Greetings from the darkside,
A few of you may have noticed that I disappeared. So, what happened to my plan to cruise in “Strider” for the rest of my life? Well, readers of my late forum will recall that I fell in love with the girl-almost-next-door from my childhood summers at the lake. We never knew each other as kids due to a three year age difference but, after my brother’s introduction, I found myself reconnecting with my family the inland community of my youth. Both of our families have roots in the area going back over a century.
We did two abbreviated ICW winter cruises on “Strider” that many here have read about. “Strider” began to seem rather small for two with ambitions to cruise more extensively and I began to take seriously the tee shirt I once posted a picture of here. It said, “I’m really a powerboater. I just have a boat with sails so I can hang out with a nicer class of people.” I thought of all the enticing places I had passed by because of the mast and the few times the sails had actually gone up. The ICW made me fall in love with waterway and river cruising, things to see close at hand, the anticipation of the next bend, the freedom of boating life while surrounded by the life of the land. Patsy’s stomach is delicate and I’ve been beat up by the sea enough for this lifetime. So, we decided to buy a powerboat.
We first thought to do it in Europe. Canal cruising in that scenery is certainly the ultimate. However, we soon realized that it would only work if we basically did the ex pat thing. Maintaining contacts with family and enjoying our lake cottages would meant about six transatlantic flights a year, not a life we wanted. North American waterways became our objective.
So, we found a 36 foot Kadey Krogen Manatee trawler that had been mostly a stationary residence. I couldn’t bring myself to sell “Strider” to a stranger so I just gave her to a good friend in Canada on the basis that we could borrow her for a week or two whenever the spirit moved us to cruise under sail in northern waters. She is now based in Fredrickton, NB.
We bought the Manatee with our eyes open about a lot of problems. What our eyes weren’t open about was me. When we inspected her, I kept looking around and saying, “Oh, I can fix that.” A few months later, it was, “Oh, I’m 66 years old. There’s now way I’m going to spend a whole summer with the boat hauled out working over my head re-bedding stainless steel rub rails.” There was a lot of stuff like that coming up on the boat. We also got immediately into a shipyard nightmare that I could write a book about.
We got the boat running. Just the windlass and ground tackle installation cost more than I paid for “Strider”. We made a ten day cruise down the ICW from Elizabeth City to Beaufort, SC and left the boat there to return home for Christmas. I had fallen in a hatch while working on the boat and hit my elbow which continued to give me trouble. The doctor told me I shouldn’t plan on doing much boat maintenance for a few months, maybe forever. We put the Manatee up for sale assured by the broker that it would sell quickly. It didn’t. The boat didn’t have air conditioning and we finally realized that a boat was never going to sell down south without it. So, we loaded everything back in a rental car and drove back to Beaufort to the boat we didn’t expect to see again.
We had a wonderful seven week cruise from Beaufort up to New Jersey, the highlight of which was doing the NY coast inside. This was the final exam for navigating shallow twisty waters. We dragged through a lot of mud and completed my NYC to FL inland waterway experience. Shortly after we tied the boat up at the old world boatyard of Beaton and Sons, a buyer came along and we decided that our boating days were behind us, at least in boats we owned. I started researching canal charters and mountain hiking trips in Scotland.
Even in the midst of Summer and gardens, Patsy went immediately into depression. I’ve had a lifetime of boating and sailing, nearly 30,000 miles in “Strider” alone. I felt like I could move on to other things in the interest of a more varied life but cruising is still new to the one I love and she realized that she had been bitten badly by the bug. A couple days after we decided to start looking for another boat, she said, “You know, the spring is back in your step.”
I spent the summer searching “Yachtworld” listing daily and talking to brokers. We drove to Savannah and back on a wild goose chase. During the long drive home, I going through listings on a laptop whole Patsy . I found a 1975 Gulf Star 43 MKII near Detroit and remembered how young and beautiful “Strider” had looked for her age because of spending her life in fresh water. This boat had also been stored its whole life inside a heated shed during the winter. The fact that she is a trawler built on a sailboat hull makes her kind of an oddball which I love but which depressed the price that was less than half of what we had invested in the Manatee by the time we got underway. We were in the car three days later driving to Detroit.
