BOAT TOUR: On Deck, Before and After our 5 YEAR REFIT — Sailing Uma [Step 220]

hello everyone if you're new to our channel i'm kika i'm dan and welcome aboard our little home and silbo douma [Music] we've been spending the past couple of years sailing and learning what we need and don't need on the boat so that we can comfortably and easily sail around the world with just the two of us we've done a lot of projects on board this boat over the years and she definitely looks a lot different than when we started so we decided to make a bit of a video series covering all of the things we've done and break it up into a few different videos this specific video we're going to be going over everything on deck [Music] the first upgrade we made to the bow and probably one of the most important upgrades we've ever made was our main anchor it's a rochna 25 so it's 25 kilos obviously it's not here right now it is about 30 meters in front of us holding us to the seabed for us it's our insurance policy it's what keeps our boat grounded when we're at anchor and not dragging and drifting into other boats or into land so it was very important and we definitely wanted to make sure we had a proper anchor before we left the dock for the first time the next thing you'll see up here is our bow sprit it's actually one of the most recent modifications we made to the bow the reason we added a bow sprit was to better manage our light wind sails because we have an electric motor we sail everywhere and it's very very rare that there's zero wind there's almost always a little bit of wind and so having a good suite of light wind sails is really important for us so we can keep sailing even when the wind drops down a little bit this one is made out of carbon fiber we worked with the guys in plymouth at the multi health center to build the carbon part of it right now we're only using it for the spinnaker but hopefully we'll be getting a code zero in the future and it's also removable if for some reason we ever need to pull it out for pulling into a marina or if it's sticking out a little bit far we can just undo one screw in the back and the whole thing still slides out just aft from the tip of the bow sprit is our anchor roller it's what guides the chain and the anchor down into the water now this was original on our boat and we've made a couple of modifications to it but for the most part it worked okay it's very undersized for our anchor and it doesn't hold it as securely as we'd like so along with the new bow sprit we're going to be modifying and building a new bow roller so that the anchor will actually stay down underneath the bow sprit and we'll be able to have both out at the same time it will also allow the anchor to self-launch so when we come up to anchor it'll just drop in smoothly and easily and it won't require us to be up at the bow at all connecting our anchor to our boat is our anchor chain this is 5 16 high test galvanized chain we replaced it about two years ago and it's actually holding up really really well much better than our first attempt at getting anchor chain now now that's all managed by our anchor windlass this boat didn't come with a win list when we bought it and we didn't have a win list for the first year and a half we were out sailing so we were up here manually pulling this chain in every time we wanted to go for a sale it worked but it just meant we never really went on day sails because pulling the anchor was a pretty labor-intensive job [Music] when we were first working on our boat we found this windlass on a boat that was being scrapped and we carried it around for a year and a half before we figured out how to attach an electric motor to the bottom of it because we sort of diy'd a 48 volt motor onto the back of this windlass it has had its issues in the past and it is one of the things that we're hopefully going to be upgrading soon so we can use the windlass to both drop the anchor and bring the anchor up and we can also do that from the cockpit in the future when we're pulling our anchor up oftentimes the chain and the anchor are completely covered in mud in the caribbean it's all sand so we didn't really have that issue but uh the further north we went the more muddy the bottom became we used to actually use a bucket and a scrub brush which also worked but it was a lot more messy because all of the cleaning had to happen on deck and it was definitely a lot more time consuming so we also installed um back about midship a saltwater washdown pump it's actually the same pump that we use to flush our head but we can attach a hose to a deck fitting and then we can come out here and hose all the mud off as the chain comes in it's much easier now especially now that we have a windlass just step on the switch hold the hose over there and as the chain's coming in all the mud gets washed off and that way when it goes down into our chain locker which is just forward of our of our master bedroom our mattress where we sleep every night and when the chain's covered in mud and kind of salt water has a sort of fishy gross clay smell to it and it can kind of permeate throughout the rest of the boat so it's nice having that clean when it's in there as well we can also use that hose to wash our boat off after um long ocean passages it might sound sort of counterintuitive to wash a salty covered boat with salt water but um it actually works well because if we're offshore for a week or two the salt sort of builds up in layers because it gets wet and