I got the bug…starting looking at boats again

It hit 80 degrees Fahrenheit here the other day and I starting looking at boats.

I’ll never be able to replace Sea Badger – she was the perfect boat, the perfect set up, she had the perfect name – but I do miss being on the water, so I’m looking.   My issue is that I have fewer nickles to rub together so I’m having to set my sights lower.

Ideally, I would like a boat that I could:

1.  Fit within a 20′ slip (with a 2′ overhang)

2.  Use in saltwater

3.  Easily maintain   – meaning:  flush engines easily/ spray with a hose to clean

4.  Allow it to sit in saltwater for the entire summer (bottom paint)

5.  Pull a 2 person tube

6.  Can seat at least 4 people

7.  Is safe !!!

8.  Fits in the budget my wife allows me.  🙂

Because I know the boat will sit in saltwater for a long time, I’d like to have an outboard motor, because it can be tilted out of water and the newer ones are easier to flush with a hose connector.    An I/O in saltwater without fresh water cooling is not an option, and most small I/Os are not fresh water cooled.

I’d like to avoid carpeting in the boat, because that violates my rule of only washing it with a hose.

I’ve looked at a lot of boats online and a few in person at various boat yards and I’ve been disappointed.  When you’ve had quality, it’s hard to accept less.  I keep going back to Stabicrafts – Locally they have a 1530 and an 1850 Fisher model that are very interesting but currently out of my price range.   I’ll keep checking my sofa for lost change…

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

In the United States there was a fashion designer named Richard Blackwell, most knew him from his Mr. Blackwell’s Ten Worst Dressed Women List in which he would recognize the 10 worst dressed women of the previous year.   To my mind, there were a lot of good looking women on that list including Farrah Fawcett, Raquel Welch, Julia Roberts to name but a few.  This gets me to a quote I heard, the author of which I cannot recall, who stated, “It’s a man who doesn’t like women who notices what they wear.”  C’mon, in their day if Farrah Fawcett, Raquel Welch or Julia Roberts gave me the opportunity to date any of them, they could be wearing a burlap sack, a MOPP suit or a dang Denver Broncos jersey (I HATE the Denver Broncos) and I’d be all over them like white on rice.  I don’t care what they wear..it’s what’s under their clothes that interests me!!!

Okay, okay so what’s this got to do with boating.  Well, hard for me to believe, but some people actually don’t like the styling of Stabicrafts.  To which I say, “They must not like boating because what’s beneath the style is what really matters and Stabicraft is one sexy boat in the water.”   I never really said that until I typed it here, but you get my point.  If you’re looking for a quality made, great handling, safe boat then you need to look at Stabicraft.

It gets better.  This past Sunday I attended the 2013 Seattle Boat Show and visited the Stabicraft booth, where I met Paul Adams in person!  Besides trying to not let him see me cry as I mourned the loss of Sea Badger, I was honored to have him give me a tour of the new Stabicraft 2600 Pilothouse.  This boat is so new that it isn’t even on the Stabicraft website (if you haven’t visited it in a while, it had a refresh and looks great!!!).

I always thought that Sea Badger, a 2250 SuperCab, was gorgeous, but in Stabicraft’s continuous efforts to produce better and better boats, they changed the pontoons yet again.  It’s kind of hard to see in the photo of the 2600 Pilothouse in the link I provided above, but the pontoons are no longer just straight, they are contoured and the welds angle back 30 degrees making the bow of the boat much more slim and, yes, sexy!!  I kick myself for not photographing it so I could show you, but I really think it’ll appeal to a lot more boaters.   You have got to see this boat and judge for yourself!

The stern of the boat was also modified to aid with backing the boat up.  It’s a problem I didn’t have, but it just goes to show that Stabicraft saw a way to improve it and did it.

So, not all the new Stabicrafts have this sexy bow or modified stern, but trust me, they are one hell of a boat!

Let me leave you with this:  song

What price do you put on safety?

I sold Sea Badger 😦

A very nice couple bought Sea Badger to have at their home in the San Juan Islands.   He was very excited to get the boat, but my spider senses gave me the impression that she wasn’t too keen on spending money on a boat when there were other priorities in their lives.  You know what sold her?   SAFETY.   Sea Badger, and all Stabicraft, are very safe boats.

She’s a wife, a mother and more importantly a grandmother and she was willing to let her husband have a toy as long as she knew that he and their grand-kids would be in one of the safest boats in the water.  I sensed it and I applaud it.

