Converting a Bareboat Charter Catamaran to Full-time cruiser

yeah they're from the Exuma this is a follow up to that video I made a while back about the lessons we learned in finding or buying a catamaran so this is what it costs to convert a midsize catamaran from a bareboat charter boat from the moorings or something like that to a full-on cruising boat capable of being off-grid and autonomous and way from docks indefinitely and crossing oceans if that's your thing I do want to say that we are very hands-on with our boats so we did what work we could do ourselves to save money so we bought our leopard 46 from warnings as is and if you're not familiar with that moorings will sell you a boat and then do what's called a phase-out where you do a survey and you get a checklist of things that need to be remedied we didn't do that we just took the boat gave him some cash and took delivery in st. Maarten so we got the boat for a lesser price but we decided that overseeing those repairs and the remediation instead of turning it back over to moorings to have them take care of it was a better idea and the more owners we've talked to the more we think that we made the right decision so our priorities were this number one we wanted to make the boat safe and seaworthy number two we wanted to make it comfortable for full-time cruising and lastly the last priority but so important to us was to make the boat look good to make it pretty alright so first priority is to make the boat safe and seaworthy a number one was fiberglass work we had the bottom bead blasted that means stripping all the bottom paint right down to gel coat so that we could start off with a fresh base and have a smooth layer on the bottom you really have to make sure there's an epoxy barrier coat on top of the gel coat so that the gel coat is now protected before you put the paint on and then we did some scratch repair work all this together we took care of down in st. Maarten the grand total was about $18,000 that was in line with what we were expecting to get that bottom work done if you're at sea I think there's really two major emergencies that you can have one of course is losing the mast and number two will be losing the steering system the rudders on this boat were in kind of tough shape there was some evidence of pick corrosion around the top of the rudder stalks that's something you should be looking for it's survey possibly even dropping her rudders to make sure that there isn't a problem there and so we just replaced the rudder stalks that means rebuilding the rudders and that actually was not a huge expense we had contractors do that they did a fantastic job it cost about forty five hundred dollars for new stocks to have the rudders rebuilt and at the same time we replaced the rudder bearings with catamarans these modern bearings they last depending on sea miles you know between two and five years and they get a little bit loose little rattling we decided well we were praying here we might as well have that done to the engines and sail drives this actually came in under our original estimates we thought we might have to replace one of the sail drives turns out it was just some issues with the prop which we were placed I'll get into that in a second so total service costs on the two yanmar yanmar engines was seven thousand dollars we got new heat exchangers new alternators new Inlet seek hawks we had an oil leak problem that we took care of so about seven grand right off the top to make sure the mechanicals working well electronics and eeper basically replaced all the electronics on this boat from the autopilot the chartplotter installed a class bas AIS transponder the radar all that we were anticipating doing some of this adding the radar and the AIS what we weren't anticipating doing was replacing all the electronics that cost eleven thousand dollars which actually seems like a pretty good deal to me because the performance of these newer generation of electronics is so much better than what you would have found about ten years ago when this boat was built the rigging on catamarans needs to be replaced about every 10 years depending on who you talk to in fact some insurance carriers will require that you replaced the standing routing every 10 years and eight and a half years it looked like we were seeing some signs of corrosion here and there it was not a disaster there was no cracked fittings nothing like that but we decided to do the standing rigging preemptively now our experience up til now with our other boats has been with like one by nine wire we used Norseman mechanical fittings switched fittings we've done some of this rigging ourselves what we didn't understand or the difference is that a lot of catamarans have low stretch rigging which is called compacted strand rigging it's something that you really can't do yourself unless you know what you're doing and also the wire is way more expensive than one by nineteen standard wires so the rigging one we thought would be maybe six seven grand it turned out to be twelve thousand bucks but it's something that makes us feel a lot better when the wind pipes up to know that all that standing rigging is fresh it's brand new we had it done in the middle or the end of 2018 in the hurricane season all right the dinghy we did well here actually our total cost was twenty-two hundred bucks I scored an engine from somebody in the BVI's a Yamaha 15 four I think I paid $1,500 and then the dinghy itself from the used pile it was repaired all the patches were fixed the use pile the moorings base for 700 bucks so we probably needed a new dinghy here this next season or maybe the season after that we've got some leaks here and there the engines getting a little bit rough