More pictures here:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/...587.1073741875.1846284215&type=1&l=e906521310
The boat was beautiful. The broker’s were disorganized. The seller was psychotic. I thought I had seen everything. You’ll have to wait for the book. But, a couple of weeks later, I and a delivery crew, sans Patsy, were headed down the Detroit River in our new boat bound for Albany. Good thing Patsy didn’t come. We got the living holding tank contents beat out of us crossing Lake Erie. Literally. The beautiful new stainless steel holding tank was improperly installed by the PO and a weld cracked. This was just discovered yesterday is going to hold up our departure for Florida. It was as they say in Maine, as dark as the inside of a cow on the lake and we were pounding over waves about three feet high and four feet apart. It was as bad a night as I have ever spent on a boat.
The non stop run from Detroit to Lackawanna ended with a beautiful sunset entrance into the harbor at the eastern end of the lake. My crew then ran up to Tonawanda, the western end of the Erie Canal, and spent a couple days changing fluids and straightening things out in the engine room. Patsy joined us for the six day transit of the canal to Albany which is right up there in my short list of greatest boating experiences. Canal cruising is all we hoped and expected. It is a whole new life. The boat has a separate freezer and refrigerator as well as a generator driven electric stove and oven. We filled the freezer with family style frozen meals and, instead of cooking, spent the evenings sitting around a table large enough for eight drinking beer and telling seas stories.
The boat is now at Coeymans’s Landing Marina, by far the friendliest and most helpful place I have ever had a boat. Pulling in there was like coming home. I’ve been working harder than I can remember getting the rope locker converted for chain and the area around the windlass overhauled. It’s been nothing like the similar project on the Manatee but I’ve learned a couple of interesting things. One is that the doctor was wrong. I can still do the heavy work. Perhaps that has something to do with the boat. The Manatee was imminently practical. My boat designer’s head greatly appreciated her but I never really loved her. I’m already in love with this boat, “Gypsy Star”, and the work feels completely different.
Our scheduled departure for points south was the middle of next week but this holding tank issue must be dealt with. I’m still investigating but it probably has to come out of the boat. It’s getting late in the year but this is a far more capable boat than either of the last two. As long as we get her ready to go before the marina docks are taken out, I’ll take her south in any month of the year.
A few of you may have noticed that I disappeared. So, what happened to my plan to cruise in “Strider” for the rest of my life? Well, readers of my late forum will recall that I fell in love with the girl-almost-next-door from my childhood summers at the lake. We never knew each other as kids due to a three year age difference but, after my brother’s introduction, I found myself reconnecting with my family the inland community of my youth. Both of our families have roots in the area going back over a century.
We did two abbreviated ICW winter cruises on “Strider” that many here have read about. “Strider” began to seem rather small for two with ambitions to cruise more extensively and I began to take seriously the tee shirt I once posted a picture of here. It said, “I’m really a powerboater. I just have a boat with sails so I can hang out with a nicer class of people.” I thought of all the enticing places I had passed by because of the mast and the few times the sails had actually gone up. The ICW made me fall in love with waterway and river cruising, things to see close at hand, the anticipation of the next bend, the freedom of boating life while surrounded by the life of the land. Patsy’s stomach is delicate and I’ve been beat up by the sea enough for this lifetime. So, we decided to buy a powerboat.
We first thought to do it in Europe. Canal cruising in that scenery is certainly the ultimate. However, we soon realized that it would only work if we basically did the ex pat thing. Maintaining contacts with family and enjoying our lake cottages would meant about six transatlantic flights a year, not a life we wanted. North American waterways became our objective.
So, we found a 36 foot Kadey Krogen Manatee trawler that had been mostly a stationary residence. I couldn’t bring myself to sell “Strider” to a stranger so I just gave her to a good friend in Canada on the basis that we could borrow her for a week or two whenever the spirit moved us to cruise under sail in northern waters. She is now based in Fredrickton, NB.
We bought the Manatee with our eyes open about a lot of problems. What our eyes weren’t open about was me. When we inspected her, I kept looking around and saying, “Oh, I can fix that.” A few months later, it was, “Oh, I’m 66 years old. There’s now way I’m going to spend a whole summer with the boat hauled out working over my head re-bedding stainless steel rub rails.” There was a lot of stuff like that coming up on the boat. We also got immediately into a shipyard nightmare that I could write a book about.
