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).