Questions and Answers

We love receiving questions from people -- whether they are armchair travelers or world explorers. We’ve even had questions from our own parents!

Please be aware that these questions and responses were from the year 2002. In some cases, we have changed the way we do things.

If you have questions of us, please send them to mail@TwoGypsies.com.

The Answers

Q: I can't deny I'm jealous of your freedom and I understand your reasoning very well. My wife and I are still in the rat race but we hope to follow in your footsteps in a year or two, especially with respect to the sailboat. I would really like to know how you decided on THIS boat and then why you felt you had to do a major refit. Did you know you would need a new engine when you bought the boat? Where will you go now?

A: We were going to work another five years and buy a new boat. But the urge to see more of the world while still healthy took us into the world of freedom in late 1999. We've never regretted that decision for a moment. In fact, I've never known anyone, when contemplating the end of life, to wish for a few more days of work. It takes sacrifices, of course....mostly financial....but not only is this life far more rewarding (even though I had one of the best jobs in Washington, DC), we're likely to live longer to enjoy it. Seems like a good plan to us.

We met personally with Cabo Rico's designer Bill Crealock and found him to be a wonderful gentleman. The three hours he gave us proved extremely valuable in our boat selection. We had some experience, having owned an S2, but buying an offshore boat involves a huge number of considerations and compromises.

We had learned some of the differences between brands and began to see little differences that tilted things more toward Cabo Rico or Pacific Seacraft. Crealock designed both and still works for PS. The PS lacks the headroom I need. Now that we've had the work done, we are so happy we made the choice we did...for many reasons: thickness of the hull being a major consideration. The people at the yard were amazed when they cut the new 3-inch exhaust hole. They had never seen a layup that thick. The exact words of their head mechanic, were "This is amazing....you could hit something at 10 knots and never hole this boat." We're not going to test that, but at every stage of our re-powering we found more examples of how amazing this boat is.

There is no wood veneer anywhere. Cutting a hole for an electrical panel reveals the thickness and quality of the wood. Many others use a lot of plastic. Checking out electrical cable conduits reveals exacting care. The cutter hull shape really does cut through waves. CR has always used lead ballast. It's more expensive, but provides more weight in less space down low, increasing stability. The stanchions on many boats are screwed or bolted directly down onto the deck. On a CR the mounting brackets bolts horizontally through the hull-deck joint, and are amazingly stout. The stanchion fits down through that bracket.

We checked out the tanks. Nothing is worse than tearing a boat apart to replace tanks. CR's are fiberglass, except for the inspection ports on top. We've never heard of one having to be replaced. The CR has surprising tank sizes. Ours is an '87 model and has 50 gallons of diesel (average), but two fresh water tanks totaling 150 gallons (good).

Concerning your question about our selection of this particular boat, we had looked at one in California. It had not been well cared for and we were discouraged. When found the one we bought in Florida. It was generally in very good shape, but it lacked some things we wanted....electric windlass, shortwave radio, genset, and other things. We got such a good buy that we figured we could add those things and end up with a great boat. What we didn't know was that the engine had a lot more time than the owner told us....as much as double the engine hours.

While the engine ran fine and had only a few little problems (typical things like minor leaks, exhaust and heat exchanger problems), we were concerned about the high engine time and pondered whether it would be wise to re-power sooner rather than later. The decision to do it now was to waste the remaining time left in the engine....maybe two or three years. At the same time, we liked the idea of having a top quality yard install a state of the art engine.

The decision was made for us when we found that a genset wouldn't fit in the boat without sacrificing about half of the quarterberth. We have few visitors, but the quarterberth is a valuable sea berth...and you can store a lot of stuff there too. That's when the idea of re-powering now came to mind....re-powering, and adding a large frame Balmar alternator. That gave us the electrical generating capacity to charge a large battery bank, which we've always wanted. Of course, accommodating four Lifeline 4D AGM batteries involved other major changed....moving the hot water heater and building expensive platforms, for example. All this lead to our removing the Heart inverter/charger and replacing it with the largest model...and forced us to replace the Link monitor, which couldn't be upgraded to work with the new inverter. But it's sure nice to have 840 amp/hrs of electricity in reserve.

We love the windlass. It makes all the difference, allowing up to have a very large anchor and lots of chain. And we love the new ICOM 710 SSB/HAM radio.

The point is that you can't buy a used boat that you won't want to make changes on. And changes lead to other changes, and they're all more expensive than your worst nightmare. But we're happy to have done it the way we did because by having done it early on we have ended up with a boat we understand much better, can use more efficiently and effectively and feel safer in. We still have running rigging to replace (the main boom topping lift broke just yesterday), and in fact we recently purchased an entire spool of rope to start the process.

Not everyone will do it the way we did, but we're sure proud of what we have now. We are far more confident with the boat and its systems that if we had bought a boat that "had everything," or, perhaps, even a new boat -- which would require up to $100,000 in additional equipment. A surprising number of new boats were in the yard while we were there had all kinds of problems. One woman with a new Hunter 42 said they place cans all over the boat to catch drips every time it rains.

 The bottom line is that considering our experience and financial condition, buying a slightly older boat of very high quality was a better decision than a larger, newer boat of lower quality -- both short term and long term. If there is a significant surprise, it involved the tremendous amount of work it takes to strip and varnish all the surface wood. For example, the cap rail on a CR is beautiful because it isn't flat. It's slightly rounded....meaning that you can't take to it with an electric sander without sanding off the dome. And it is built in a way that the inside/underside is very hard to get to with a heat gun and scraper. I still have the heat gun scars to prove it. The rail (and cockpit coaming) on many boats are flat and would be much easier to strip and varnish. But they aren't as pretty, and the wood isn't thick, quality teak. On the other hand, having less wood would sure make life less labor intensive.

Concerning where we'll go, we don't know. By early November we'll be heading south from the Chesapeake, the Bahamas in mind. Our primary current goal is Panama....the San Blas Islands, where I once visited while working for the Smithsonian. They are incredible. Our route and timing are undetermined. After that, our longer goals are crossing the Atlantic or the Pacific. Beyond that, who knows? We've visited 64 countries between us, but there are a lot more nooks and crannies out there.

Go to Q&A 2003