but 2,200 bucks and squeezing two or three seasons out of it that's a pretty good deal okay the window seal and rebid this is something we weren't quite aware of as we sailed it for a couple of three thousand miles we started to notice the bedding working loose from the back of the large windows in the salon this costs about six to eight thousand dollars to have done and we did it ourselves for materials cost which came in right about a thousand dollars I'm not sure Megan is doing the camera work honey would you recommend somebody do this job themselves yeah this was a really really tough job and I think paying for might be worthwhile that's six to eight thousand dollars because it is really dirty heavy back-breaking work to get these windows to be vetted properly we did a good job we saved maybe six or seven thousand dollars but wow that was really really tough hatches and seals these low profile hatches you'll see them on most production boats man they're expensive and they just don't last like they should they start to separate they start to leak so we replaced a couple of them replaced several seals and that was about a thousand bucks final part of keeping or making the boat safe and secure and seaworthy I think really relates to speed when you can go fast you can get out of the way of bad weather you can get to safer Anchorage it's just safer to be able to go fast when you need to and for this boat that means a couple of things and some new sails the main was in great shape but we had a new jib built and we added a cruising spinnaker an asymmetrical spinnaker you have to add some gear along what with that we put on a bow sprit blocks for the tasks we got good deals we got a used spinnaker for a lot less than you pay for new it all set us back about seventy five hundred bucks so new sails we've swapped out the fixed props which are common on basically all charter cats to the Brunton h5 auto props which are on the more expensive end of the spectrum but we go at least and not faster maybe even in 1.5 knots faster with these feathering props they were $7,000 for the two and I'd spend that money tomorrow to get that kind of speed it's really a great investment there's a few other miscellaneous life jacket co2 monitor issue fire extinguishers stuff like that little miscellaneous maybe another thousand dollars and the total for the make it see where the category is right here alright category number two second priority with this partial refit probably the number one priority you should have in making a boat comfortable is a water maker we wanted to go with a 12-volt water maker we bought one used it's a Newport 400 from spectra new fully installed you're talking about eighteen thousand dollars I had to replace a pump head that drive unit had the Clark pump rebuilt and in total we have about fifty five hundred dollars invested in the water maker it makes about twelve gallons per hour in the tropics it's supposed to make make sixteen or seventeen but we're working on the efficiency there the refrigeration systems there are two or the vote came with two we had to get the seals replaced on the doors which we did online fairly cheap we also needed to have a controller replace that was a little bit more expensive and then we bought a third refrigerator a portable unit and in total we spent about eleven hundred dollars on our refrigeration systems to bring our refrigeration capabilities up to par with what you need to live full-time solar and wind this is actually probably less than you would expect but I did all the work myself I got the wind generator secondhand but we've got a total of about 980 watts of solar on this boat and then we added a D 400 wind generator that I just happen to come across used on the dock kind of have mixed reviews on the wind generator we love having the power but even though this is the quietest one may theoretically it still makes a lot of noise I'm not sure we would add this next time but in total we have about 1,200 watts of passive energy production which is just about enough we could use another 3 to 500 watts of solar but the costs on that so far we've invested about $3,800 for the panels for the wind generator for the charge controllers this next one is huge this is maybe the best investment we've made we bought name-brand lithium batteries from rely on we've probably got a little bit more than we needed we have three 300 amp hour batteries which gives us a total usable capacity of about 700 amps which is probably a bit much most of the time it's just Megan and I and shredder the dog on board and we probably could get by with 600 amp hours of lithium battery but the costs on this are very very high if you include the new charger and the batteries and the wiring it's about twelve thousand dollars to go lithium about this size but we really don't need to worry about our power that much anymore we don't need to run the generator the that often maybe every week or so to keep the generator in good shape but the batteries soak up that juice immediately so the solar is more efficient the water makers more efficient because you get that stable thirteen point two volts but yeah we went lithium I'm very happy we did all right C deck if you're not familiar with C deck it's basically like a stick down rubber pad we're serious with rubber pads the put down on your non-skid on your boat it's spongy it's more comfortable I think it looks really really nice but the stuff is not cheap I've been $5,500 few little miscellaneous items to talk about we had to do some service on the air conditioner air conditioners that is we're West Coast sailors the idea of needing air conditioning on a boat to see the ludicrous but if you've spent any time in a marina on the