very close to the amount that fellow blogger and film maker Dylan Winter splashed out for the boat that he started his long round UK project putting into as many of the rivers and ports as he could : from memory he started out with a Mirror Offshore which even he said was a ‘crap boat’ and only after 5 years of adventure was he able to make a larger cash investment and thus buy a much better boat – a Hunter Minstrel. I happen to think that that was the best boat he ever owned and not long after that I found and bought a Hunter Liberty – in my eyes an even better boat.

I had a huge amount of fun with that thread, I know that at some point I did the obvious thing and started looking to see what I could get, in as good condition and as complete as possible, for half of my original budget. Surprisingly, the answer was positive although it often meant going to see boats that had been abandoned in boatyards or harbors and which the boatyard owner or local harbormaster were trying to get shot of and thus the asking price was often just a few hundred pounds. The obvious problem then are the immediate costs of getting the boat moved (by trailer) and starting to pay out for insurance, essential kit and new boatyard fees.

My main idea in those days was to buy a boat at less than my budget point and then see what it took, in terms of additional costs, to do a significant passage with it : I was thinking of something along the lines of a cross channel passage at my end of the channel – that’s the wide part btw, or maybe end to end of the south coast. I did eventually buy a very old wooden boat at around that budget and sailed it from Ipswich on the UK east coast all the way around to my home port inland of Plymouth in the south west. The thing that happened with that project is that I realized that I would then have had to haul Inanda at a boatyard and start an extensive rebuild and refit as she needed new frames just as a start out.

Projects like that really only worked for me because I was in full time employment myself and was able to use a significant chunk of my income to fund whatever work I chose to do. All that changed when I retired from the NHS but by then I already had a boat that required minimal work and that was ultimately the boat that I did my long summer cruising and living aboard in Brittany.

As most readers will know, I retired and planned my next boat as a ‘maximum’ build, maximum in that it was the largest boat that I could build at home and maximum in that it was beyond my skill level when I started it and very maxed out when it came to the eventual build cost. There never was a budget as such and in terms of my health issues I only completed it just in time – I wouldn’t have the strength or endurance for that build now.

After my strokes and with the Pathfinder set aside I knew that what I really needed was a project to immediately engage my mind and so I went back to the price point budget idea and decided to try my hand at a £1000 total budget idea. It worked out pretty close as I acquired the hull inexpensively from one seller and found a trailer at about the same cost, the most expensive part of the whole project was having a new sail made for it – and anyway that’s where the next £1000 project comes in although this time that’s my start-up cost and what I intend to do in this thread is to detail the costs of turning a basic hull into a viable camp cruiser not too camp may I add !.

And so…..my starting cost this time around is £1000 and for that I get the CLC Skerry hull (and it’s foils) the rig and the sail, interestingly it uses exactly the same mast, boom, yard and sail as does the Passagemaker so I intend to swap the sails around so that the Skerry gets my smart new one and at some point I will sell on or gift the little Passagemaker to someone who can make good use of it – I really can’t become 3 boat Steve and to be honest I need the space.

What I start off with will need a lot of modification – small craft designer John Welsford has already written to me and told me what he thinks a basic Skerry needs in terms of buoyancy and capsize recovery so i’m planning how to do that even before I get the donor boat here. In my ongoing list of materials and new parts that I will need is also what I intend as the base kit for one of the boat’s main functions – that of a camping cruiser, at the moment that seems to require a new tent and a few bits n pieces. Perhaps what is a bit more interesting is for me to set out here my ambitious plans for the modified Skerry now that iv’e finally admitted to myself what this is all about : then at least you can either cheer along if it works or shake your head in despair at yet another bonkers idea from the Cornwall funny farm.

Blog time, December 2024.

I figured to leave the explanatory part until last as it’s very much part of the normal ‘blog time’ section I usually run at the start of a post. As many of you will know, iv’e now had 2 strokes and pretty well given up on my ambitious former plan of rowing and sailing around the UK in the big Pathfinder while filming the whole event to make video’s from. That’s gone ‘by the board’ as us boaty types say and I thought that i had given up on any form of outdoor life and I was a bit sad about that. I bought the little Passagemaker dinghy as partially a quick project while I was feeling pretty ‘down’ about life and what I had in mind were short rowing and sailing trips in the local rivers with maybe a bit of foreshore campcraft thrown in. For some reason I kept finding excuses to think about and study other expedition style boats so I had to come around to the eventually conscious conclusion that a sailing and rowing expedition was still very much on my mind.

