The Sailboat Search Chronicles: Part 14 (Details and Dates)

Oct 2 2009 in The Sailboat Search Chronicles by Deborah Bach

I’m starting to feel a bit like a bad parent or at least, a negligent owner.

Not that it could be helped — hurricanes have a way of throwing a wrench into things.

Our new boat, Three Sheets, has been sitting empty in her slip 1,500-plus miles away, untouched since early August. While other boats have come and gone from San Carlos Marina over the past weeks, Three Sheets has remained forlornly in place, securely tethered to the dock. It’s been more than two months since her sails have been raised, since she’s had a chance to show off her considerable sea chops on the Sea of Cortez. It’s downright sad.

But that will soon change. We’re planning a mid-November cruise for about 10 days out of San Carlos, after which the boat will be shipped to Tucson and on to Seattle. Our plans were slightly waylaid by Hurricane Jimena, a Category 4 storm that tore up the Baja Peninsula with winds of up to 150 mph in early September.

San Carlos was hit hard by the hurricane, which knocked out power and water services and collapsed a bridge on the main road into town. Marina Seca, the dry storage boatyard in San Carlos and to our knowledge, the only company in town providing haulout services, was heavily flooded. Its offices had to be temporarily relocated and staff spent days pumping out boats and cleaning up the mess. The company was without running water or phones for a couple of weeks and lost all of its computer records, yet admirably managed to keep customers apprised through a blog providing photos and updates.

We waited a while after the hurricane before even trying to contact Marina Seca to arrange for shipping. Various blogs and forums have carried heartwrenching accounts of Mexicans impacted by the hurricane, people who were without food or water, who lost their houses and their belongings. One especially poignant post detailed the plight of the residents of El Cobijo San Jose, a seniors home near San Carlos, who were shuttled up a rickety ladder onto the roof as the raging waters rose around them, destroying their few possessions.

Obviously, moving our boat could wait.

Now that our plans are moving ahead, we’re excited to get down to Mexico and hoist the sails. It’s been more than a year since we’ve been on a boat for even a week and we’re long overdue for some time on the water. We bought the highly-recommended “Sea of Cortez: A Cruiser’s Handbook,” written by Northwest couple Shawn Breeding and Heather Bansmer, and are looking forward to exploring a few of the destinations described in the book.

After our cruise, we’ll decommission the boat ourselves (easier said than done, I suspect) and have it shipped to Tucson, where it will be loaded onto another truck bound for Seattle. We settled on truck transport for reasons of convenience and cost. Moving the boat by truck will likely cost about $9,000 plus recommissioning, versus about $13,000 to ship it by barge out of La Paz, about 200 miles from San Carlos.

Another, less expensive option was to ship by boat from Manzanillo, 600-plus miles south, but the shipping company confirms sailing dates only within three to four days of departure, which means making last-minute — and likely costlier — travel plans. A 600-mile sail was also not my ideal scenario for a shakedown cruise that we only have two weeks for. So trucking it is.

Now that those mundane details are almost sorted out, I’m focused on infinitely more interesting things, like shopping for bedding and picking new upholstery for the cushions on the salon settee (men, feel free to tune out at this point).

We’re having the cushions reupholstered at an auto upholstery shop in Tucson, which should cost about two-thirds less than having it done in Seattle, where labor and rents are considerably higher. We plan to have the work done in advance so we can pick the cushions up on the way to San Carlos and install them, freshly reupholstered, in the boat for our cruise.

A word about cushions: When we started looking for a new boat in the spring, I immediately reserved the right to replace the upholstery on whatever boat we buy. Since we were looking at older boats, I figured the upholstery would either be worn-out, dirty, ugly or all of those.

After looking at a dozen or so boats over the past few months and countless more online, I can tell you that almost without exception, the upholstery on older boats is downright fugly. I’ve seen cheesy seashell motifs circa 1985, butt-crushed velour, pastel nightmares.

And I knew that new upholstery would be kicked to the bottom of the priority list, below a new autopilot, new dodger and the myriad other projects Marty will invariably have planned for the boat. So I insisted. Marty, recognizing his fortune in finding a woman foolish enough to join him on the money-squandering venture known as boat ownership, wisely agreed.

The upholstery on our new boat, Three Sheets, isn’t even close to the worst I’ve seen, but it doesn’t do much for the gleaming brightwork surrounding it:

Salon cushions-1

If you’re going to spend as much time with the varnish brush as the previous owners clearly did, upholstery that contrasts with the wood would seem a better choice. We’re thinking about a light-colored, marine-quality vinyl that looks like leather but is more durable and easier to maintain.

A little art, some new dishes and bedding, a restocked galley and liquor cabinet and we should be ready to go. Besides a heater, which we’ll have installed as soon as the boat gets to Seattle, if not sooner, there’s really nothing else she needs.

If all goes as planned, Three Sheets should arrive in Seattle by early December. We’ll be ready for some winter cruising.

12 Comments »