Boats are fun!  So are motorcycles.  I’ve had both and I never thought twice about respecting the environments in which they are used.   On a motorcycle you never really know what is around that next curve…it could be nothing or it might be a pile of slippery wet leaves.  Either way you protect yourself hoping for the best but preparing for the worst.

How many of you went boating on a nice day on flat water only to find yourself in a storm, or patch of rough water that caught you unaware?  It happens.  Is that the time you want to be asking yourself if you got a good deal on your boat or trust in the fact that you’re in one of the safest boats on the water?

Sea Badger wasn’t cheap to buy new.  She wasn’t cheap to buy used.  But in the situation where the S*** is hitting the fan it’s easy to recognize that she was a BARGAIN.

Would I buy another Stabicraft?   Hell YES!

Anchor and Seats Follow Up

Okay, so I had a chance to run to the boat and install the anchor and put in the seats.

1.  Anchor

The new anchor, a Manson Supreme, which I just learned that it is made in New Zealand like the boat, is 3 times the weight as the old Fortress anchor.  As a result I needed to double bungee cord it to the boat to make it secure.  As you can see on the right, it’s not the best looking connection and I’m afraid it may be a little hard to unhitch when I need to deploy it, but it is definitely secure and doesn’t swing around.

2.  Seats

Did I mention that the seats are HUGE!  I tried to put them in so that they faced inward, but they were too deep from front to back so they didn’t sit securely on the bench and felt unstable to sit in.  I then fit them in so that the back of them sat against the Alaskan bulkhead (rear of the cabin).  By some stoke of luck, the back rests fit exactly between the sides of the cabin and the rear door frame!  Positioning them in this manner means that the user must bend his/her knees in front, but it’s not uncomfortable and the pressure of one’s feet pushing back makes the seat very stable.  Here is a photo of the starboard side seat.

Here is a photo of the port side seat.  

Here my eldest son is modeling how the chair can be used.  Overall I’m quite pleased.

Evolving Situation

The whole reason for selling Sea Badger is going south, so this may be a missed opportunity for others and Sea Badger may remain in her current den.  While the situation plays itself out, I’ve got plans to use Sea Badger and I’m going about making preparations.

1.  Heavier Anchor.

Right now Sea Badger has a 7 lb Fortress anchor, which according to their documentation is  the right anchor for a boat 28-33 feet in length.   Problem is, last time I used the anchor the sea bed was covered with seaweed (not sure exactly what kind of plant, just know there was lots of it).  As a result the anchor couldn’t dig in, instead it just scraped along the top of the plant life and I watched as Sea Badger started floating away.   Mind you, this is after I dropped anchor and powered back on it to dig it in.   I thought it was secure, but within 30 minutes I had to catch a ride on another boat and retrieve Sea Badger.

I have added 30 more feet of chain since this incident to add weight and get a better angle on the anchor, but I just decided to not mess around and bought my favorite anchor, a 25 lb Manson Supreme galvanized anchor.

I plan on installing it today, which I will report on, but the weight difference has me wondering how I’m going to secure it to the bow roller since I don’t have a windlass to help keep it in place.  My nylon bungee cord is questionable since it seems to be straining with the light weight Fortress anchor.

2.  Seating

My youngest son hogs the front passenger seat.  Yeah, it’s as much a parenting issue as anything, but most of the time he’s in the seat.  This means that my wife and my oldest son often sit on the bench seats behind the helm and passenger seats.  The bench seats are comfortable enough, but for longer trips they lose their appeal, which is why I recently purchased two of these seats from West Marine:

The seats are HUGE!  Not sure how well they are going to fit on the benches, but I’ll report back on my findings.  They are really comfortable.  I’ve tested them around the house 🙂

 

 

Some people just can’t grasp a new concept – the Luddites of the boating world.

If  you’ve been reading my blog, you know that now is a unsettled time for me.  My family is looking at trading up on a second home, but at the expense of selling Sea Badger.    Lots of emotions flying about, but it also got me reflecting on my past.

In my 50 years, I’ve had to opportunity to move about and buy several different homes.  I remember a conversation I had with an older real estate agent who had studied to be a structural engineer when in college.  As we were looking for homes, I said to him, “They just don’t build homes like they used to.”  To which he replied, “Yeah, and that’s a good thing.”  That caught me off guard.  If you look at the bones of an old home, they used real 2 x 4s that were really 2 inches by 4 inches, not the downsized stuff you find today.   They also had old growth wood, not the soft, fast growing knotty wood you find today.  They used real wood, not glulams.   How could an old home NOT be better than a new home?     You update the plumbing, you update the electrical and you end up with a better home!  I was sure of it.

