Are modern boats good value?

It’s a long, long time since I posted.  I must be getting mellow in my old age.

What got me thinking this morning, is reading (in the excellent Marine Quarterly) about Eric and Susan Hiscock’s first circumnavigation, in Wanderer III.  The boat cost them £3,300, which seems a risible sum these days.  However, I recalled that in 1952, boats were considered to be extremely expensive – compared with a house for example, the average price of which was £1,891, as I discovered when I did a bit of homework.

In today's prices, the hand-built, ‘one-off’ Wanderer III cost £80,322 – quite a bit of money by anybody’s standards, to be raised without a loan.  However, the Hiscocks had no children and, being the organised sort of people they were, had probably planned all this for a long time and carefully saved for the voyage around the world and the vessel that they needed to do it.  They knew they would be living on board for 3 years and in those days, not only was it a problem taking money out of the country, it would also have been a problem reprovisioning in a lot of places.  Tinned food would have been an expensive luxury in islands like the West Indies and the Pacific Islands. Thus their decision to buy a larger boat than their beloved Wanderer II.

The Second World War was not long over: rationing still existed in Great Britain and there was still a dearth of good materials available for boat building.  However, 60 years on, this great boat is still going strong.  True, Thies Matzen has replaced all the iron floors, knees, etc with bronze, but he writes of her: “Of course, she had to be well built, and she is. Wanderer III is traditionally planked and caulked and is well kept.”  And after nearly 300,000 sea miles, she is still crossing oceans – and not just in the Trade Winds:  Thies and Kicki have spent many years sailing south of 40°.

So how much would a new 30ft boat cost today, I wondered.  Well, apparently if I were to buy a 31ft Benéteau, it would cost me £83,000 ‘on the water’.  I gather that one needs to spend some £24,000 over and above the basic cost of the vessel to equip her for ordinary weekend sailing.  However, that probably includes a heap of electronics that we could do without; on the other hand, I suspect a lot more ‘real’ gear would be required to circumnavigate, so let’s take the £83,000 to be what it would cost – about half the price of an average house in the UK (I checked).  And we are talking about a cheap and cheerful production boat, here, not something designed for crossing oceans.  (I’m not sure if any production boat builders would build a 31ft boat for crossing an ocean, because most people appear to think that 40ft is the minimum one could take offshore. I’m way out of touch with production boats, so had to make do with my Beneteau as an example.)  However, in real terms, this somewhat indifferent cruising boat would cost more than Wanderer III.  It makes you think, doesn’t it?  

But what makes me think even more, is the thought that for all our technological improvements: will our Benéteau 31 still be tramping over the world's oceans in 60 years, having been a floating home to two couples for most of that time, and with only one major refit along the way?  Somehow, I very much doubt it.  There are still a large number of good, honest wooden boats alive and well and going about their business, particularly in Great Britain, where the climate is kind to carvel boats.  However, the modern sailor’s demands for space, comfort and large diesel engines will probably spell their demise long before the little ships themselves are no longer fit for duty.  Every now and then you read about them or see one up for sale: what a reflection they are on the honesty and integrity of their builders.  May they long be loved and cherished.

Chart plotter assisted strandings

We all know that I'm a curmudgeonly Luddite and if you despise this aspect of me, then I don't suppose you read this blog.  As it happens, I rather like my little Garmin 76 GPS.  It's as old as the century and still does all that I want it to.  I find it very handy for working out how far it is from A to B, as I have all my usual routes fed into it and can extrapolate from them.  I feel no need to have anything better - not in the least because my handheld GPS is completely waterproof and needs no aerial - and I most certainly do not want a chart plotter.

I have used one of these devices, so am not coming here completely from uninformed prejudice, but while I can see its use for sneaking up a narrow channel in the dark, or poor visibility (as long as you are confident of your waypoints), I am at a loss why anyone should prefer to use a tiny screen instead of a 43 inch by 29 inch chart.  Where, pray, is the advantage?  However, by far and away the worst thing about a chart plotter, is that as you scale down ie, (for those who get confused about the difference between large scale and small scale), show a larger area of (land and) water on the screen, most chart plotters eradicate 'extraneous' detail.  Like buoys.  Or reefs.  Now the smallest scale chart will most definitely omit buoys and even anything but the most major lighthouses, but it will never omit a reef.  So if you are racing across the Indian Ocean, as a Danish boat was recently, and happen to make a blunder that sends you heading directly for a reef a couple of hundred miles north, north east of Mauritius (as far as I could deduce from the radio), then your navigator, placing his fix on the chart, will say, 'Good heavens!', or words to that effect, 'there's a bally reef in the way', and advise the helmsmen to alter course accordingly.

