Of Failed Boat Sales and Mislaid Plans

I’ve not updated the blog in well, forever, because life has been…mundane with not very much sailing.

We’ve been in New Zealand since before the pandemic, and life here has been mostly normal since the virus isn’t out of hand. Weekly poker games, lunches with friends, boat work, and other typical non-adventures don’t make for high adventure and compelling blog content.

We had a few interesting things happen though, with an almost sale of the boat which fell through and of course lots of boat work.

Sold…not Sold

As we announced about a year ago, we’re selling Evenstar to take a hiatus from cruising for a few years. We had her listed with a broker just as the pandemic broke out, and her listing languished. The problem wasn’t so much the lack of interest in the boat. There was plenty of that. But the inability to come see the boat was a deal killer.

As a matter of pure chance, our broker allowed our listing to lapse, and a fellow came walking down the dock admiring boats. One thing led to another, and a month later we had a contract to sell the boat to a local sailor.

Such a deal is fraught with challenges, and that we were selling the boat without a broker made it that much more difficult. A few issues include:

• Currency risks. We wanted to be paid in U.S. Dollars; the buyer had all his money in New Zealand dollars.
• Importation. Evenstar is not a New Zealand boat, and for her to live in NZ she would need to be imported and duties paid. Due to how NZ law works, it’s cheaper to import her before she’s sold, but that means we have to do it.
• Paperwork & Lawyers. Evenstar’s ownership documentation is all in U.S. jurisdiction, and would need to be changed to New Zealand. NZ authorities and the buyer need assurance all loans and liens are paid off, and the title is clear. This means lawyers.
• Surveys, inspections, and negotiations. As much as sailors slag on yacht brokers, competent brokers DO perform many useful functions. Not only do they smooth the above paperwork, they also act as a buffer between buyer and seller when sorting out differences of opinion regarding a survey outcome.

That last…”sorting out differences of opinion regarding a survey outcome” may have been key to keeping our deal afloat. Alas, it was not to be.

Without publicly airing laundry over the whole affair, suffice to say that we disagreed with the factual inaccuracies and speculative assertions made in the survey. We trusted our knowledge of the boat, its condition, its capabilities and everything we’ve learned about her in fifteen years. The buyer trusted a surveyor who couldn’t find the start battery or properly count the number of life rafts on board.

Those differences of opinion proved insurmountable. The survey wasn’t without merit. It highlighted one issue we’ve since dealt with and brought to our attention a few potential issues we could proactively avoid in the future.

Pre-sale madness.

One key part of the deal was the dates. The seller wanted to get a full Kiwi summer out of his new boat, which meant a closing before Christmas. This was understandable, and we did our best to accommodate this even though it would cost us some money and a lot of work, though we didn’t relish the prospect.

But what madness ensued! We’ve owned Evenstar for fifteen years and lived on her the last eight. We have no other home, and we keep only a few things in storage back in the U.S. Everything is with us. And the pandemic did not afford Danielle a chance to go through her stuff properly and move out of the boat.

But we had a plan. We’d get a storage unit and move everything we were taking back to the U.S. with us there, then ship it back once the smoke cleared. Eight years of cruising meant a ton of gear and equipment on board, not all of which would convey with the boat. So while sorting and discarding, we were also cataloging and selling a wide variety of tools, gear, duplicate (and triplicate and quadruplicate) spares, and most things of value to world cruisers but not necessarily to a coastal NZ sailor.

And when the survey rolled around, we’d pretty much succeeded. Almost everything but our basic living needs was off the boat. We’d reserved some gear in storage since our plan was to buy a motor home to tour New Zealand for the remaining months we could stay. We’d even found one, put a deposit on it, and cleared the electrical and self containment certificates on it.

And then it all blew up.

Post Sale Letdown

Of course, the deal melting down was an immense disappointment. We got lucky on a few things, like getting our deposit back on the motor home. But we still had most of our stuff in paid storage, a boat without a listing broker and off the market in the key spring and summer months, and our plans once again in ruins.

So what to do? Regroup, reorganize, and get the boat back on the market with a vengeance, of course!

Unfortunately, the boat deal blew up at our drop dead closing date in the week before Christmas, of course. The good news – we’d get to spend a final Christmas together in our home instead of…somewhere else. A hotel, a holiday park on a camper? Who knew? But we were feeling pretty unsocial by then, and a quiet holiday at home was just the thing.

