The Best Advice from a Boat Surveyor

10 years ago, when I bought Wisdom, there were a bunch of issues that I felt strongly, that needed to be corrected immediately to make the boat liveable. Naturally, as I was a new boat owner and fresh to sailboats at the time; my concerns were far from applicable as to what actually needed to be addressed!

The boat had a little bit of water damage on the interior which had discolored the veneer. Nothing structural, only cosmetic. I mentioned to the surveyor how I planned to replace those panels with new wood and to “fix the problem”. He told me:

“Live with the problem as it is for a few months and see if it still bothers you”

This helpful piece of advice was taken to heart and I lived with the discolored veneer for a few months to see if it still bothered me. Needless to say, 10 years later my parrots found the weakened veneer and started to peel it off the bulkhead. Suddenly, the problem became very ugly and needed to be addressed!

Had I started working on the veneer all those years ago, I would have been wasting my time and resources on unnecessary aspects of the boat which offer nothing to the actual integrity to the hull and her ability to sail! Every time I see something that screams “Urgent Need To Be Fixed”, I stop and think about his wise words.

Is this something structural or cosmetic? If it’s structural, is it important? If it’s cosmetic, will it bother me in a month?

Structural issues that are part of a seldom used system are of lower priority than a structural issue that is integral to the soundness of your hull. Picture this: the car on the mast that holds the spinnaker pole broke. You no longer have a secure way to mount the spinnaker to your mast and can’t use your spinnaker pole. This sounds really bad but you are on a beam reach from one island to another and will be anchored in two days, where you can then carry out repairs.

There is no reason to repair the car while underway, and when you get to your anchorage, ask yourself “How much did I actually use the pole?” Some people use the pole every time the sail off the wind, while others only have the pole on their deck to bang their shins on when they walk by. If you are the former, replacing the broken car becomes a top priority, but if you are the latter, maybe clear off the deck a little by selling or giving away your spinnaker pole and removing the broken car.

Compare this to noticing a crack in your stem. This is a structural issue and cannot be ignored! There is no waiting or contemplating about this issue as it is critical to the structural integrity of the hull and the safety of the ship!

With cosmetic issues, imagine that your fender popped, and the topsides got scratched. For a few thousand dollars, you can get the scratched fixed and make it look like it never happened! Before you go spend thousands of dollars, maybe wait on it and see if it still bothers you in a month. If after a month, you realize that you don’t even notice the scrape, let it be and use that money on something more important to you on the boat. Likewise, if after a month, you can’t stop looking at the scrape and thinking about how horrible it looks, then get it fixed and that will be money well spent.

There is no shortage of boat projects, but there is a shortage of time and resources. Managing time, money, and parts is critical to making sure that the important projects get done in a timely manner and the less critical projects get done when you get around to it (or never).

This little bit of advice has been instrumental in the way I approach boat repairs as well as other facets of my life and I hope that it can help you too.

ICW vs Ocean Cruising

Ocean Cruising is probably what everyone pictures when they think about “traveling on a sailboat”. You have endless waves between you and your next destination as you are carried along by the ocean zephyrs. It sounds romantic, and it is absolutely worth it; but it is a lot of work!

While out at sea, you never get any sleep. Your body gets used to living with a lack of sleep after a few days, but you never really feel “rested” because the longest amount of sleep you can get is your short “off watch” time. When you go to sleep, your bed is in constant motion, and that makes deep sleep a little harder to get!

The rewards are incredible stars, unbelievable sunsets, and an experience of a lifetime! You can reach any point of land with a coast and explore the world the way it has been traveled for thousands of years. We have spent the last 5 years traveling around the Atlantic, visiting ports in Europe, Africa, South America, and the Caribbean.

Now we are back in the US cruising up the ICW where everything is different! The ICW is a protected waterway in the coast of the US that lets you gently move your boat along the entire coast. Between Florida and North Carolina, there are only two places where your boat is in danger of getting damaged. One is the Rock Pile in Myrtle Beach, SC, the other is the rocks in Snow’s Cut, NC.

Aside from these two small areas, the entire ICW consists of either a soft mud, sand, or shell bottom. If you run aground, it will be gentle and you will be able to float off on the next high tide (unless you bumped bottom at high tide, then you will need a tow). The only source of waves are the other boat wakes that move along near you!

The ICW lets you sleep at anchor every night, never worry about provisioning or water because there are grocery stores and fuel docks (where you can get water) everywhere. If the weather is good, you move onward. If the weather is nasty, you just wait at anchor another day and see what tomorrow brings!

We spent three days at anchor in 40 knot winds in Georgia where the waves got up to about 10 inches high. We were still able to dinghy our dog to a beach in our inflatable dinghy with a 2hp electric outboard. The winds were incredible, but the sea was still flat (all things considered). If we were in the ocean, we would have been hove to riding over 30 foot waves while rolling all over the place. Instead, we sat back and streamed our favorite shows while we waited for better weather to return.

While cruising in the ICW might not seem very glamorous, it is a great way to get your feet wet! You can try out your gear and get a feel for your boat. You will still get to experience traveling by boat, dinghying to shore, and living at anchor but in the comfort and safety of the coast. This might be your dream come true and you will never need to face the adversity of the ocean during a storm, or it is just what you need to teach you how to untie the lines and set off on adventure.