then it dries and it gets wet and then it dries and so when we anchor we can just hose all of that salt off and the little tiny bit of salt left from a single rinse isn't actually that bad it's it's very convenient to have a salt saltwater hose and we like it a lot keeping us secure and on deck while we're up at the bow working is our bow pulpit it didn't start off this nice and shiny the first one that we had we actually salvaged off of another boat being scrapped it was off of a much larger boat so it meant cutting it down and shaping it to fit on our boat which meant i had to learn how to weld and it worked okay at the beginning but when we're in the dominican republic we got hit by another boat and it actually bent and damaged our bowel pulpit quite a bit we sort of temporarily welded it together but eventually ended up replacing it with one that fits much better the same guys who built this bow pulpit also built our stern arch that holds up our solar panels but we'll get into that later also in the bowel pulpit are our nav lights they're right up here at the front and when it comes to nav lights you definitely get what you pay for we went through four sets of navigation lights before we found these ones and although they're pretty expensive they've lasted four years now so it's a very brutal environment up here smashing into the waves and getting salt water washed over it and one of the tips that we've learned about nav lights is when you pull it open the entire back should be covered and sealed in epoxy because if it's not they won't last very long also up here the bow is our head sail all of our sails on our boat are from precision sails and we'll get into more about how they're rigged and how we use them in a separate video but in a nutshell this one's called the head sail it's kind of what drives the boat forwards and it's rolled up around our forestay on a roller furler this drum down here has a rope attached to it and that gets run back to the cockpit so we can make the sail smaller if the wind picks up and keep our boat balanced when we're walking on deck especially out at sea on a boat it's important to have a really good grip um and when we got the boat the paint that came with the boat if you remember it was a very very bright blue paint it was 50 years old and it worked okay just like a lot of other things we have on the boat when we got it but you could definitely tell that over time it got worn out so we always had it in the back of our minds to repaint the deck but we definitely wanted to wait till the main projects that we were already doing were completed before we were painting the deck because we didn't want to have to paint it twice so when it was finally time to apply the new paint we looked at multiple different options from mixing sand and epoxy to maybe put on some fake teak but what we ended up going with was something called kiwi grip and the cool thing about curio grip is that it was very easy for both din and i to apply with just two of us and we could work on it outside it's not very hot on our feet so it doesn't make our feet bleeding especially that we always stay barefoot on the boat but the most important thing is that it's easy to repair because we live on the boat and we're on deck all the time and our boat is not a showboat so it doesn't have to be all like pristine all the time there's things that fall on the boat especially we do boot work on deck there's things that fall we scratch stuff so it's good to know that whenever that happens we can just send it off reapply and it's just it looks like new um it's been about a year and a half since we installed it and it is as grippy as the day we installed it so i think that's pretty good so the majority of our boat is covered with the kiwi grip but for the vertical parts and the shiny bits we use something called alex sealed and it's a super duper hard paint that's super easy to apply you just roll it and tip it it was something that was recommended by our friend andy from boot works today i'm sure if you like boatwork videos i'm pretty sure you've already followed him and just like the kiwi grip it's a really easy paint to repair because if you get something scratched or if you have to do a repair on the deck then you just send that section off and you reapply the paint um and it blends it together pretty nicely so yeah overall we're really satisfied with the paint we have and hopefully it'll last us for the next 10 years and we'll never have to paint the deck again [Music] because we live on anchor most of the times we use the dinghy to go explore and to go diving and we also use the dinghy to go from the boat to land in a sense our dinghy is basically our car [Music] when we're not out exploring on a dinghy it lives in one of three places either and on the water on deck or up here in the air when we are offshore sailing we hoist the dinghy up and flip her on deck and just securely latch her down with some extra lines that we have when we're out on anchor she's either floating behind the boat or she's hoisted up on the side like like she is now we started using this method with our first dinghy because if you kept it in the water in the rain she would just sink so we started hoisting her up at night and we just it's a habit that we figured was a good habit to keep anyway so it's something that we do every night because it helps the dingy have a longer life because the salt water just damages everything it touches and depending on where we are it also