January 2008 - I was sitting in a minivan travelling to the annual reunion of the London Sailing Project (Now renamed the Rona Sailing Project), in which I was a Watch Officer.
During the trip I struck up a conversation with one of the Watch Leaders about his Hurley Alacrity. By the end of our journey from Southampton to London I had pretty much agreed to buy his boat at the end of the sailing season. My timing was perhaps curious. My wife and I had announced the amicable end of our marriage the previous August and I was due to move out of the family home in April. Not a good time to buy a boat perhaps. On the other hand I had additional funds due from my part of the house and I could do what I wanted. A boat such as this, perhaps not quite as small, was something I had been dreaming of so our conversation seemed to be predetermined by fate.
I had every intention of doing all the things you should do before buying a boat but somehow it never worked out for me and everything was done on trust. You can call me a fool if you like but the boat's owner and I being in the "same club" somehow resulted in trust; the distance the boat was from where I lived, a number of stressful events in my personal life, including concerns about my father's and my Uncle's health, combined with the time commitments of my professional life also meant that I never got round to looking at her (the boat), other than in photographs. Having said that the financial risk was not so huge and I didn't have time to lose too much sleep over it because my focus was elsewhere.
In retrospect I could have saved a lot of time if I had looked around and found a similar boat in better condition for the same money but on the other hand refurbishing my Alacrity has been and, at the time of writing, continues to be an education.
Here she is as she was delivered to me in Coventry (about as far away from the sea as you can get in the UK) in the dark, just to add to my mistakes, in November 2008.
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I had always planned to fix my "new" boat up and had been left in no doubt of the need by her previous owner.
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What were my credentials for refurbishing a boat?
Well perhaps they started to develop way back in the 80s when I sat on the roof of my brand new Renault Traffic van with a drill my hand, poised to cut a hole in it so I could fit a windup skylight/roof-vent combination. This was meant to be the first part of the process of turning the van into a cross between a camper and a transport kennel for the dogs, the latter accessed from from outside. It was meant to be but I sat there a long time thinking that if I mess this up and make the hole too big I'm going to have to buy a bigger skylight, then I am going to have to make a bigger hole and if I mess that up...... I felt sick.
In the end I did it. With no training or obvious talent I converted the van, lined and insulated it so it was fit for purpose, at least for a stopover if you could cope with camping in basic style. When complete it had seating, carpeting, including the lower wall, a bed for two (just) over the kennel and an internal window so when the back doors were opened to let the dogs out the cabin area was not exposed to the elements and remained relatively private. But, of course, working on a van does not prepare you for the most of the specific skills required for working on a boat.
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| Tenacious (Jubilee Trust) |
In order to learn to sail we joined the sailing club based on the local river, in our village in fact, and did an RYA dinghy sailing course. As you can see the river was just wide enough to sit for two seconds on each tack to windward if there was a good blow. There were, however, annual outings attended by most of the club for a weeks racing at Saundersfoot where there was more room to play.
One advantage of river sailing and the occasional river swim is that you get lots of experience of fluky conditions and sudden gusts of wind flowing between the hedgerows and trees growing near the river bank. At other times, sometimes in the same race, the skill is all about getting your boat to move in the breeze created by a passing butterfly.
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| Coppet racing week - Saundersfoot |
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At first glance it does not look bad but note how the water is kept out by gaffer tape on the chine.
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| A winter of work in my garage |
I worked on that boat and learnt a lot under the supervision of a shipwright who had left the coastal yards to work on pleasure craft in the heart of England. Sometimes he would arrive at my garage and tell me to sand off the expensive yacht paint he had told me to spend hours putting on and money in heating garage in winter so it would dry, only to see most of it turned to dust and vacuumed away to prevent it spoiling the next layer that was similarly sanded away. This was after he had happily angle-ground a hole in the bottom of the boat bigger than my hand on the flimsy excuse that filling it with layer after layer of glass fiber and sanding and filling until it was back in shape was better than hoping the crack between the centerboard housing and the air tanks would not get any bigger. It was my own fault for, when asked, opting for making the boat as good as new instead of patching her up but for me that was a given.
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| The finished product - Little Acorn |
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| David Wallder skipper/instructor |
The skipper/instructor of one of the courses I did (with Southern Sail) belonged to the London Sailing Project and it was through him that I made contact with them, which brings the story full circle to the conversation in the minibus that lead to a Hurley Alacrity that was in need of more than tender loving care sitting in the garden.
Why did I want a small yacht with a cabin and why settle for an Alacrity?
Dingy sailing was fun. By the time the Alacrity was parked in my garden I had been living on my own for seven months and was sailing single handed most of the time, which I had got quite used to. Big boat (75 foot) sailing as part of a crew for a good, charitable, cause was great but I also had the urge to sail and live, well at least camp, on my own boat and go where I wanted to go with some sense of purpose. Even if I would not be traveling far in the time available it would be more fun and challenging than the sailing around and coming back again normally experienced in a dingy.
Plenty of people have written before me that up to (or down to) a point you can have just as much fun and challenges on a smaller boat as a bigger one at much less cost and maintenance. The Hurley Alacrity sitting in the garden, which the later sale of the GP14 partly paid for, fitted that bill.
In the months prior to paying for and the arrival of my Alacrity I had done some research about the type of boat on the Internet. Additionally a skipper with the London Sailing Project, whose opinion I greatly respected, spoke favorably about the weatherly properties, for a bilge keeler, of one he had known in the Thames, as did his mate, the Mate, who used to own one and gave me further insight into this type of boat.
Attractions included the fact that the Alacrity is a relatively beamy bilge keeler. This means that it does not have a center board taking up room in a relatively wide cabin, so more space for camping for me and the dog; remember that van? The Alacrity has a shallow draft, allowing extra exploration opportunity's. As it has two keels it can dry out when the tide goes out without falling over; ha!! The spinners who weave the strands of our lives must had smiled at the irony of that one given what they had in store for me and my new boat.
