Capital Yachts Gulf 29:  Got a Story to Tell (in this Big Hotel)...

A Quick Recap
When Jenny and I met, I was living aboard my beautiful 1955 32 foot Danish canoe-sterned long-leaf yellow pine on white oak sloop and playing with a sailing dinghy on the St. Johns River in the sleepy and seedy town of Palatka, Florida.  It was 1996 and I had recently traded up from a smaller stout little double-ender, was quite single, energetic enough to keep her afloat and sailing, and committed only to the live-aboard life.  At my income and skill level, that combination of factors was necessary to be able to support a wooden boat.  Those were good years with a lot of friends and fun.  Time passed, we lived life, and our boat fleet expanded and contracted.  Apparently by our own choosing we found ourselves living on Florida's lower east coast in late 2004.  It's certainly a densely populated place with good career opportunities, but it takes a serious effort to stay in touch with the natural world (if a hurricane isn't lurking).  It turns out that nature, wind, salt, sun, and time are important to us.
and in an odd turn of events, you can hear a distorted echo of salt, sun, and time at this link while you're trying to read my ramblings...
The Fateful Moment
Saturday afternoon, January 6, 2007, on the intracoastal waterway at one of our occasional and mildly seedy hang-outs, we were engaged in our usual banter and enjoying observing the interactions of people as they negotiated the interfaces among land, sea, and each other.  We actually observed folks being courteous to each other, although it took some prodding.  Must not be from around here.  So then it happened.  Three unkempt, grinning sailors anchored in front of us, tossed their garbage bags in their dinghy, rowed over to the docks, clambered out, tied up, walked through the buildings to the dumpster, paused at the rest room, then pulled up to the bar and ordered some beers.  Damn.  We simply did not need to see that.  OK, maybe we did.  Our fleet had recently grown from its low of one canoe with the addition of a Hurricane Tracer sea kayak which was meant to keep me occupied while Jenny is back in school full-time.  You see where this is going, don't you?  After an hour of reminiscing and examining our current situation, we decided that it would be OK to buy an old sailboat as long as it functioned reasonably well as intended, that we could stay aboard comfortably over weekends or on a short cruise, and that we didn't spend more that about $10k (that's 10 boat bucks) to acquire and commission it. 
When It's Right, It's Right
We went home, I hit BoatTraderOnline, and up popped this rather compelling ad with this interest-piqueing picture.  I'm not so young (but not so old) and 1980 wasn't so long ago that I don't remember a little bit about it.  A 27 year-old boat is a Good Old Boat in my book.  When I lived aboard in Palatka, Mike & Ayn kept their Gulf 29 on a mooring in front of River Street.  Mike took me aboard one day to have a look around, and I've coveted this boat ever since.  Everything about this boat said, "Come here now and purchase me."  The asking price was $6k, dang cheap for an old boat that mostly lists for $20k and up.  The advertisement indicated that it was placed on 1/6/2007, so there was a possibility that it was still available.  The picture looked very familiar to me, just like the serene and park-like Gibson Dry Docks in San Mateo, Florida where I had hauled my other boats.  I called the seller and got some particulars from him, then caught up with Tom Kight who said he knew the boat and thought it was probably a really good deal if I wanted it.  Oddly enough I had business up near Gibson's the following Tuesday, so I scooted on up bright and early on Tuesday morning and had a look in living color.  Oh Yeah...  Well, it was in a lot of pieces, is really, really (really) dirty and inhabited by mud dobbers & wasps, but it was all there and then some.  Blisters had been ground out and repaired, a fairing coat of epoxy had been applied and sanded, a rebuilt diesel with 4 run-in hours on the clock and two oil changes had been lowered into the engine room, the bent rudder had been repaired and barrier coated, and a huge (think full pickup truck & UHaul trailer) pile of inventory and new replacement parts came with it, including the old engine in several buckets.  Wednesday evening I met the seller and placed a deposit for purchase of the boat pending Jenny's approval and an informal survey and cost-to-float estimate from Kevin Barraclough, Proprietor of Weston Marine and instigator of the formal and fit-for-society version of the Rat Island Yacht Club (and that's an entirely different story).  We signed 2 copies of a simple hand-written contract, and shook hands.  The deposit would hold the boat until noon on Monday, January 15.

