In with the new

 So what do you do when you've managed to clean up and rip out most of the interior of a 26ft sailboat? Walk around your local home improvement
 store of course! Always keep an open mind and a rough sketch of an idea when you're wandering around a store looking for inspiration on the cheap. My first stop was to look at the insulation. My Grampian was known for having a thick solid fiberglass hull, good build quality, but bad for condensation. The soft puffy fiberglass insulation is useless when it gets wet, so that stuff was out from the get go. That left me with several either close celled or open celled Styrophone boards, or an aluminum bubble wrap type material. In the end the choice was pretty straight forward. 1 inch close cell board glued directly to the hull both as insulation and a condensation barrier, then the 'aluminum bubble wrap' as an extra bit of insulation followed finally by more of nice toung and groove cedar slat closet liner I had picked up earlier to built my forward hatch out of.

Pre insulation and cedar, Note the ugly ancient red tweed

As you can see, I glued wooden stringers to the hull every 16", glued the insulation and aluminum bubble wrap between each stringer, and covered it all with the cedar. I also decided to install A car sterio here with plans to eventually add a VHF and somple NAV station.

All done with this corner! I picked up the VHF from craigslist for 40$ got my hands on a Barometer and Hydrometer for 10$ at a yard sale, and added an atomic clock with weather reporting I got for christmas 

Forward Berth still covered in red tweed

No more tweed, more stringers, more insulation, ran out of the foil insulation but better than nothing.

I decided since I had the extra space and no more of the foil insulation I'd give Water resistant spray foam a try and fill up the void where the foil would have gone. 

Insulation done and slats in place. I decided to leave the shelve space bare except for a single coat of brown paint. My Grampian may be big for a 26ft boat but I sure could still use all the shelf space I can get.

Close up of the cedar with mahogany trimmed shelves after I oiled and varnished everything.

I also decided to raise the floor by about 1 1/2 inches, sacrificing a bit of extra head room in exchange for almost doubling the available floor space I glued, tabbed and finally epoxied pressure treated wood onto the original floor stringers and laid down some 1/2 inch marine plywood. I coated the plywood with several coats of epoxy, then glued down some thick plastic vapor barrier to both sides and finally laid down some bamboo flooring. I know the Bamboo flooring wont likely hold up as well as some other materials, but it was very inexpensive, looked pretty good, and has held up for three years so far. When it comes time to replace it I still have over half a box left from when I originally bought it, given the tiny floor size thats more than enough to do it all again.

Original floor stringers

New raised floor stringers

My Friend and boatbuilding helper Garfunkle lending a hand

New wider bamboo covered floor plus carpeting

Out with the old!

Now, I had a relatively clean space and the lights finally on. Unfortunately, that made it all the easier to see the rot damage to the port side dinette and floor boards. A couple minutes of looking at it convinced me that it was time for it to go.

On the plus side, the wood had rotten out so badly that it didnt tak all that much to remove. I had to score the base of the only fiberglass tab along the bottom with a razor, followed by a couple taps with a hammer and a bit of leverage with my crowbar and most everything on the port side came up.

The floor was even easier, the floorboards were so bad a firm pull took everything out in one go.

After that bit of fun, I spent most of the remainder of my time tearing out the dirty red and black tweed that seemed to cover everything. I didnt bother with pictures of that part because the stuff was so dusty an itchy I still dont want to be reminded of it. After another round of cleanup I finally had a (more or less) blank canvas to start my work with!

Square One

So my boat had finally arived... Now what? For starters The boat was still a mess and reeked of Beer and who knows what else. I attacked the boat with broom, mop and various cleaners, ending day one with the boat looking just slightly better and myself feeling slightly... soiled.

I also noticed that the forward hatch was gone. Somehow, somewhere, the hatch had flown off during the drive up, leaving only the broken bits where it had torn from the hinges. As usual,one step forward leads to two steps backwards. As I was still flat broke from the move I managed to cobble together a workable hatch to keep the rain out from scraps of plywood I had kicking around.

Temporary crappy forward hatch... off to a good start....

Several Days later I replentished my funds, picked up a few sheets of marine grade plywood, some cedar slats and a little varnish and cobbled together something a little better

Next I took a look at the electrical panel... It looked something like this:

after spending a few days working in that aweful, swealtering, dirty, itchy space I had made enough headway that I more or less knew what every wire was for, replaced the worse ones with new marine tinned stuff that cost an arm and a leg and felt confident enough to try hooking up a battery... The boat caught fire instantly.

After putting out the flames and clearing the cabin of smoke I set back to work. Apparently someone had rewired the battery switch into a major, unfused short. Now I knew what Darryls backup plan possibly was if he hadnt managed to get rid of the boat in time.... A half hour later the electrical was finally sorted and everything worked!

To Begin With

The original craigslist add photo

There she was, a 26ft keel sailboat on craigslist listed for free! Even I could afford that! The list said it was a Grampian 26 in need of 'restoration' that needed to be gone asap from behind the Townsend lobster shop in Provincetown, MA. The next day and 6 hours of driving later I was standing in front of her and her owner Darryl. Darryl had originally purchased The Ann Marie from a friend of his up in Maine, god knows how he got the boat from Maine to Ptown given the lack of motor, sails, rusty keel, stuck centerboard, and three small drill holes in the bottom to let water trickle out when it rained. Near as I could tell she was mostly being used as a spot to drink, smoke and camp out in. The port side dinette berth was so thoroughly soaked in beer it had molded and rotten away.

