When we left our yacht in the Caribbean three years ago we ripped out the galley and hacked off the solid dodger. But why would we do this? Over 20 years ago my Scrubby had a dream and his dream was to buy a yacht and sail off into the sunset. Well he had actually planned a dynamic circumnavigation which is hardly the romantic notion of sailing off into the sunset, but that would be another book entirely! Firstly we needed to raise funds to buy a yacht. So the house promptly went up for sale and we started the search to find the perfect yacht. Many magazines and books were bought and read, countless yachts were looked over and rejected… and so the next idea was to build our own.
Scrubby liked to dream big and no project was too difficult him to undertake . After looking at and rejecting a Roberts design for a steel hull we came across a Van de Stadt option that looked good. My Scrubby then explored the possibilities of a self-built steel hull and duly investigated the price of sheets of steel and the possibilities of attending a welding course at the local Polytechnic College. Fortunately for us, someone he bumped into one day knew someone else who already had a steel hull in storage and we could get it from him for a dream of a price, a fraction of what it would cost us to build our own. But wow, the whole thing was massive at 50 foot, much bigger than we thought we wanted, covered entirely in rust and complete with it's own botanical garden growing from below decks. The dream of a self-build hull was duly rejected as the reality of the project's scale started to sink in.
That plan abandoned, what next? Well we still wanted a steel hull, so we looked around for a boatbuilder and eventually found the wonderful man who built our hull and installed the engine, hatches and spray foamed the inside of the yacht, all at a very reasonable cost. He also did a beautiful paint job on the outside of the hull. He is now retired from boat building but is always willing to answer any questions we have for him about the yacht. And over the years we've had a few. The stainless steel work was also done at this stage of the build by another magnificent craftsman. Our boat sat in their yard for over a year before we could take possession of her. Anyway, to cut a long story short 7 years later and my Scrubby had finished fitting-out the inside of the yacht, and for a home build we thought she looked good. Cut to about 17 years later, and after quite a few frustrations it was decided that if it didn't work then we needed to get it sorted before we could get on with his big dream… hence the dumping of the galley and that solid dodger.
Now three years down line from when we set about the boat with jigsaw and sledgehammer, we've been hanging around the BVIs for what seems ages waiting for the work to be finished on the yacht's new galley and dodger before we can relaunch and move back on board. The work force is definitely on "Island Time", and with many deadlines coming and going things are dragging on and our collective patience is being sorely tested. So here we sit, squatting aboard someone else's boat with a nearly completed yacht refit and paint job. We have a fully revised version of the now not quite so dynamic circumnavigation and are champing at the bit to get the details sorted in our quest to simplify our life. Details such as visas, getting our cat out of the cattery in Texas and flown to join us on the yacht, stowing our possessions and provisioning the yacht for the voyage… which in itself is not quite as simple as it sounds when you have food intolerances…
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| This is me carsondcat aka Nicky |
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| And this is Scrubby aka Bob |
