Port Everglades, Florida
October 8, 2007
I’m sitting on the tarmac in Florida at Fort Lauderdale International Airport, Westbound for Oakland, California. As the wheels lift off, I finally feel like we have completed the first chapter of our journey. I’m thinking about all of you that will read this. Some of you have been following our progress, others have been part of it, and for a few of you, it will be a bit of a surprise…
I’ve been in the Bahamas and Florida on and off for the last 3 months to complete the purchase and refit of our new boat OCÉALYS, which we plan to sail across the South Pacific for the next couple of years- or however long it takes.
It’s been an intense process: 100 or so days, 4 haulouts, 5 surveyors, 4 brokers, U.S. Customs, the French Affaires Maritimes (OCÉALYS is a French-flagged yacht), a lightning strike (!), 600 hours of work at the boat yard, and finally a hoist onto the deck of a cargo ship to bring her Westbound to Ensenada, Mexico.Here’s the story so far…
As much as one can trace this sort of thing back, I think Sophie and I decided definitively that we’d undertake some sort of grand adventure about 3 years ago during dinner at a Japanese restaurant. We knew we had to do something to break the routine, get some contrast and perspective, and expose the kids to a broader set of experiences. We brainstormed for a while and decided that there was no better way for us to do that than go cruising on a sailboat for a couple of years.
Next was the question of timing: we felt that Annabelle, our youngest, had to be at least 3 years old to do this safely, so that gave us our timetable. Annabelle’s third birthday was last month, and we’re hoping to leave in December. January at the latest.
The next big step was finding the right boat. We decided pretty early on that we wanted to go cruising on a catamaran this time. The room, stability, and speed were very compelling. The disadvantages are cost (it’s almost like buying two boats), and that in heavy weather they can be difficult to handle. After some research we decided that the French-built Catanas had the right mix of performance and blue-water passage making ability. We started looking for 43’ to 47’ Catanas built from 1998 to 2002 with help from our 2 great brokers in San Diego and surprisingly good resources online.
The boat we wanted turned out to be difficult to find and we had to broaden our search to the East Coast, the Caribbean and South America (the boats in Europe, because of the strength of the Euro, were out of our reach). I’d seen OCÉALYS, a 2002 Catana 471 online when I was doing research and getting ready to shop seriously. But when we finally sold our house and were ready to buy a boat, she was in escrow. I was really disappointed since OCÉALYS just felt like the boat for us, even though I’d only seen her on the Web. The following couple of months didn’t turn up any other promising boats, so I decided to call the seller’s broker on the off chance we could come in with a back-up offer. I had a short and very pleasant phone call in French with a gentleman named Alexis (who would later be instrumental in making the deal go through and became a friend) and we put in a backup offer in case the current deal fell through. It did. Our offer moved in, and I flew to Grand Bahama where OCÉALYS was lying in storage out of the water.We had her surveyed and did a sea trial of sorts. There was no wind and we had to back down on the engines just to fill the spinnakers to have a look at them. We accepted the boat and moved on to final negotiations. We made the deal and started the remainder of the purchase process. Half way through that, Alexis and I were supposed to bring her across to Ft. Lauderdale—about a 12 hour trip.
The evening before leaving we went aboard to get her ready, but none of the electronics or electrics were working. We figured that the minor electrical issue we knew about had gotten worse, and that we’d go ahead with the crossing. So at 0500 the next morning with no lights, no GPS and no radio to call for clearance, we headed out of Freeport for Fort Lauderdale. We would have looked very suspicious to anyone paying attention. As the sun came up and the top of the mast became visible, Alexis (pictured) noticed the absence of various antennas and wind instruments, and we figured out that the electrical problems were the result of a lightning strike which must have occurred during a thunderstorm the day before. Talk about bad luck. It was pretty quiet on the boat for about an hour as we both dealt with this news internally.Eight hours later we arrived at the entrance to Ft. Lauderdale’s harbor, and 2 more hours of motoring got us up the New River to Lauderdale Marine Center, which would be my home for the next two months and the beneficiary of a surprising amount of our money.
At this point the purchase was stalled, and it took about a month to deal with the lightning strike: insurance companies, inspections, surveys, estimates and tests for damage. A lightning strike can be devastating to a modern cruising boat. Because Océalys’ mast–and the rest of her spars–are carbon fiber, there was a lot of concern about the effects of the lightning strike.We had to fly out an expert from the West Coast to do an Infrared Thermography of the mast. If you believe in the results, the mast has a clean bill of health. Both lightning strikes and carbon fiber spars are not completely understood, so when the two meet, I think there’s a bit of black magic and snake oil involved in making assessments.
Once the purchase was finally complete, work on the refit began in earnest. All of the electronics, and the entire electrical system had to be replaced because of the strike, but lots of other stuff needed to be done to get Océalys ready for sea. I won’t bother you with the 247 item list, but she has new rigging, new electrics and electronics. Both engines and the generator were serviced. New alternators, new canvas (awnings, covers, etc), a new Solent, new dinghy and outboard, a couple of new windows, new ground tackle (anchor and chain), new windlass, new toilets and attendant hoses (a fun project I saw to personally), leaks fixed, lines replaced, hull graphics changed, topsides spit-shined, and stainless polished. There was a real advantage being in Ft. Lauderdale for all of this work since it’s a major marine center. All of the vendors for the entire refit were literally within a 10 minute drive of the boatyard.
The bulk of the work that I didn’t do myself was done by Nautic and Co. of America, a small, family-operated company at the yard. Eric and Chantal are originally from France and with Eric’s brother Thierry, maintain an amusingly strong bastion of Gallic culture. They answer the phone in French and even start conversations on the phone and with their English or Spanish-speaking employees with several words of French before finally giving in to the lesser, if not appropriate English language.
They spent a lot of time with Océalys, and by the end of it I think felt a little attached. Thierry even came down the river with us to load her onto the ship, and was tweaking throttle cables and such the whole way. He called me the next morning and said, Maurice, I had a dream that a small diesel leak at the generator kept going and flooded the boat and caused a huge problem.In fact we’d forgotten to shut off the fuel, so we called aboard the transport ship and had it taken care of.
Loading Océalys aboard the M/V PAC Antares was quite an event and a bit stressful. One of the deckhands was nice enough to reassure me, Don’t worry, we haven’t dropped one yet today... My new, but already dear friend John came down for 3 days to help me get OCÉALYS ready for the shipment. I don't know if I would have made the ship without his help. Everything had to be stowed and lashed down in case the ship runs into heavy weather. There are a couple of hurricanes brewing in it's path...2 weeks from now hopefully she’ll arrive healthy and in one piece in Ensenada. I’ll keep you posted.
-maurice
