Most recent activity
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Everything that I ever post in the HMS Severance thread.
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I sent the 10% deposit for Yantara today, £3,168. I'll collect her from Langkawi when her current owners finish their cruise in around March.
Some reference points here - camper vans are illegal in Singapore, but if they were not a new one would be around £300,000, and around £150,000 used. I think I mentioned that a lot of things here are a lot more expensive than back in the UK, and motor vehicles are a good example of this.
Boats, on the other hand, and especially this one, cost less (well, apart from Scruffy the Contessa, but I would say that that price is shall we say ambitious).
The refit that Yantara went through in late '22 to early '23 cost around the asking price, and as part of that a very extensive amount of the important parts (rigging, sails, anti-fouling etc) are close to brand new. The gearbox has 20 hours of use for example.
Does this mean that she won't cost a fortune to maintain? No, absolutely no guarantee there, but compared to everything else I've seen over the past 12 months she's in the best condition, with the newest parts, at the best price.
I'll document the ongoing tinkering and (hopefully) travelling, so if you want to see me lose my shirt this may well be the thread in which to so do.
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All the navigation kit works, the current owners say that normally they up-anchor/un-moor and get into open water, then put the autopilot on so that they can focus on trimming the sails and enjoying the voyage. You can plot points on the 12" Raymarine chart plotter which are then sent to the autopilot which will then take care of the steering input required get there. There's a radar (48 nautical mile range) on the mast, and AIS, both of which give a good picture of the surrounding environment - radar being useful for seeing fast approaching inclement weather and unlit, AIS-less fishing boats. I need to look into this but combining all the systems should enable an alarm to sound if a collision course is detected from either a boat broadcasting AIS, an obstacle such as a reef or sandbar, and an otherwise stealthy fishing boat/longtail.
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Almost everything works - one of the burners on the stove (of four) is borked, and there are lots of little details that make my teeth itch which I need to address.
An example - you can see a knife rack screwed to the bulkhead/partition in the galley, and whoever did that used screws which were longer than the partition was deep, so the ends stick through. Buying a bag of shorter screws, some filler and some paint would enable a lot of small details to be addressed.
However, there is a larger issue - the 600 litres of water tanks (made up of multiple GRP tanks under the central floor area) are leaking, and are no longer in use. It's believed that it's not the tanks themselves, but rather the connections between them, but it's extremely hard to get access so currently she's got 200 litres of soft tanks in a locker under the starboard sofa.
This is something I'm going to address, I'm going over options at the moment - it might be that I cut access holes in the tanks and then put the soft bag tanks inside the existing hard tanks, but first I shall see if I can get access to the connectors and replace them all. Input very gratefully received on this, alongside recommendations for a cheap but decent endoscope.
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The galley, chart table and saloon is in the centre of the boat, and it's very light and airy in there - and I can stand upright everywhere, not just in the centre of the cabin.
Galley:
Chart table, fuse panel and so on:
Saloon:
She's extremely welcoming and comfortable, was my conclusion, in part because you've got everything that you'd have in a 30' boat, but with 17' more space to put it in. Only two cabins in a boat of this size is unusual - the norm would be a minimum of two rear cabins, maybe two at the front as well, so having that dedicated to the living area gives a real sense of space.
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She's got two cabins - one V-berth at the front, and one large double cabin at the rear. The sofa in the saloon can convert into two berths, giving six in total.
V-berth (in popular "throw stuff in it" storage mode):
And the rear cabin:
We opened all the lockers and pulled up the floorboards under the V-berth and she's dry, very dry - which is a great sign given that she's been cruising for two months at this point.
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Unlike say the Beneteau Oceanis the deck is very easy to walk around, being a good width and without a lot of stays and lines competing for space.
In part this is because the majority of the lines are operated by winches on the base of the mast, rather than being run back to the cockpit - something which was changed on the later GRP versions.
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The boat was anchored off Ao Pur pier- she couldn't come in as in common with a lot of Thailand the bay was very shallow and shelved down only very gradually. We took a frankly pointless but mandatory bus to the end of the pier and met the one half of the couple who own the boat, in the RIB which was her dinghy. This has the advantage that we could do a circuit of the boat as we came near her, and she's a good looking boat - I was focussing on not falling out of the RIB so didn't take any photographs, but here she is on the hard in October '24.
She's a centre-cockpit cutter with a hard dodger (cockpit roof), with, and this is unusual in my limited experience, a clean and clear aft deck space.
The solar arch projects to the rear of the aft-deck, and has davits to raise the dinghy when under way. Over the aft-deck is a (new) canvas bimini which can be connected to the rear of the hard dodger with some zips. There's a lot of shade available which in the tropics is something you really want.
The hard dodger is a sign of her design roots - the Southern Ocean can be on the tumultuous side, and having protection from severe weather is handy.
Ok, don't worry about moving anything.