Outfitting in Nauseating Detail

As near as I can tell, outfitting a boat for a long trip comes down to stripping everything out of her that you can carry so you can get at the bits you need to inspect or beef up, and then to load her down with so much ancillary crap and supplies that she can barely float.

To cover the first bit, preparing her systems, we found that we didn't actually have much to do. Insegrevious is 1978, John Cherubini-designed Hunter sloop, and she's been to Alaska before (under previous management). Hunter has a poor reputation among some sailors (the snobs), but as far as I can tell most of that was earned in the mid-eighties with some notoriously skimpy designs and shoddy workmanship. I've heard, although it may be apocryphal, that fiberglass boats of the sixties and seventies were laid with the glass extra thick because designers weren't absolutely sure at the time of the characteristics of the relatively new material. Whatever the reason, the 33-foot Hunters laid between '77 and '83 have solid hulls with the fine lines and seaworthiness characteristic of Cherubini designs. The old Yanmar 2QM20 diesel sitting in the stern can be hard to find parts for (Yanmar's policies regarding geographic distributorships are right out of the Stone Age and god help you if you need to find someone there who speaks English) but it runs like a champ. The mast step and steering quadrants had been reinforced by a previous owner, making the rigging and steering more solid than many boats that age. The wiring had been a mess when we got her but had mostly been re-run since. I'd added a battery for the house bank to bring the storage up to 198Ah.

What we were left with were a lot of relatively minor upgrades:

• Strapping down heavy stuff and installing latches on lockers
  
• Replacing the mainsail
  
• Adding an autopilot
  
• Installing an integrated GPS, radar, and chartplotter
  
• Buying and rigging solar panels
  
• Adding a holding tank
• Painting the hull
• A thousand other minor items

We've gotten through a fair bit of the more complicated bits on the list, but I will put up posts on how we did them and why, in the grand nautical tradition of helping the next guy avoid all our mistakes. I may also ramble on at length about some of the smaller projects which have been either particularly interesting or particularly painful (gathering charts for the northwest coast is the one currently driving me up the wall).

The Tyranny of the Charts

I like charts, just as I have always liked maps... loaded with possibilities, covered with nooks and crannies and the promise of unexplored places. Sit me down with a magnifying glass and an old, musty roll-up of the Western seaboard and I am a happy camper.

This is all well and good if you are daydreaming or if you restrict your voyages to a relatively limited geographic area; up to this point, all our travels have been covered quite handily by two convenient waterproof Maptech chartbooks (1510 and 1520) which have all the relevant NOAA charts reproduced to a common size and bound together for Puget Sound and the San Juan islands.

If you are bound for Southeast Alaska from Seattle, however, you are suddenly looking at a whole mess of overlapping, inconvient, expensive options when it comes to paper charts.

"Wait," you say, "didn't I just read that you had purchased and installed a spanking new, GPS integrated chartplotter? Why not use that!" Indeed we did, and we shall; for about $250 we got two little chips the size of two postage stamps which cover every square inch (or centimeter, once you get north of 48 degrees) of our route. We expect to rely on that as our primary plot for the trip.

But it's not quite that easy, as nothing to do with a boat ever is. One, since it's a gadget, it's subject to failure--run out of power, short-circuit, get gremlins, you name it. If this happens while floating safely in dock at a major marina, well, it's time for cocktails and a warranty service call, and you can explore the sites for another couple of days. If it happens at night, in a westerly gale, off Cape Scott, well, you'll need something a little stiffer than the average cocktail, and a lot of luck to go along with it.

Beyond that, apparently it is a requirement of the Canadian Coast Guard that you maintain adequate paper charts for your prospective route onboard irrespective of any fancy electronic navigation gadgets you may be carrying. They're not the Mounties, but I'm disinclined to cross them nonetheless.

Cost, however, is a factor. I've heard it estimated that a full set of charts covering the Inside Passage and the west coast of Vancouver Island will run you north of $4000; just the Inside Passage set, at 2/3 scale and in black and white from Bellingham Chart Printers, is still a little over $1000. Now, after the initial investment in the chart plotter package, that seems a little steep for a (hopefully) redundant system. In fact, it's entirely outside our remaining--and quickly dwindling--budget.