The bad news is that much of New Zealand shuts down from the week before Christmas until about the second week of January. So the boat work we wanted to do to help re-enter the for sale market had to wait. We couldn’t get a callback for a quote on anything until well after the new year, never mind get scheduled for a haul out and work.

Living in a Van, Down by the River

The first step was to address the one legitimate finding in the survey – a weeping from the crack between the hull/keel joint. Water coming from there when the boat is hauled can be a sign of trouble, and could not be ignored. After consulting several reliable expert sources, we determined that we needed to torque the keel bolts.

With an externally ballasted boat like Evenstar, the keel (19,800 lbs of lead) is held to the hull with a number of strong bolts. They bed these rather aggressively in the lead and attach to the hull at a lattice of reinforced strong points. But in essence, ten tons of lead spends its life hanging off the bottom of the boat.

After twenty-three years and many thousands of miles, some flexing and loosening in the joint and bolts is normal. In theory, torquing the bolts a little is easy – put on a wrench and whack it down tight.

In practice, the bolts are under all the tanks and only a couple of them can even be seen, never mind tightened, without moving the tanks. This turns a mundane task (tightening a bolt) into a more complex feat of engineering, since Evenstar has two water tanks and two fuel tanks over the bolts.

When we could finally talk with a yard, we figured it would take about two weeks with the boat out of the water to sort out the keel bolts. The surveyor had suggested the entire keel needed to be removed, and the joint inspected – a massive and expensive undertaking. To us this seemed akin to cracking a patient’s chest open to check out a heart murmur. It just wasn’t needed until we determined there were bigger problems.

Life on the Hard

I think I’ve discussed the little joy that is “life on the hard” in a sailboat. Out of the water, you can’t use the boat’s heads, sinks, or refrigeration systems. You can stay on board, but life is a nuisance since you’re climbing up and down ladders to get to the toilets and you have to cook and do dishes in the marina’s kitchen facility (if there is one!).

But this project would disrupt the interior of the boat. Not only would we have no food storage, cooking, washing or toilets, we wouldn’t even have a floor. Or stairs down into the boat. Or even a little ridge of wood to get a toehold on when lowering yourself into the boat like Spider-Man or some thief sneaking past a security system.

Life aboard would be impossible. Two weeks or more at an AirBnB or hotel were in our future, plus an awful lot of eating out. There had to be a way around this.

The Little Blue Van

The solution came to us in one of those “Kath, you’re probably going to hate this idea” moments. (She really does hate it when I say that…)

Get a campervan.

It seems obvious now, but facing a few thousand dollars in hotel rooms and dining out, why not just buy a little campervan and sleep in the boat yard? That is free, and you don’t even need to climb down a ladder to pee at night. When it was all done we could sell it, and even if we took a ding on the price, it wouldn’t be worse than 2-3 weeks in a hotel and dining out daily in Whangarei.

But the bonus was that after the boat project…you have a campervan! A self-contained camper in New Zealand is a license to “freedom camp” or stay in many cool places for nothing or next to nothing. We’d already joined the NZ Motor Caravan Association when we almost bought that motor home, so we were all set.

All we had to do was find a suitable van. Easy-peasy.

We did a LOT of driving before we found our current van. There were some adventures, like the van we drove where smoke started pouring out of the seat under my butt during the test drive.

“It doesn’t usually do that,” the seller said.

I certainly hope not. Turns out that when I moved the seat back, the metal pan under the seat shorted out the house battery terminals. The seller was shorter than me and never moved the seat…

We also had a terrifying incident where a child hit US while we were test driving a van. I was driving slowly through a residential neighborhood in Auckland when I saw a flash out of the corner of my eye. A boy on a bike came flying out of a blind driveway behind a bush as we cruised past. He smacked right into the side of the van. Fortunately, he was OK and his mother was far more annoyed at him (“What are you going in the road like that for? We told you not to go in the road like that!”) than at me for driving the vehicle he smacked into.

But two trips to Tauranga and beyond and back again, and we finally found a van.

The Work

We did a few things to the boat when she was on the hard. After reviewing what we went through during the false-start sale, we’d decided on a few cosmetic upgrades to the boat and repairing the hull-keel joint. And any time the boat is out of the water, you do things. It’s easier to find a broken through-hull or other problem out of the water than in. And much less exciting.

Keel Bolts and Torque

The keel bolt project went off without a hitch, and we felt 100% confident that we’d done the right thing.