While the ICW and the Ocean are vastly different, both offer incredible sights, memories, and experiences to the cruiser who is willing to explore them.

DC Water Heater

Ever since I was a kid, water heaters either ran on Shore Power or with a heat exchanger from the motors hot water. When I took out my diesel motor to put in an electric motor, I gave up half my heating options. When I went cruising, I disconnected from shore power and gave up hot water all together!

After 5 years of cold showers, we finally have hot water again! A company called Missouri Wind and Solar makes a 48VDC, 700W water heater element that simply threads into your existing water heater. It has all the necessary components built into it so all you need to do is give it electricity!
Water heats at a known rate, 2.4705 Watt hours to raise 1 gallon 1°F. This means that if you have a 6 gallon water heater, you will need 14.8W per °F that you want to increase in the tank. If your sailing in cold water where the temperature is 50°F and you want a nice hot shower at 130°F, you need to increase the temperature by 80°F and that will use 1.18kWh of power!

1184W (needed to warm your shower water) / 700W (the power of the heating element) = 1.7 hours or 1 hour 41 minutes to heat the water for your shower.

1kW is a lot of electricity to use on a hot shower, but when you are cruising, you don’t shower everyday. On shower days, simply turn the water heater on about 2 hours before you want your hot shower and then turn it off when you are done!

To make showering even more efficient, we are able to still be charging from our solar panels with the heater on, letting us heat the water for an afternoon shower without draining our batteries.
You might be wondering why even bother with a DC water heater. Why not just get and inverter or run a generator? Those things are expensive! If you have an electric motor, it probably runs on 48VDC or higher, and you are familiar with set up and step down DC-DC converters from Victron and how affordable they are! The water heater element costs about $80 from Missouri Wind and Solar, while an inverter to power an AC water heater will cost you close to $1000! A generator is another option, as it will crank out the power to run the water heater, but they also cost about $1000 to buy and more in gasoline to operate.
All of these alternatives are going to cost you while having a DC water heater element lets you run it off your batteries for under $100.

YouTube Algorithm

You might not care about the YouTube Algorithm because you might think that it doesn’t affect you. This couldn’t be farther from the truth if you watch anything on YouTube!

YouTube chooses which videos get shown to a creators subscribers and on Home Page based on a variety of metrics. You are either a creator who is trying to figure out how to get your videos seen by potential viewers or a viewer who is being force fed the same regurgitated crap that YouTube’s Algorithm is feeding you.

This video performed incredibly well, beating out the last 10 videos in views instantly! Why? Because we talked about “Girls walking around naked”.

Naked is the important part because apparently a lot of people search for videos with the term “Naked” in them on YouTube (hate to break it to you but if you are looking for that on YouTube, you are on the wrong platform. There are a few other websites that will yield what you are looking for).

Suddenly all our viewers were finding our channel by searching the term “Naked” and we received a ton of views! This was great because it was a crossover episode with our friends from Bums on a Boat, the more views we received, the greater the number of viewers that would find their channel! Seems like a Win-Win situation.

YouTube even congratulated us for making a video with an interesting thumbnail and title, along with really good watch time. Yay! Watch time is always really high on our episodes because they are captivating, and no matter how many views they get, the watch time remains high. The problem is that the video simply isn’t shown if it doesn’t have certain “catchy” aspects to it.

Our next episode was performing pitifully! It started off ranking 7th of our last 10 videos published and YouTube sent us a kind little reminder saying something along the lines of “fewer viewers are choosing to watch this so it will show up less in recommendations”. In other words, it didn’t contain the word “Naked” in the title so the video was not being shown to viewers and therefore underperforming.

We changed the title and in under an hour it had climbed the ranks to the position of 2 of 10!

The YouTube Algorithm will either showcase or bury your videos and you have no direct control on what it does. All you can do as a creator is try to cater towards what the Algorithm likes so that you can grow as a channel.

How does this affect you as a viewer? All your favorite creators are forced to make clickbait crap to try and keep their channel and their livelihood working for them. We don’t have another job that buys food, we live directly off the earnings from our videos. If the video does poorly, we make less money and if we don’t make enough we would have to stop sailing to work a normal job! As you can see, YouTube’s Algorithm has us by the throat and we are stuck between a rock and a hard place!

As you know, we are not the type to just accept hardship and not find a way to improve the situation! We are sailors and we are very good at finding solutions to our problems.

Our solution to the problem is to stop hoping that YouTube will notify our subscribers and to make a way to notify you guys directly! I have created a list serve (or e-mail list) that you can sign up on and when we publish a video, you will be notified directly by us. There is no spam, there is no junk, just a direct communication from me to you letting you know when we have a new episode or video out.

The goal is to build the list serve up to the point where it rivals the YouTube subscriber number so that we no longer need to rely on YouTube to notify our viewers of a new video and we can put an end to the constant clickbait titles just to get YouTube to notify our viewers of our episodes.

La Parguera, Puerto Rico

I grew up in Puerto Rico going to La Parguera every weekend, then I moved to the states and missed those beautiful waters every day I was away.

Sailing back into the waters of La Parguera was incredibly special! I was finally able to show Maddie, my wife, all the places I swam and explored as a kid. We even went to the bioluminescent bay, also called the bio bay, where Maddie went skinny dipping!