On the plus side, after poking about for over an hour, I found the deck and hull to be absolutely perfect, not one soft spot anywhere to be found! The rudder had an issue where someone had replaced the fiberglass on one side with bondo, but that looked to be simply repairable with the right materials. Darryl also mentioned that the rigging was kept at a friends house and was included as well. Despite a nagging feeling that the boat looked a little like it belonged in a landfill I wrote Darryl a 50$ check in exchange for a hand written bill of sale and spent the remailder of the week figuring out how to get the boat all the way back to Halifax.

Driving over the Sagamore Bridge behind my 'new' boat

After contacting half a dozen transport companies I finally settled on the guys from Earls Marina. Total cost for the big move was 650$. Thankfully, that was exactly what I had to spare at the time. I called up Darryl to give him the good news and asked if I could come down the day before to grab the rigging and get the boat ready. Thats when the penny dropped. It turned out 'the rigging' was a bare mast that somehow didnt actually belong to Darryl. No boom, no shrouds or stays or turnbuckles, and according to Darryl no mast either unless I paid his friend for it. He also had decided that he wanted 'a couple hundred  extra' for the boat stands... At this point I told him never mind and that the boat would just have to stay where it was.

I had originally hoped to call his bluff but as the week wore on without any word from Darryl I figured it just wasnt meant to be. Until he called. Now apparently the mast DID belong to him and he was willing to give it to me, and was willing to take 100$ for the boat stands. That was good enough for me. I contacted Earls marine transporters again and set a date of 9/22 for the move!

That day... was very rough. In the end I couldt get the mast before hand and we had to make an extra trip. I also learned that moving a heavy keel boat was nothing like movin my little 15ft bay sailor. After all the sailing books and forum posts I read not ONE mentioned how to prepair a boat to be moved or how to prepair the spot it was going to be moved to. Most of my day involved running around crazy trying first to get the mast figured out, then loosing the blocks meant to go under the boat, then hitting the lumber store to buy a 12' long 6x6, then running around trying to find the battery for my cordless skill saw, then looking everywhere for my hand saw when the battery for the skillsaw drained after three cuts. Also the movers didnt like the spot I set aside in my moms back yard because they would have to drive over buried septic lines, something the 20,000lb trailer and 7000lb sailboat would definetly crush.

Still driving...

After solving all the little problems that kept popping up, and tipping the transporters extra for all the extra stops and agrivation (thank god I got another paycheck in!) The boat was finally at its new home!

Finally there!

A bit of back story

Alright, so to backtrack a bit! My name is Ryan, I've been sailing since around the age of 8 when a very derelict Snark sailboat washed up near my parents house. It had a tree growing out of it and only floated because it was mostly made of Styrofoam but I cleaned it up and polled it around the lake until I found the original owner, and traded him a dock I built in exchange for the sails and mast. I sailed my little decrepit Snark boat around the lake, using a paddle as a rudder and wrapping the main sheet around my leg because it took both hands to hold the rudder in place. Literally all of my first swear words were spoken on that small quiet New England Lake. By the time I was twelve the neighbors had finally had more than enough of my little mostly rotten foam Snark and it mysteriously disappeared. It was soon replaced by a much less decrepit sunfish with a real rudder and everything! The neighborhood returned to its original New England tranquility as the waters rang with fewer and fewer swears. By then I learned the exact balance of my little boat and only capsized when I wanted to, such as when friends were over or I had convinced my mom to finally go out sailing with me (She yelled one of the final swears to really ring out across the lake when I said 'watch this!' and promptly flipped the boat over).


Time went by, I grew up and moved to Plymouth. My little boat disappeared during a storm and sailing became just one more thing I planned to try again someday. Then in 2009 while visiting my Mom at the old house by the lake one of the neighbors who had been the most patient with me in my early sailing days offered me his Cape Cod Builders Mercury 15 bay sailer, complete with trailer and all rigging, for 50 cents, with the provision that I fixed her up properly. I was back in business. I learned fiberglass work, rigging, painting, varnishing, and everything else about boat work by first doing it thoroughly wrong on my poor little 15 ft bay sailer. However! By the time I was done she looked terrible! But she was sailable again! Each year I would repaint and revarnish, and slowly fix everything I almost fixed the year before until I was actually fixing things the way they were supposed to be.

My little CCB Mercury 15 In one of its incarnations

All this sailing and fixing began to give me a really, really, bad idea. I started to watch eBay and craigslist for boats in the 25 to 35 ft range. I joined every forum I could find and read every angry post about rig design, hull shape and material, bottom paint, and well, most every topic involving sailing and boats seemed to turn into angry back and forth posting, but I read them anyway. The main thing I learned is everybody regurgitates their own hearsay, especially professionals... After a lot of reading, searching, and almost learning things that either sounded like common sense or slightly contrary enough to common sense that it could actually be correct over the common sense, I found a Grampian 26 for sale in Provincetown for the whopping price of free. The rest of this blog is all about my Grampian and everything it is took to keep her sailing.

Some days its about relaxing

Some days its about Adventuring

All the days aboard Jera are magical