By Robert S. Mellis The 45-foot ketch we owned for seven years in the 1990s was a handsome sailboat: heavy teak decks, king-size berth in the aft cabin, double berth forward, two heads, an engine room that had 360-degree access. But it had a mortgage that was forbidding. And the repair and maintenance bills were a nightmare.
We wanted to sell up and sail away. But the boat mortgage was a formidable and crippling impediment. So we sold the 45-footer at a profit and downsized to a 30-foot cutter for which we paid cash from the proceeds of the sale of the big boat. We spent 18 months making this new boat into our floating home. And then we went sailing. No mortgage. No debt. Just a monthly cell phone bill and lots of ongoing maintenance.
This is the story of finding our new home, figuring out how to create adequate storage space aboard, loading the boat for our voyage from Portland, ME, south to the Bahamas, and returning to Connecticut after two years. It also is a story about learning how to lighten a cruising boat that has become overburdened with the weight of a floating home. We learned that it’s important to keep the boat light, otherwise you’ll have a sea slug that is not much fun to sail.
We found our Willard eight-ton cutter in York, ME. Quiet Passage sat high and dry in the front yard of that tiny town’s only surgeon. He wanted to sell her after 12 years of ownership.
Our surveyor poked and prodded and declared her to be generally sound, though he was a bit perturbed about the 21 hypodermic needles epoxied to the spreaders and to the masthead and then electrically wired to zap the cormorants that had plagued the doctor as his boat bobbed on her mooring during the summer months in York Harbor. We removed the spreader needles, as well as the electrical wiring.
We had a couple of skin cracks re-glassed at the stem and stern, and we strengthened the deck where the mast sat. And then we dug out the more than 120 lead pigs (each weighing 23 pounds) that were movable ballast in addition to the external iron keel. We scrubbed the 25 years of muck, grease, bilge water and, maybe, sewage from the pigs and I fiberglassed a series of coffins in the 18-inch deep bilge before reloading the pigs and screwing wood strips on top to keep them secure. This simple piece of carpentry and glassing created a spacious upper bilge area where we could store heavy toolboxes, canned food, our holding tank on a flat, secure area. We knew every inch of our boat would have to work for us because of the relatively small size.
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The main cabin had a u-shaped eating area with a long settee opposite. The rear of this settee had a swing-down back that could be raised to create a pipe berth so the boat could accommodate four sleepers in relative comfort. But Jo and I had no intention of sleeping with company on a 30-foot boat. So we unscrewed this hang-down back, exposing superior compartmentalized storage space behind the padded wood. We sawed 10 inches off the back, allowing it to be lowered and still perform as a seat back while exposing oodles of storage space for books, tapes, as well as a cubby for our Siamese cat, Ming.
I took a three-inch wide strip of this wooden back and attached it to the former tiny shelf at the top of the seatback. This provided us with another storage area for small items when I screwed a milled piece of teak there.
We found we could secure our heavy duty Yachtsman sewing machine behind the seatback, along with cruising books, videotapes, spare propellers for the wind generator, charts and oil-absorbing cleanup cloths.
I built a shelf into our hanging locker that permitted storage of hats and lots of soft clothing. In the v-berths, I attached shock cords to the wooden slats on the side of the hull to retain more books and then fashioned a teak extension above the bureau on the port side to allow even more books to be stored forward. (Yes, we’re passionate about recreational reading!)
We opened a storage space behind the head that had remained hidden for the boat’s entire life and were able to use this as a cubby to store great quantities of toilet paper, paper towels, etc.
On deck, I mounted an oversized electric windlass—Lofrans el Tigre— that dramatically improved our quality of life. This oversized windlass makes short work of hauling in our 100-feet of chain. We added an Aerogen 6 wind generator on our stern and have not regretted this since it is a quiet, 24-hour source of potential energy. We are in awe that we can sit at anchor and be bothered by the noise generated from wind generators on boats 100 yards away while our Aerogen works away at whisper-quiet level.
Because our boat has an Adler Barber refrigeration unit, we knew we’d need battery power to keep up with the demands for ice of the tropics. So I installed a total of 850 amp hours of batteries. In addition, I installed a Heart 1500 inverter/charger.