Not so fast…

As my real estate/structural engineer agent explained, they built houses from experience back in the day.   The quality of the wood was better, but the structure of the house wasn’t.  Houses weren’t engineered back then, so some parts were way overbuilt and others were very poorly designed so the stresses were all wrong and the resulting structures not as safe.  He pointed out engineered ceiling trusses as an example.  Today we can have our down sized 2x4s engineered to handle more stress than a traditional roof.  They don’t look as strong, but in reality are better designed to do what is asked of a roof with less waste and weight.

Another example:  In my earlier life I was a police officer for a very well known mid-sized city in California.  Our police department was built during the 1930s as a work project and was designated a bomb shelter.  The walls were 2 feet thick of reinforced concrete, as was each of the 3 floors.  I had no doubt that it could take a direct hit from most artillery and/or conventional bombs and survive.  The problem was that this building was built less than a mile from an earthquake fault and no one thought of the shear strain of the ground moving underneath it, they just built it so survive getting hit from the top.  The result was that it was determined that to update it to modern earthquake standards was too much work and expense, so they tore it down.  Very impressively built building but poorly engineered – result was an inferior product.

So, this is a boating blog, what’s any of this got to do with boats?

I’m offering to sell Sea Badger :-(.   It is a premium aluminum boat, not to be compared to a riveted aluminum boat, or an aluminum boat that uses wood as a structural element.    Thing is, Stabicraft boats are often lighter than other better known premium aluminum boats of the same size.  As a result, some people don’t think they’re built as well.     A lot of these other boats are built by welders in a traditional manner where the thought is “thicker is  better.”  Hogwash!  If your boat is engineered correctly, you can save the weight and have a just as strong, if not stronger structure.  Plus, in the case of Stabicraft, with its unique air chambers, you can have an extremely safe boat, a very well handling boat, a better ride and get better fuel mileage.  

Stabicraft boats, like Sea Badger, are different than ‘traditional’ aluminum boats – but just as we no longer live in caves, now is the time to adjust boaters’ ideas of boating to the 21st century and see what a well designed and forward thinking boat can do.

Sea Badger is FOR SALE! Sad day for me, potentially great day for you!

Yes, it saddens my heart to say that Sea Badger is up for sale.   Okay, before I get all teary eyed, I feel obligated to say that the ONLY REASON she’s up for sale is because I found a screaming deal on some beachfront property here in the Puget Sound and the Mrs. convinced me that for the sake of the family we should go for the property and allow Sea Badger to find a new home.

A quick review of Sea Badger and her options:

• 2011 Stabicraft 2250SC
• Enclosed Alaskan bulkhead
• Yamaha 225 4-stroke engine with 50 hours
• Fully protected keel
• Awesome, factory built radar mount
• Garmin 740S – built into dash with Garmin Radar and Garmin transducer
• Lowrance Elite 5M-Gold GPS (for redundancy)
• Fusion Stereo with interior/exterior speakers
• Factory swim ladder
• Porta-potty (unused!  🙂
• Factory bench seat conversion to bed option (This is one heavy duty system – Here is the blog article about it)
• 2nd Battery with upgraded manual switch
• Fortress anchor with 30′ chain, 150′ line
• Diesel cabin heater/defroster
• 2 additional accessory plugs
• VHF Radio
• VHF and Stereo Antennas
•  Dual axle galvanized trailer with spare tire and rails – NEVER been in salt water

Sea Badger has spent less than 10 days in the water overnight.  She lives at the dry-storage facility in Edmonds, WA, where she has been pampered.  Her motor flushed after EVERY use.

She is the best handling, safest boat I have ever owned!

It is with great sadness that I offer her up for sale, but my loss is your gain.

Price:     $71,500  U.S.   OBO

Respond below if you’re interested and I’ll follow up with you in a timely manner.

Eighth Trip: Kingston, WA, March 17, 2012 Happy St. Paddy’s Day!

A trip from Edmonds, WA, to Kingston, WA, in a boat like Sea Badger isn’t really a trip.  It’s  more like a quick stop to the market.   Kingston is ~4 miles across the Puget Sound from Edmonds.  On a trawler going 6 kts, it’s around 1 hour with docking, but with Sea Badger it is literally a 15 minute trip.  It’s not uncommon to say, “I’m looking for a greasy fish sandwich, wanna go to Drifters in Kingston?”  A couple of nods and we’re off.

