Top: Arabella as I first saw her at Blackwater Sailing Club (July 2005).Bottom: the tasteful seventies colour scheme...
At last! I'm the proud owner of Arabella! Together with all the bills and logistical problems that every yacht-owner knows and loves, of course...
Yacht Insurance
The first insurance brokerage I went to was a well-known name. They had one of those handy "apply for a quote online" features which I filled in and submitted nearly a fortnight ago. Nothing happened for nearly a week, so I chased them up. The result was immediate: poor Arabella was rejected "having regard to her age and value." Ah well, welcome to the realities of owning a cheap, old boat. In fairness they referred me on to two alternative providers without waiting to be asked.
I approached both of the alternative brokers. The first came back the next day...with a rejection "having regard to age and value"! I couldn't believe it, how hard could it be to insure Arabella? To their credit, this company had a tie-up with a broker that could place the insurance with underwriters, and the tie-up was sufficiently slick that the other broker's quotation arrived in the same envelope, which I thought was impressive. The quotation was £180 for all risks, including up to £3,000,000 cover for liabilites to third parties. The insurance cover was for all UK coastal and inshore waters, which is all I need for the foreseeable future.
The second provider came back more slowly, but with a quotation of £130. Fifty quid won't buy me much in the swindleries, but down at B&Q it'll pay for a lot of teak oil or interior varnish, or an extending step ladder for getting on board Arabella when she's laid up, so I read both policies line by line to check whether the cheaper one had any holes in it. I coudn't find any - the only material difference was that the excess on the cheaper policy was £150 as opposed to £100 on the more costly one, so the cheaper policy it is then.
Surveyors' recommendations
The pre-purchase survey on Arabella revealed the need for two repairs/improvements, both of which were recommended but one of which really does need to be attended to before Arabella is put into the water.
The job that can't wait is the replacement of the through-hull fitting for the drain to the self-draining cockpit. This is a standard kitchen plughole and yellowmetal pipe that is so corroded that one blow with the surveyor's hammer collapsed it! Remarks about sending the damage bill to the surveyor aside, it clearly can't stay that way unless I want the boat to become a submarine, and a new bronze fitting is required with replacement hose attached by double-clips at both ends.
The other job is the installation of a diaphragm-type bilge pump. Arabella doesn't currently have any means of pumping the bilge out. Actually, she doesn't have much of a bilge either, but to me that just means the cabin is at more risk of damage if any water enters, so I may as well get it sorted out at the same time as the cockpit drain.
Inventory & Electronics
I'm glad I kept quite a lot of the cruising inventory from my previous yacht, because the essentials don't seem to have got any cheaper during the intervening five years. A rummage around in my self-storage unit has revealed that the things I don't need to buy include: 3 lifejackets; waterproof Navico handheld VHF (still with power in the battery!); handheld GPS plotter (but the electronic chart will need to be updated/replaced); deck scrubber; a couple of warps; Portland plotter and dividers; rechargeable heavy duty torch; hand bearing compass; and, embarassingly, a Navico TillerPilot together with a remote control unit, both of which I could have sworn were on my old boat when the buyer collected her, but weren't. Fair play dictated that I subsequently had to reimburse the buyer for replacements, so these bits are mine now that I have unearthed them. I also found:
- an old offshore flare kit: the flares are out-of-date, but the poly bottle that they came in can be recycled.
- a completely new and unused Walker trailing log in its original packaging. I have absolutely no recollection why I acquired this - it must have cost at least a couple of hundred pounds in the mid/late 1990s when I picked it up (at a Boat Show, I think) and I wouldn't have needed it on the old boat. Nor is it required for Arabella because a combined depth/log is already fitted. The Walker log is a beautiful piece of kit, though, a real reminder of 'solid British engineering' from the days not so long ago when we used to actually make things as opposed to selling nothings. I've put it back into storage as an 'investment'.
Arabella already has a Navico TillerPilot 100 on board, but I'll hang on to my (newer) Tillerpilot. It'll do as a spare and unlike the one on board, my model accepts GPS/Wind inputs via NM0183, which might be useful if I ever install a fixed GPS in the boat in the future. Similarly, my handheld VHF can act as a back-up to the Silva S10 VHF/DSC that's already on Arabella. Some of the posts on the YBW forum are less than enthusiastic about the Silva range of VHF radios, so a back-up might be helpful...
The Silva VHF/DSC can also be hooked up to a fixed GPS, so I've added the latter to my long-term-when-I-can-afford-it-projects list. My handheld GPS can be plumbed into the boat's electronics and clipped to a deckhead mount to act as fixed GPS and send information to other instruments and a compatible autopilot, but to be honest I've always preferred to have it to hand (it being 'handheld' and waterproof, after all) or stuffed into the nearest cockpit pocket, so I don't see myself going that way.
While poking around the nether regions of my storage unit, I also found a lot of little things that are nice to have and that taken as a whole would cost quite a bit to replace, such as nautically-themed mugs and tea-towels and a few Solent-specific books, such as Peter Bruce's very helpful little guides.
The cost of the items that I already have, in terms of replacing them new at the swindlery, is safely north of £1300 and I'm well pleased that I haven't got to spend it all over again.
Unfortunately, there are still things that I have needed to buy just to get going with. These are:
Fenders: 5 XM size 1 fenders (18") @ £9.00
Boat hook: Plastimo wood/alloy boathook @ £29.95*
Replacement emergency flares: Coastal pack @ £65.00**
*I could have saved about £15 on this if I had gone for the plastic version, but I really prefer wood and I was so chuffed at how much I had 'saved' by already owning some stuff that I got a bit carried away.
** It paid to watch the swindleries carefully here. The coastal pack, which was the bare minumum I felt I should have, contains 2 red handflares, 2 orange smoke flares and 2 red parachute flares. There was a considerable range of prices available online, but the trick was to check whether the price included post and packing - when I looked, p&p ranged from nil to £14.00. The price shown above was the best that I could get after trawling through 8 swindlery websites and included p&p. The most expensive all-inclusive price was £82.00. Incidentally, it was cheaper to buy the flares as a pack in a poly bottle than to replace them individually, so my old poly bottle has just become Arabella's new grab-bag.