prevents it from getting stained on the hull we also don't have dingy davits on the back because uma's booty is very skinny and because we have the wind vein back there there's just no space for david it's just very easy for us to flip the dinghy on deck and we don't mind doing so um so that's what we do and i guess i'm gonna get back on board now so these lines that i'm holding on to are dyneema lifelines they were not always on the boat in fact one of the very first things that we removed when we got the boat were the lifelines because they just weren't solid and we didn't want to have a fake security of something that could break at any point so we removed them and we did have plans to build a stronger version something very solid that could that we could trust that would hold our weight if ever we fell we thought that sailing through the caribbean we would find a place that would be cheaper to build them but every single island that we would go to the cost kept going up and up and up so we just learned how to maneuver on deck and sail without lifelines three years after sailing around the caribbean without them we were getting ready to seal the north atlantic ocean and we had a list of projects to be done including finally getting the rails that we wanted our original idea was to make a solid stainless rail all around the boat but we couldn't afford that material at the time so instead we connected distinctions with dyneema and it's been a year and a half since we installed them and it's still super solid the cool thing about dyneema too is that we can retention them over time when they get a little bit loose it's also easy to repair and it looks really good aside from the companion way uh the main entrance we have two of these hatches on the boat one behind the bass and this one here which leads into the v-berth which is our master bedroom and the cool thing about the hatches is because we live on incur most of the time and the boat faces the wind it's really nice to prop these open and just let some fresh present and the last thing is we can use this as a extra escape patch [Music] our mast and our boom are actually still original they're the ones that came with the boat but the gooseneck where we attached the two together we actually broke the original one while we were in a storm off the coast of florida so we designed and built a much sturdier replacement last year the mast is also where we raise the mainsail and reef the mainsail but we're going to cover all of our sails and sail handling in its own dedicated video we had this backpack built last year and it helps manage our mainsail when we're hoisting and lowering it because it keeps all the sail in one place and it also protects it from uv damage when we're here on anchor on a nice sunny day allowing our mainsail to last a lot longer than it would if it was unprotected you can also see up here by the mast is where our chimney comes out for our wood stove we built this stainless guard bar for it so none of the ropes or handling or when we're up here walking around we don't get burned on it we don't use our wood stove very often but it is super nice to have on those cold wet rainy days out on anchor where we just want to heat up and dry the boat out the marine environment is one of the harshest environments as far as we're concerned the salt water and the sun the constant uv so everything on the outside of the boat needs to be built specifically to handle this environment this chimney top is made by a company called dickinson marine and they're actually designed for sailboats except after we bought it we realized that it's made out of 304 stainless and it's actually a brushed finish which means out here in the salty environment it rusted almost immediately you can see the guard rail that we made is out of 316 stainless and it's polished and you can see the difference between the two i'm not really sure how we're gonna fix that in the future but it's definitely done a pretty nasty job sort of staining the side of our deck and something we're gonna have to figure out in the future we also added these on deck handrails when we had the bow pulpit and the stern arch made they're sistered together on the inside and the outside so they're super super strong and we'll actually clip into these when we're offshore with our harnesses if we need to but they just add a little bit extra support when you're kind of walking on deck it makes the whole thing very secure the original ones that came with the boat were made out of teak and they had a single bolt going through every foot or so which meant they were very wobbly and they also broke very easily because it was very thin wood i think we broke both of them at least once before we replace them with these metal ones they also act as a bit of a foot support when we're up here managing the sail offshore and the boats rocking back and forth it's a really good place to wedge your foot up against and make sure that we kind of stay up here on the cabin top when we're when our center of gravity is so high that we could actually potentially fall overboard having a dodger on a boat makes a big difference it's basically a windshield protecting us from the wind from the rain and from all those waves splashing on deck when we got the boat the dodger was already about 10 years old so it worked okay but after a couple years in a harsh environment in the caribbean it started to leak like crazy and it came to a point where there's nothing else we could do