East Coast in the southeast and down through the Caribbean you lose your wind ventilation your ventilation from the wind and you need those air conditioners we got about four hundred dollars we've had to spend on getting some service done on those miscellaneous now there's really a lot of miscellaneous that fits into the making it comfortable category some of those you could probably do without but if this is your house and you're doing this full-time you're gonna appreciate having things like a washing machine we've put LED lights throughout the boat the fishing gear something you're really gonna want to have on a boat like this and paddle boards nice paddle boards are expensive I've loved this all together I may be under estimating just a little bit and I'd say we've spent about five thousand dollars on just the miscellaneous nice-to-haves make it or things on this part and the grand total is Ling okay the last category in making this boat into a full-time Cruiser from a bareboat charter boat is making it pretty these are the things that you do to a boat to make it yours to doing this full-time and you're living on this boat this is our home so this is also an ongoing process well I got ten other projects we're going to do this is what we've done so far we did a custom stack pack and sail covers to get rid of that borings blue color they were in fine shape but we just wanted it to look more personalized we went with a taupe the total cost on that is about $1,600 we did some other miscellaneous things for about another thousand dollars like we did a new enclosure around the helm position upholstery this was a big big job and my camera operator is also a fantastic seamstress actually got her own sewing studio on this boat again part of making it into our home but the upholstery she did for the cost of materials that you did I love she did the upholstery on our other previous cruising boats and it took her a long time a lot of tough art work down there in st. Maarten but the materials themselves were $1,400 to have this done professionally at a canvas place you're talking between about six and eighteen thousand dollars to have custom upholstery done the cockpit side curtains only about two hundred dollars for the materials and again you could probably spend seven eight hundred dollars if you went to a canvas place and had it done there the sewing room and the customization that we've done on our master suite to make it into a king-size bed the total cost there are between three and six hundred dollars mostly this was just a lot of sweat equity that we put into it but one more thing in the make it pretty category and that is carpet now we had carpet on a previous Cruiser and I hate it my thinking has completely changed carpet on boats can be fantastic how can I actually make the boat stay a lot cleaner this soaks up a lot of the salt that you inevitably track in at your coming from out the water so what we do is in the off season we go and buy some remnant carpeting where we pay on this one $40 $40 for all this carpet you cut it out and that you get a fresh carpet every year the other great thing about having the carpet is that sugar our old dog it's much easier for her to walk around the slippery flooring that's underneath the carpet it's really her she slides around especially when we're under way so this is much easier for her it's also comfortable on our feet too but yeah carpet is another make it pretty thing and I'd say that we invest about once you buy the carpet pad you're talking about one to two hundred dollars per year to get that buy it again for a total in the make it pretty category of this much if you look at the totals it really is fairly expensive to convert a charter boat into a full-time Cruiser which brings up the question should you buy the boat that's already converted or should you buy the boat that is complete blank canvas and then do the outfitting yourself and we feel like by doing the work ourselves hiring out confidence contractors where it's required that gives us a lot more confidence in the boat we also get much newer equipment we get new radar a new autopilot new AIS we get recent engine work done and we're not relying on somebody else's older work so we have the time to do the outfitting and we had done this before this is our third cruise this is our fourth sail boat our advice would be that if you don't have the time if you're working with full-time I think that we might actually advise that you buy a boat that's already outfit because it is such a big job to go from bear boat to full-time Cruiser you may want to buy that owners version that's already got all the doodads or you might want to buy the cruiser that's already been tricked out because this took it a lot of time a lot of money if you don't have that time it might be better off spending money hey thanks for watching all the way to the end I really really appreciate your comments and questions if you've got them so please do take time to leave a comment below and also hit that subscribe button I'm gonna do more videos about the boat do more videos about weather and weather forecasting I'm a meteorologist by the way and also maybe some vlogs and you can follow along on some of our travels all right take care

Channel: Nick O'Kelly

Views: 319,718

Rating: 4.9052405 out of 5

Keywords: Charterboat, catamaran, Moorings, Leopard Catamaran, Cruising, outfitting, costs, how much does it cost, watermaker, boat work, sailing, Yanmar, Saildrives, Raymarine, boat, sailboat, saving money, converting, conversion, radar, autopilot, SeaDek, Brunton, Autoprop, safety at sea, seaworthy, Phaseout

Id: izMqIfbj3_A

Length: 18min 53sec (1133 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 05 2019