What I find myself doing, then, is combing through the chart catalogs trying to find the right combination of discounted charts (a la the 2/3 size BCP versions), free self-printed charts (all NOAA charts are available for free, online--the downside to this is that only half the trip is in US waters and my printing capabilities don't do justice to the chart detail), and full-scale, full-fee charts (the only sort available from the Canadian Hydrograhic Service, who, conveniently, maintain a monopoly on surveys of Canadian waters) which cover the route in enough detail to be safe, but not so much that I am paying extra for a lot of stuff I'll never use. Those full chart sets are convenient, but include areas in great detail which we'll either bypass entirely or cover in the course of an afternoon without approaching any obstacles. Cutting out those large scale harbor charts for places we'll never be near makes things much more affordable; but it requires a lot of detective work.

I've been combing over online chart catalogs (I highly recommend the Dynamic Chart Viewers at American Nautical Services--they have the least cluttered and easiest to read catalogs for just about every chart source) trying the sort all this out for the past couple of weeks. I think I am just about there; the CHS is really my last major obstacle. Between their lock on charts for BC waters and the strong Canadian dollar, they are still breaking my budget.
It so happens that there are supposed to be a number of US Government charts covering those waters, but I have yet to find them freely available online as they should be... my tax dollars at work, and all. NIMA, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, produces charts of "foreign" waters and the catalogs show a number of them I would like to get my hands on, but BCP wants to charge full price for them just like the CHS ones. NGIA, the parent agency for NIMA, is theoretically charged with distributing certain of its product to the public, but in practice they still embody the paranoid military mindset they were borne of, and it's extraordinarily difficult to find their product in understandable or useable formats.

Some guy named Bob, who is awesome, went through the existing (and publicly available--no military minds, these) NOAA electronic charts and converted them to PDF for easy redistribution. Be kind to Bob's bandwidth--he doesn't have a donate button up, yet, but those are large files! Take only what you need. I found the link off Sailnet so I don't think it's supposed to be secret, but Bob, if you don't want to ask for donations and don't want traffic from this blog, drop me a line and I'll take the link down.

If only Bob were to be frustrated by and turn his genius toward the NIMA charts!

At any rate, between Bob and some judicious paring, I think that I can get a safe complement of paper charts for the trip for around $200. Don't quote me on that.

Outfitting - Preamble

Like many part-time sailors, we're on a tight budget; it's all we can do to come up with the two-odd months of free time to head to Alaska (although, being both of us self-employed, we have it easier than some), let alone fit out and provision adequately for the trip. Moreover, like many we have found that getting ready to go sailing has eclipsed our ability to actually go sailing, and so many of the shakedown trips that we had hoped to make before actually pointing the compass NW have fallen off the list entirely.

We decided on this trip early last year and promptly didn't do much to get ready for it until this year. That wasn't my intention, but business picked up quite a bit for both of us at the end of the year, when we had intended to start slowing down and doing boat stuff instead, so like most small business owners we scrambled for the cash while it was on the table and the boat took a back burner.

That's had some mixed effects; while we're behind schedule, we're not quite as strapped for cash as we might otherwise have been. On the other hand, I'm burnt out and badly want to just go, which isn't possible or wise without doing some planning and preparation. Over the next few posts I'll cover what we have done, what needs done, and what probably won't get done at all (not counting the stuff that I have forgotten about even putting in one of those lists, which needless to say, won't be getting done either).

First post!

This shall be the blog of the good ship Insegrevious, a 33-foot Cherubini designed Hunter sloop, bound this summer for Northern waters, or whatever perils may strike her before.

We hope this blog will be one-stop shopping for friends and family to find information and photos from the trip, since we're far too lazy to update each of you individually, and perhaps some bits of information will be of some use to other sailors bound for the Inside Passage in the future, although it is hard to imagine anyone with any less experience than us attempting the journey and so most will probably already have learned the hard lessons we may detail.

We're outfitting the boat now and planning on a mid-May departure, God willing. Personally I find myself hungry for details when it comes to planning and putting together such expeditions and there is actually relatively little out there to be found for the novice sailor planning such a trip, so I'll try to load up as much detail as I can; I'll distinguish those posts from the "fluff" travelogue crap, though, so you won't have to wade through it if you don't want to.

Cheers, and check back again some time.