So, I did want to document the trip to Kingston on the blog, and it was flattering to hear one of the dock guys at the Port of Kingston say that he was watching us cross the Sound with binoculars and was hoping we’d stop over so he could see the boat.  Let me quickly add that the Port of Kingston is one of my favorite ports because they give you a two hour grace period to dock and eat lunch before they charge a fee.  Very cool!   But, the real reason I wanted to make a blog entry was to document my gas usage on the trip to La Conner, WA, documented in a previous entry.  As I mentioned in the trip log to La Conner, the ride was brutal and when I finally got back from the 92 mile round trip, the gas pumps  at the Port of Edmonds were closed for the night.  Before heading out to Kingston, I stopped by the gas pumps to fill up.   My gas gauge was reading more than half a tank, but to be honest, I didn’t believe it.  Sea Badger has a 70 gallon tank and I was thinking I must have used 45+ gallons of gas on the La Conner trip.  You could have knocked me over with a feather when I caught the tank from overflowing at 30 gallons!!!  It wasn’t cheap at $4.459/gallon, but I got over 3 miles to the gallon!!!!     Please read the post, but in short the water that day was very unpleasant and I know I traveled more than 92 miles because a good chuck of the time I zig-zagged back and forth across the water to tranverse the incessant waves at a more pleasant angle.  I was happy with how the boat performed that day, now I’m really happy with how the motor performed.  🙂

Crash, Boom, Bang!

I just read on Bloodydecks.com (aka:  www.bdoutdoors.com) of a Stabi-craft getting hit by a 40 foot,  25 ton fishing boat and the boater surviving the incident.   It’s all accessible here but to cut to the chase below is a quote from the boat owner:

This happened last August……..9 miles off sunny Huntington Beach, California and involved a 40ft 25ton Commercial fishing boat………..saying HELLO to my Stabi…….the Stabi Capsized in 20 seconds…….only a portion of the case has settled…………but I lived and bought another boat last Oct.

So, I’m not sure who is being sued and I certainly don’t want to get in the middle of it.

I did hear from a good authority that the Stabi-craft didn’t sink, she capsized but stayed afloat until the boater was rescued.  Under the circumstances, I gotta think that’s not ideal but also not too bad.  Looking at the boat, it appears that the cabin is fiberglass, which makes it a 2050 model or smaller boat and according to an article on Boattest.com as a 20′ boat she must have positive flotation:

… in 1978 the USCG promulgated a federal law requiring that powerboats 20′ and under have positive flotation. Boats with outboard engines over 2-hp had to be able to float “level” in a swamped condition with the engines attached. Inboard and stern drive powered boats 20′ and under had to have “Basic Flotation”, which allows their sterns to sink but part of the boat must be above water. All of the USCG requirements are measured in “calm” water.

Of course, when the boat is run over by a 25 ton boat, is it still expected to float?  Would a fiberglass boat have survived as well?

I’ve got to hand it to this guy…nothing like almost getting killed and getting right back into the saddle.

Banana Badger Boats

Say that fast 3 times!

They finally arrived, the two Hobie Mirage Oasis kayaks in Golden Papaya color that I ordered at the 2012 Seattle Boat show!  OMG are they BIG and YELLOW!  A friend drove by my house when I had the kayaks on the roof of my truck and they thought I had a school bus parked in the driveway.  Each one is 14 feet long, just shy of 3 feet wide and weighs in at 73 lbs.

I drive a Honda Ridgeline truck, which is only 17 feet long and these suckers sitting in Thule Hull-a-Port PRO kayak carriers on the roof look completely out of place.

You look at it and think, “that shouldn’t work,” but somehow it does.  Of course, when driving with the kayaks on the roof, the combination gets lots of stares from both other drivers and pedestrians.

So, why did I buy Hobie kayaks?    I was sold on the Mirage drive, which is described as,  “Two pedals that drive a pair of underwater fins – much like a penguin’s flippers.”

This allows the kayaker, me, to propel the kayak using my legs instead of my arms.   As you can see in the photo below,

it is kind of like riding a bicycle but instead of a circular motion it is an alternating pushing motion  —-> push forward with one leg, then —-> push forward with the other leg, repeat.

Storing them has also been a challenge because of their overall size.  I want to keep them indoors, but I don’t have the space to just let them lay about in my garage, so I decided to get a hoist system for them.  I decided on the Handy-Hooker Canoe and Kayak Storage Hoist, because of it’s weight capacity and simplicity of installation.

Now I just need to find the time to use them!

Just for kicks, here’s one more shot of the kayaks sitting on the roof of my truck.