First, we had to get the table and floors up. We did that before the yard guys started work. No sense paying yard rates for work we could do ourselves.

Next, the tanks had to come up. We’d emptied all but the fuel tank, then the yard pumped the fuel out. The water tanks and secondary fuel tank all came up without a hitch. The keel bolts we could see all looked fantastic – shiny, clean, and no rust or wear. Preliminary torquing took less than a quarter of a turn to get to factory specification.

The main fuel tank was a bit of a hassle. A wire conduit across the middle of it meant it couldn’t be removed without disconnecting those wires, which is a major hassle since they ran for and aft, and we did not know which wire was which. Tracing the wires and disconnecting could add days of labor to the project.

From what I could see, there was enough room to slide the tanks if a few more things were disconnected. So that’s what they did – slid the tank about two feet aft to give access to the bolts underneath it. Not easy access though – engineer had to be suspended upside down from a chain fall to get to the last of them.

While this was going on, the seam between the hull and keel was ground out and the surface near the seam sanded to the underlying material (fiberglass or lead). We watched to look for seepage through this clean opening, and there was none.

Based on this, we concluded the weeping liquid we saw after the boat was hauled had come in from the outside into the seam and was leaking back out, it did not from inside the boat. To further test this, once they torques the bolts, the engineers filled the bilge to the top with freshwater. Not a drop came out the seam.

In the end, the bolts need to be turned a quarter turn – not very much – to reach the specification we got from Hallberg-Rassy. The seam was re-sealed with epoxy and glass, and prepped for painting.

Other Projects

We were not idle when the boat was being ripped apart down below. We’d determined a few things needed to be done to help the curb appeal of the boat, and to pre-empt further speculation from confused surveyors on the next deal. And with the boat out of the water, there were other tasks to accomplish.

The most visible thing we did was replace all the lenses in the port windows. This is something which could have been done when we bought the boat, and the windows only got more crazed and clouded over the years. When we were first hauled, Kathy and I pulled all the lenses off and drove them to a guy in Auckland to re-glaze.

We also checked and worked every through hull, and replaced one we didn’t like the look of. (To be fair, the surveyor didn’t like it either, but it was above the waterline and still turned – it took half an hour and cost about $35 NZD to fix.)

Some areas of the teak were looking more weathered than the rest, and a few boards had cracked. We got a woodworker from the yard to replace those boards and cut some seams for re-caulking. Even with regular maintenance, a teak deck is going to need some work after twenty-three years. But whatever we can do to make it look better helps.

I also undertook a few minor underwater repairs, cleaning up some screw holes. I filled them in the past, but quickly and at the last minute when I spotted them. So I drilled them out and filled them with thickened epoxy instead of the rubber bedding compound I’d used the first time.

Finally, we painted the whole bottom again. This is unfortunate, since we only got a year out of the last job and we’d spent some extra money on high quality paint. But ablative bottom paint requires a boat to move from time to time, and a year in a marina riding out the pandemic did it no favors. But the keel needed painting anyway, so it was time.

So What’s Next?

As I type this, I’m riding across the Cook Strait on the Bluebridge ferry, with our little blue van sitting on the deck outside. Kathy and I are headed to South Island for some much needed time away from boat work, buyers, and teak goo.

Before we left, we secured a new broker. This guy wanted to do a professional photo shoot, taking out a drone to get shots of the boat from all angles and under sail.

Getting ready for a photo shoot was…wait for it…a lot of work. Cleaning, fixing, polishing. The guy cutting teak seems kept making more holes, and we had to fill them with teak caulk.

Before we hauled out, we’d replaced all the interior reading light fittings (ten!), and with the new, clear window lenses the inside of the boat really pops. Of course, now you have to watch what you wear in the saloon when you’re in a marina, because you can see through the windows like they aren’t there…but I digress.

The photo shoot was the target we sprinted for…then Auckland went into a lockdown the night before the first try. A week later, the lockdown lifted, and we tried again. And boy, were the results worth it – check out these pictures.

If you want to see them all, including the interior and deck shots, check out the broker’s for sale listing.

For us now, we’re headed off for some adventure for what seems like the first time in forever. Living in a small campervan is…interesting. To those who can’t envision living in the tight space of a boat, imagine living in space that we boat-dwellers find awkward and tight! But it’s good practice, since we have no interest in returning to a fixed address once the boat finally does sell.

So you can look forward to maybe some interesting travel posts. Maybe we’ll get you some mountains, glaciers, and a penguin or two!