Three days later, on Saturday, Jenny and I motored back up the scenic and serene I-95 and had a look at the boat.  She looked.  I looked.  She said something like, "Get it in the water."  We rounded up the UHaul, went over to the seller's house in Ormond Beach, and handed over a cashier's check for the balance of his asking price.  No haggling on this one.  It was a good thing because by then the word was out and boat dreamers were buzzing like flies.  The seller said he had collected 17 messages after turning off the phone on Saturday morning.  After nearly filling the trailer from his house and shed, the seller took us over to his brother's house a couple of miles away to collect more stuff.  While Jenny and I were sorting the stuff into "leave on boat," "put in garage," "santa claus," and "dumpster" piles a couple who had driven from Tampa/St. Pete to look at the boat dropped by, expressing mild disappointment that it had sold.  We felt like very lucky early birdies, indeed.

We're having Kevin do some of the work for us that needs focus, attention, and longer stretches of time than we have at the moment.  He's installing the rudder/steering system, installing and bringing the engine to life, and sanding and barrier-coating the bottom.  We're probably going to have him drop the mast and check out the standing rigging as well.
A Little Archeology
Digging through the records and then inspecting the boat on my first boat yard weekend in 11 years indicates that Jenny and I are probably the third owners.  The original owner had a survey performed in late May 1999.  Below are the pictures from that survey.



At that point the boat was estimated as having a fair market value of $17k with a replacement cost of $46k.  The original owner was listing it in a May 2003 Sailboat Trader for $14.5k.  The seller purchased it in late August 2003 for $10k, motored it up the intra-coastal from Fort Lauderdale to Jacksonville, then down the St. Johns River to San Mateo where he hauled it out at Gibson's in early October 2003.  There she sat while he cut out the v-berth deck to remove the sewage holding tank, head plumbing, and the old fresh water tank.  He removed the fuel tank, had it tested and cleaned, then had a mirror-image tank built to provide a total of 40 gallons of diesel.  (optional equipment on original boat).  He had a stainless freshwater tank made to store 40 gallons and began fabricating a hull-form sewage holding tank for the port side of the v-berth storage area.  He purchased $850 of West System resin, hardener, barrier coat, and other glass-work stuff.  Kevin says it's enough to do bottom jobs on most of the boats being worked on in the yard.  He acquired and placed the re-built 1996 Universal M3-20 A 18hp diesel on the boat.  There are seven new bronze thru-hull stainless steel ball valves of varying sizes, and large piles of new parts ready for installation.  He did the bottom work in the picture above.  Tom and Kevin say that he appeared to lose interest in the boat around 2005 and just quit coming to the yard.

This must have been when the mud dobbers moved in...
The Name - Pixie
Boatski has a name!  Our dreadful lovely entertaining consternating cat, Pixie-the-Knife, shed her mortal coil after 14 years of terrorizing us Minskies.  Pets are meant to make the heartrate go down, I hear...  Anyway, this beast is worth remembering fondly simply because she was so mean most of the time.  The boat's new name is... wait for it...  oh, sure it's no surprise now...  Pixie.


Of course, this was the story before the boat-naming pendulum centered:

Jenny and I have to rename everything, usually downgrading the meaning of the original name.  Her cat, Pixie, became Pixie the Knife.  The all-you-can-eat buffet Golden Corral becomes the Golden Trough.  Taco Bell is Taco Hell.  Pizza Hut is Pizza Slut... and it gets worse.  This fine Gulf 29 was named Golden Treasure which obviously becomes...  We'll leave it at that.  We have to rename the boat entirely since we would be mildly embarrassed to state her downgraded name among any modern day Rat Islanders.  Names that have passed us by so far are:
 OK, Boatski will be her working name until she makes her real name apparent to us.
Updated 22 September 2007