However, if he's sitting looking at his chart plotter, cranked down to small scale, the reef won't be shown and there will be no warning of its existence until the boat blunders on to it.

Here were the excuses:

• "The boat was going very quickly".  Well, about three times as fast as the average cruising yacht, running in the Indian Ocean.  About the speed at which a decent-sized ship would travel in times long before GPS.  Considerably more slowly than a WWII bomber.
• "GPS isn't always that accurate".  No?  Well, since that nice Mr Clinton turned off the 'wobble factor', it has been sufficiently accurate for courier services to navigate by.  I dare say it will show you when you are within cooee of a fair-sized reef.  And if it isn't that accurate, why are they relying on it so heavily?
• 'The charts aren't always accurate".  Well, true, but the French and the British were squabbling over that bit of water a couple of hundred years ago and had a pretty good idea of where all the bits of rock that might damage their ships were located.  And if the charts aren't that accurate, is it not rather poor seamanship to go hurtling along in that manner?

Did they say: "the navigator was incompetent"? No.  Did they say "we had the wrong scale set?" No.  Did they say "we had no paper chart to provide a reality check to the chart plotter"? No.  They blamed everything from the weather: breezy, the time of day: dark, to the technology.  The one person who received no share of the blame at all was the navigator.  But of course, it's far too traumatic to admit "It was my fault".  Poor fellow would probably require counselling.

Of course, we can all make this mistake and many others; I am far from the perfect navigator.  A kind guardian angel guided me through a cluster of rocks on one occasion when my pilotage was well out.  They were well large enough to wreck my boat.  I've come out of the hatch to see the beach but a few yards ahead.  I've hit a navigation mark before now and run aground more times than I care to remember.  But in each and every case, it has been my fault.  Sure the charts have sometimes been misleading and the navigation mark wasn't where it was shown, but as I was doing the navigation, the responsibility was mine.  GPS and chart plotters add to the information available to the navigator.  It should be easier than ever to avoid shipwreck.  No-one can blame the chart plotter for assisting the stranding - but it's increasingly common to hear it being used as an excuse.

I was recently talking to an acquaintance and saying that I had decided to invest some money in a 'Netbook'.  Although my present laptop is functioning OK - touch wood! - it is very greedy on electricity.  I hate running the engine unnecessarily and my (cracked) solar panel isn't too efficient.  But someone told me he could get a good deal on a computer with a solid-state hard drive and a six-cell battery, both of which, he assured me, would mean that I could run the machine on its own battery for about 6 hours at a time.  And the netbook is small and light - much easier to take ashore to an Internet Cafe.

So I was saying all this, and how great it would be to reduce my electricity consumption and be able to write emails and my blog and so on.

'Yes,' quoth he, 'it should be great.  And you know, you can get all sorts of navigation software to run on Netbooks.'

Please engage brain before speaking, I thought.  But smiled and said, 'I don't think so,' and left it at that.

 I discovered this on The Marine Quarterly website: http://www.themarinequarterly.com/2011/10/ 

Too many satellites, not enough fun

Posted on October 25, 2011 


Somewhere between Sicily and Malta under a big roof of stars we were designing a new kind of yacht race. It would be sailed in one-designs, so there would be no advantage for rich owners. And navigation would be done only with equipment on the boat – logs, compasses, sextants, all that. Satellites and radar would be outlawed. Seats of the pants would be encouraged, and judgement would be by brain rather than ARPA and its descendants.

It’ll never catch on.





To say it resonanted would be a masterpiece of understatement.  I worry, of course, about the size and complexity of these one-designs and, in spite of the fact that 'seat of the pants' thinking would be encouraged, I doubt the designers would be able to think outside the circle sufficiently flexibly to advocate junk rig for its efficiency, simplicity and safety.  But it's a start - and an extension of the gloriously-Corinthian Jester Challenge.