I haven’t spoken much about the cognitive and psychological effect of my strokes except to say that I went through a very angry and volatile stage and at times seemed to have a continuous brain fog. Some days my brain is acting like a stuck record – something gets stuck in there and whirls round and round for days – and yet more of the time it seems to forget what it is doing and I have to work hard to remember things like my regular medicines : my brain is a bit like my walking stick in that some days it wanders off on it’s own and i’m never sure where it’s going to turn up.

So anyway…..I keep thinking about longer sailing and rowing trips and unrealistically about building a boat especially for that role, except of course iv’e already got a mostly finished one except that it’s really too much for me to handle here and on distant slipways. There is a ‘third way’ though and it’s to make my sailing expedition as more like an Ultralight inspired backpacking trip and the basis of that is to start with a much lighter and more manageable boat – hence my ideas for the CLC Skerry to be completed and refitted into that role. It has it’s problems and challenges and that’s what’s so exciting about the whole deal – unlike the big Pathfinder which I would trust in any weather i’ll have to be a lot more careful, cautious and seaman like with the little Skerry but equally it would be a lot easier to tow and launch. All in all i’m pretty gruntled by the whole idea.

Part the second of.

My Pathfinder expedition boat project always included an element of video form capture and storytelling – in brief I always intended to film as I cruised from place to place and then, in between passages. my plan was to take some time off at home and produce the actual video’s for Youtube. What happened of course is that that idea collapsed with the demise of the Pathfinder project and mostly now i’m just waiting for the right opportunity to advertise it again at a much reduced price and hopefully sell it to someone who will sail it and enjoy it.

Aside from the obvious written and photographed blog content here the Pathfinder project always came with a video content included : my new project is a bit different in that i’ll blog about it as always but it already has a larger written content to go with it – in short it already owns the draft sections of what might become a book project. Readers will know that iv’e admitted, in the past, to several failed and aborted book projects – the last one being an intended remake of the late Mauurice Griffiths first mini book intended for sale at railway stations and newsagents (Sailing on a Small Income). Although a lot of my intended version for the 21st century did get written I stored most of it in the recycle bin and used just a few sections – the few I liked – as the basis of blog posts.

I won’t queer my pitch with any prequels or giveaways here but the potential book has, so far, some 42 almost complete sections that are now fit for a second look and then professional copy editing, After that it needs a whole heap of new photography as my concept includes a picture for each of those sections and right now i’m already thinking about self publication or at least having a complete concept piece to show to any potential publisher – with it being a very bloke interest kind of book I can’t imagine many (if any) modern publishers that would take it on.

This week. in blog time, i’m starting work on the new video project as well, in fact iv’e already completely altered the title and appearance of my moribund Youtube channel to reflect my new intentions. This weekend i’m hoping to get several short video clips to go towards making a cohesive (and even slightly interesting) introductory new channel taster video and I already have the first full video planned out. Some members may remember that my usual main blogging camera died the death at about the same time as I tried to film my last Pathfinder video so one of my main winter jobs, and main winter expenditures, will have to be a new blogging and video camera. In the meantime i’m trying to get my head around doing time lapse clips with a secondhand GoPro.

Afterword – the slight twist in the tale.

So……I really don’t need and can’t really accommodate 3 boats here. Although the big Pathfinder will be advertised at a much reduced price some time in the spring I feel that I need to pass on the little Passagemaker to someone whom is maybe hurting for a boat. I could just advertise it for sale but to be honest i’d be much happier gifting it to a good home.

Here’s the deal then : my Youtube channel is moribund for several reasons and even as I cautiously go and look to see how it’s doing I note that it’s already slowly losing subscribers. I had this slightly nonsensical idea that I always hoped to get to a thousand subscribers and it’s currently sitting at around 850 and dropping. My final thought for the day is that if, and it’s a very big if, my revamped Youtube channel passes one thousand subscribers that would mean that the channel is succeeding – at least in my personal view, and if it gets there then i’ll simply give the Passagemaker away to someone whom will use it.