We got the boat running. Just the windlass and ground tackle installation cost more than I paid for “Strider”. We made a ten day cruise down the ICW from Elizabeth City to Beaufort, SC and left the boat there to return home for Christmas. I had fallen in a hatch while working on the boat and hit my elbow which continued to give me trouble. The doctor told me I shouldn’t plan on doing much boat maintenance for a few months, maybe forever. We put the Manatee up for sale assured by the broker that it would sell quickly. It didn’t. The boat didn’t have air conditioning and we finally realized that a boat was never going to sell down south without it. So, we loaded everything back in a rental car and drove back to Beaufort to the boat we didn’t expect to see again.
We had a wonderful seven week cruise from Beaufort up to New Jersey, the highlight of which was doing the NY coast inside. This was the final exam for navigating shallow twisty waters. We dragged through a lot of mud and completed my NYC to FL inland waterway experience. Shortly after we tied the boat up at the old world boatyard of Beaton and Sons, a buyer came along and we decided that our boating days were behind us, at least in boats we owned. I started researching canal charters and mountain hiking trips in Scotland.
Even in the midst of Summer and gardens, Patsy went immediately into depression. I’ve had a lifetime of boating and sailing, nearly 30,000 miles in “Strider” alone. I felt like I could move on to other things in the interest of a more varied life but cruising is still new to the one I love and she realized that she had been bitten badly by the bug. A couple days after we decided to start looking for another boat, she said, “You know, the spring is back in your step.”
I spent the summer searching “Yachtworld” listing daily and talking to brokers. We drove to Savannah and back on a wild goose chase. During the long drive home, I going through listings on a laptop whole Patsy . I found a 1975 Gulf Star 43 MKII near Detroit and remembered how young and beautiful “Strider” had looked for her age because of spending her life in fresh water. This boat had also been stored its whole life inside a heated shed during the winter. The fact that she is a trawler built on a sailboat hull makes her kind of an oddball which I love but which depressed the price that was less than half of what we had invested in the Manatee by the time we got underway. We were in the car three days later driving to Detroit.
More pictures here:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/...587.1073741875.1846284215&type=1&l=e906521310
The boat was beautiful. The broker’s were disorganized. The seller was psychotic. I thought I had seen everything. You’ll have to wait for the book. But, a couple of weeks later, I and a delivery crew, sans Patsy, were headed down the Detroit River in our new boat bound for Albany. Good thing Patsy didn’t come. We got the living holding tank contents beat out of us crossing Lake Erie. Literally. The beautiful new stainless steel holding tank was improperly installed by the PO and a weld cracked. This was just discovered yesterday is going to hold up our departure for Florida. It was as they say in Maine, as dark as the inside of a cow on the lake and we were pounding over waves about three feet high and four feet apart. It was as bad a night as I have ever spent on a boat.
The non stop run from Detroit to Lackawanna ended with a beautiful sunset entrance into the harbor at the eastern end of the lake. My crew then ran up to Tonawanda, the western end of the Erie Canal, and spent a couple days changing fluids and straightening things out in the engine room. Patsy joined us for the six day transit of the canal to Albany which is right up there in my short list of greatest boating experiences. Canal cruising is all we hoped and expected. It is a whole new life. The boat has a separate freezer and refrigerator as well as a generator driven electric stove and oven. We filled the freezer with family style frozen meals and, instead of cooking, spent the evenings sitting around a table large enough for eight drinking beer and telling seas stories.
The boat is now at Coeymans’s Landing Marina, by far the friendliest and most helpful place I have ever had a boat. Pulling in there was like coming home. I’ve been working harder than I can remember getting the rope locker converted for chain and the area around the windlass overhauled. It’s been nothing like the similar project on the Manatee but I’ve learned a couple of interesting things. One is that the doctor was wrong. I can still do the heavy work. Perhaps that has something to do with the boat. The Manatee was imminently practical. My boat designer’s head greatly appreciated her but I never really loved her. I’m already in love with this boat, “Gypsy Star”, and the work feels completely different.
Our scheduled departure for points south was the middle of next week but this holding tank issue must be dealt with. I’m still investigating but it probably has to come out of the boat. It’s getting late in the year but this is a far more capable boat than either of the last two. As long as we get her ready to go before the marina docks are taken out, I’ll take her south in any month of the year.