By this time, our little boat was beginning to slip deeper into the water. She was three inches below her designed waterline. And we still had to load the food and the spares for the engine.
Jo built a bimini with a cunning connector to the dodger, then fashioned side curtains and screens for the cockpit. She reupholstered, with new foam, the entire seating and bunks of the boat, and, finally, created closed-cell cockpit cushions.
By the time six months worth of stores were loaded, along with 40 gallons of diesel and 70 gallons of water, our boat was five inches below her designed water line. But we were done and we were ready to go. And so we did.
Now, with more than 10,000 miles under our keel, we’ve come to realize the importance of keeping the boat lighter. One of the many friends we made on our voyage, Dennis Kadau, sails a 42-foot Sabre. He is almost fanatical about boat weight. He has removed doors from his boat to reduce unnecessary weight. Dennis convinced me of the importance of removing weight as he would streak ahead of us and disappear over the horizon while we labored along.
So, back in our slip at New Haven, CT, I set into motion a major weight reduction program for our good old boat.
I wondered if I could remove my lead pigs without changing the stability of the vessel. So off they came. I stacked 84 of them on the dock and then waited for a breezy day to take the boat out. When we had winds of 15 to 20 knots, Jo and I backed out of our slip and set the main and the staysail. We found our little boat tracked perfectly and achieved a comfortable six knots. Before the weight loss plan, we’d have been lucky to achieve five knots. We probably could have pushed that to an easy seven knots by taking a reef in the main and setting some of our 130 genoa. But we were well satisfied with the experiment and I sold the pigs at scrap prices to a houseboat owner in our marina who needed more weight.
Now we started to go through each piece of equipment aboard. Had we used it in the two years of sailing? If the answer was yes, it got to stay. If the answer was no, off the boat it came. As a result, my spare toolbox now lives on the land at my daughter’s barn in Connecticut. My spare propeller, one of my two spare alternators, steel pipes, clothing, dozens of books from Bowditch to Cruising the West Coast of Scotland all have found new homes.
Our little boat was floating above her waterline now. But her trim is off because of the enormous weight of batteries at the stern.
Next task was to relocate our two 145-pound batteries from the starboard seat to the bilge where they replaced some of the lead pigs. This was an expensive move, mostly because we needed to purchase three 200-inch-long 2/0 battery cables at around $6 a foot, including the crimped on ends. We find a plumber’s snake is one of the most useful tools aboard. It helps us relocate all kinds of wires and hoses where hands cannot reach.
Now we are in better balance, although the 40 gallons of fuel under our port settee causes a decided list to port. This will be offset when we load our food back into the seats on the starboard side of the main salon.
When our 12-gallon hot-water heater dies, we plan to replace it with one that’s half the size. We rarely used the hot water in the tank, preferring to take sun showers in the cockpit with our solar-heated water bags.
In addition, we won’t lug around our four six-gallon jugs of water, tied to the lifelines. Nor will we carry the four jugs of diesel unless we plan to go into more remote areas when we head into the Bahamas again. We found we never had a problem with replacing our precious water, not with filling our fuel tank. As a result, we will eliminate nearly 400 pounds of weight high on our boat. We’ll carry the empty jugs along so we can be prudent if we suspect we’re heading toward remote islands. But why weigh the boat down when it’s easy to top off throughout the Bahamas.
And we have stripped our clothing collection down to the basics. We found we didn’t really need so many shirts, shoes, jackets, and pants. Three sets of warm weather clothes are more than enough. You live in swimsuits and t-shirts when in warm weather. In the north, you need layers but it’s relatively easy to keep the quantity down. And we made pillows for the settee into which we packed our off-season clothing.
We’re well pleased with our leaner, meaner sailing machine. She’ll never be a racing boat. Nor are we interested in that. But we’re much better able to head to sea this year and not have the sense that we’re sitting aboard a sea slug that doesn’t want to take us over the horizon.
Robert and Jo Mellis have sailed together for more than 40 years. They’ve owned 14 sailboats, making a hobby of buying tired, unloved boats, then bringing them back to life. They almost always were able to sell their boats at a profit, allowing them to buy larger vessels and repeat the process. Their current sailboat, a Willard eight-ton cutter, is 30 feet on deck, although she measures 37 feet overall when the sprit and the steering vane is taken.
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