and we tried to use that waterproof spray but after a while it just crumbled apart like you could put your finger through and it just came into pieces when it was time to make the new dodger we took it as an opportunity to design one that would work perfectly for us and one that would solve all the problems that we had with the older one and since we were making the stack pack and we were getting the sales from precision sales at the same time we also took it as an opportunity to make everything match and have the same color scheme a few issues that we were able to solve with the new dodger is the first one being the visibility because in the old dodger there were so many blind spots and especially at night where you want to make sure that you can see everything so we wanted to have as much clear sections as possible and in order to be able to get rid of as many seams as possible we use polycarbonate instead of vinyl which means that it could hold up the curve a little better as well the other great thing about polycarbonate is that it has a much longer life and it stays clear for longer and it's much easier to clean which means that we probably will never have to replace this ever i guess one drawback is that it doesn't roll up but we never really roll up our dodger anyway and all the panels are removable so if we need to take it down or we need to remove some sections we can just easily do that another addition we did to the dodger was adding some of the handrails uh on each side and in the back as well because with the older dodger one thing that we've noticed that we will always be holding here whether or not we're um in the cockpit or we would try to find a place to hold as we move forward on deck and adding those rails meant that we don't have to directly hold on to the dodger which means that it lasts a lot longer and it also gives us something pretty strong to hold on to the last issue that we had with the design of our dodger is the position of our main sheet because the main sheet is where it is in the cockpit it comes across here while we're while we're sailing downwind and so the dodger couldn't actually go further aft to give us more protection so what ended up happening is all the water would spray and drip down right here on our shoulder and we'd end up getting wet so our solution to that problem was to come up with two removable panels that we call the dodger wings and because the side that gets exposed to the wind and the water is always on the opposite side of where the main sheet is while we're sailing uh we would clip one of those wings on and it kind of covers down behind us and provides a much better sort of protected shelter for us to stay dry and warm in but because accidentally jiving or forgetting to take it off before you drive or tack does happen sometimes we also built in a safety latch so that we can tighten up a drawstring inside of the panel and if the main sheet comes across and pushes on it that latch breaks free and the panel just gets pushed out of the way so that the main sheet can go back to getting pushed up against the dodger frame and then we can remove the wing after if we need to this entire thing was a pretty complicated thing to do so we found a really good canvas guy in norfolk who helped build the entire thing he was a true artist and it's been over a year and it's still drum tight which is amazing he did such a good job building this for us overall the cockpit of this boat is pretty small but for both then and i it is the perfect size because we can both be handling the helm and the sails all at the same time and tacking back and forth without ever being in each other's way damn that was fast that was great we lost like 0.8 knots of boat speed on that attack and in a lot of boats the helm is pushed for the aft but the reason why we like the layout of this cockpit is because by having the helm forward we can have access to everything from just one single point this whole setup makes solo sailing quite enjoyable [Music] we've said it many times and we do think that every person on the boat should be able to solo sail the boat because if one of us gets injured it's we should know that the other person can get to land safely i have access to the main sheet the helm control we can use a traveler and just a traveler when we're attacking or driving um and both primary winches are just like and i have i'm pretty sure so having it at arm's reach is is a pretty fun thing um so we can like adjust the head sail or tack but let's face it we're not gonna have somebody cracking their head open on every single passage so more realistically it's just nice to be able to handle the lines and tack or jive by ourselves while the other person is either cooking or is off watch so that we don't really need two people to do everything all the time we recently built this little helm pod so that from the helm we can easily have access to all the necessary controls such as the throttle the motor controller um the autopilot settings and soon we're gonna add the windlass settings as well here and also from the helm the good thing is we can have a good visibility to our char plotter and we can keep an eye on the wind and the depth on the two smaller screens another really nice part about having the helm so far forward in the cockpit is that it gives us the ability to have a full-size emergency tiller we can just take this cap off if our steering cables break or something we can take this cap off slide the tiller on and then