Early on when owning a recently-purchased brokerage boat, it’s always a little game of “catch up” hunting down the deck leaks one inherits. During our summer season in New England I fixed a few but I have a few more to go, primarily as a result of Hinckley Yacht Services either having chosen poor sealants, having done a poor job of preparing mating surfaces, or both when sealing items.
Continue reading Going After Another LeakRoger Hewson, the man who brought the world some of the finest cruiser-racer sailboats ever made, died this past weekend. Below is the announcement from Sabre Yachts.
Thank you for brining us these wonderful boats, Roger, which continue to bring so many of us so much joy decades after they were built!
During the first 35 years of Blue Moon‘s life, various leaks have appeared and been fixed, but not before leaving their mark in the form of mold hiding in various parts of the boat. The result has been a slight moldy smell down below, especially near some of the vinyl used to cover the inside of the boat’s cabinets and the edges of the settees, in the aft bunk, etc. We plan to replace the cushions aboard entirely to rid them of the moldy smell, and the only solution to the vinyl issue will be to hear it out and replace it. Yesterday I got a start by pulling apart the finishing covering the topsides in the aft cabin.
Here is my media dump from a very enjoyable fall spent day sailing around Annapolis. Blue Moon was a delight and proved much faster than any other sailboat she came across apart from pure race boats.
And I couldn’t be more excited! We had a terrific fall season day sailing around Annapolis and taking a couple of short overnight cruises, but just before Thanksgiving it was finally time to haul out and get set up for a fun winter of projects!
During our spring cruising south through Maine we got some very brief previews of how good Blue Moon‘s Espar diesel heater was, but they quite brief and fleeting.
Now it’s the day after boat show in Annapolis, and we are in a cold spell. As I have done frequently during the 2023 fall season, today my daily routine was to work from the home office in our house, then Torqueedo out to Blue Moon on our Lake Ogelton mooring to work from the boat (“WFB”?) for the afternoon. Only tonight it was chilly and Lisa was out, so I stayed for dinner aboard.
Wow.
It was windy and cold on deck, but down below I enjoyed the warmest, coziest, driest heat imaginable while the wind whistled overhead and Blue Moon swayed gently to-and-fro at her mooring.
On cold nights in Fort Lauderdale we ran the reverse-cycle AC / heat on shore power aboard our Sabre 42. Yes, it is effective, but heat pumps create damp, noisy and somehow COLD “heat.” Just think about heat pumps in a house – how does “heat” manage to feel so drafty and cold?!?! Aboard our Sabre 42, when we ran the reverse cycle heat in Fort Lauderdale we had crazy amounts of condensation forming all throughout the boat – literally dripping from the metal frames of our deck hatches while the compressor and raw water pump noisily came on and offline. Not so the diesel heat on Blue Moon. It is bone dry and cozy, producing only a distant and mild whooshing noise. I am looking forward to a long, cold Annapolis fall before I haul out – cruising locally or just enjoying the boat in town, venturing on deck for a wee dram of scotch in cold fall breezes before retiring down below to warm up in our toasty down-east teak cabin while taking in my favorite 80s television on Amazon Prime like I did tonight.
Life is good!
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Here’s a dump of some fun photos and videos from this summer living aboard Blue Moon!
We are back in Annapolis! The summer was so busy between our cruise south, meeting friends in multiple locations, and work firing up again for me that I just didn’t have an ounce of bandwidth for blogging. But we’re back home now and getting back into a more normal routine. So lets blog!
Continue reading After A Summer Living Aboard, What Do We Think of The Sabre 38 MKII?I arrived last evening with a rental car full of galley equipment, provisions, tools and clothes and I’m dodging rain showers getting it all aboard here in Northwest Harbor Maine!
Rover's Blog 