we can actually still steer the boat with our emergency tiller [Music] we actually pulled it out and tested it once while we were sailing off shore and it was actually kind of enjoyable our boat's not too big to be able to still steer it with a tiller so it's nice to know we have that ability if we need it and it's just stored right here in the cockpit locker beside me one of the other things we really like about the layout of this boat is that it doesn't actually have an aft cabin like kika said at the very beginning uma's booty is uh pretty narrow when it comes all the way back here but it does mean that we have really big cockpit lockers in this side we normally store our outboard motor along with all of our free diving and fishing equipment and we keep our spare jugs of water in here this is 20 gallons of fresh water and it's also what we use to fill up our water tanks in the dinghy because we don't have a water maker on board so three trips back and forth with the dinghy with all these full and our water tanks are top back up just behind them underneath here is our stern line for tying to the shore and also our hydraulic autopilot ram in the starboard side cockpit locker our our light wind sails our extra lines our inflatable paddle boards and the life raft including a bunch of other junk that ends up getting stored in there but these lockers are absolutely massive we used to keep two full-sized bikes in there as well um they're just huge we love having that much storage space on the boat and behind me is the lazarette it is the last locker in the cockpit a little bit smaller but also still massive kika and i have both been in here working at the same time with room to spare right now it's where we keep our dock lines and our fenders and also our spare gas we kind of use it like a gas locker since the top isn't actually air tight any vapor just comes right out it's also where all the internal mechanism and control lines are for the k-porn wind vane which as you can see is the very last thing hanging off the back of our boat for the first two years after we left florida we sailed basically without an autopilot we technically had something but it was unreliable and it would randomly die so for the first two years we were basically hand steering through the caribbean [Music] that was a fun first five minutes yeah we didn't really mind because the islands are so close together that i think our longest passage was about two days but knowing we were going to be crossing oceans soon one of the first major upgrades we made to uma was installing a self-steering wind vane on the back and we specifically like this one because it's a very clean very simple design and it steers incredibly well this one's made by a company called cape horn and we chose it specifically because it's a beautiful and simple design but it's also custom tailored to our individual boat so it fits it like a well-tailored suit and because of that it steers incredibly well on all points of sail there's a little vein that goes in the top and you steer that into the wind this pendulum drops down into the water and it uses the hydraulic force going through the water to apply a lot of mechanical pressure onto our steering system and actually steer the boat it's kind of like sticking your hand out of the window of a car when you're going along and you can kind of twist your hand and goes up and down it's a really great system and it's steered us all the way across the atlantic ocean we've had it on board now for about three years and we absolutely love it it's such a brilliant contraption these two giant solar panels have been providing us with all of the power that we need for the last five years we went over a lot more detail about how we gather power how we store power and how we use power on board in a previous video and we'll make sure we leave the link to that one as well in the description below well thank you so much for watching everyone i really hope that you enjoy this tour of our deck again we'll be going into details about the interior of the boat the systems and the electronics we have on board and our sail handling in separate videos so stay tuned for those as you can imagine on the boat nothing is ever really finished so we always have a lot of projects that we're working on but the main things that we always look for on our particular boat is functionality uh good looks and efficiency and every project that we have is basically something that we can install ourselves that we can repair ourselves and that is reflecting our style so let us know in the comments below if you have a boat and if you have projects that you see on our boat that you would love to try out and uh give it a thumbs up if you liked it and we'll see you in the next one cheers bye whoa there's a swells here now [Applause] all right cheerios [Music]

Channel: Sailing Uma

Views: 500,033

Rating: 4.969131 out of 5

Keywords: steps, one step at a time, travel vlog, minimalism, tiny house, tiny living, travel, off grid, Sailing Uma, sailing around the world, electric motor, solar powered, delos, how to travel, travel cheap, sailing, dan and kika, sv uma, vagabonde, blue water cruising, sailing vlog, living on a small boat, sailboat, boat tour, exterior boat tour, boat tour deck, sailboat tour, boat tour refit, 5 years boat refit, dream yacht, boat life, sailing on a budget, living on a sailboat

Id: 0NE79xB6W_w

Length: 27min 45sec (1665 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 04 2020