By way of introduction...

S/V Alchemy, the vessel in question, May 1, National Yacht Club, Toronto, Canada

Hello there, gentle readers. Most of whom I will assume are new, and some of whom have travelled from our sister blog of some antiquity, which describes how our crew and vessel have taken several years to get to this place, from which we plan to encompass the world.

The Cabin Boy predictively renders a verdict on future pretension.

All right, perhaps that's a pretentious introduction to be avoided in the future.

 

 

The point of this blog and the main cast

Our goal here is simple: to share with our readership, some of which I suspect will migrate from my venerable "repair and refit" blog, to follow our adventures by sea and land and see as we see the world in which we live. We plan to feature a lot of photos, eventually videos and even drone and underwater media, both of which we've found impressive additions to the blogs of other cruisers we admire, and some of whom we know, such as the fine people at Distant Shores and 59 North.

Our "take" will naturally develop as our journeys continue, but include those of a long-standing wildlife rehabber and holder of both a biology and teaching degrees and a man who never took a high-school shop class or owned a car, but who can talk about diesel repair with only a spot of drooling.

Also featured will be the views of our 18-year-old son, who was on a boat for the first time at five days of age and has had to listen to his parents talk interminably about the sea for much of the intervening time. It's going to be his world: his reactions to it should prove illuminating.

As noted, we are a three-person Canadian family, consisting of Lucas Dacey, 18 years old (he's much larger than in the above shot now); Rebecca McMurray (Mrs. Alchemy) and Marc Dacey (blogkeeper and alleged skipper). We live aboard S/V Alchemy, a Canadian-registered 12 metre, 16 tonne cutter-rigged steel motorsailer built in Ontario in 1988 and owned by ourselves since 2006. We have a long-held ambition to go around the planet in this boat, and to take five years or more to do it. We don't intend to rush, after all.

Alchemy in 2019, before some fairly signficant upgrades.

In 2018, we sold our house in Toronto and moved aboard in 2019. Technical difficulties precluded our escape to Canada's east coast for some shipyard tasks, and the current pandemic has delayed us further in 2020.

Until recently, that is. Our government allowed "pleasure craft" passage down the St. Lawrence Seaway as of Monday, June 22, and so we are in the final stages of preparing to leave for Halifax circa the second week of July. Our hesitation is related primarily to seeing if the near-inevitable "second wave" of this accursed pandemic threatens a fresh round of lockdowns and quarantines, as the only thing worse than not going at all this year, which, given the situation in Canada, was a strong possibility, would be to embark down the river only to be quarantined or otherwise stopped short of this year's goal, which is the Halifax region of Nova Scotia and a date with a shipyard to redo the bottom (essentially a paint job) and to rerig the mast. From there, we hope to cross the Atlantic in May, 2021.

The story of Alchemy

My wife and I joined the National Yacht Club in Toronto in the spring of 1999 as "crew". This meant learning to sail via a) an eight-week course and b) via joining the "crew bank" to supply bodies to the extensive sailboat racing contingent at the club. I was in my late 30s at the time and, while as yet childless, we had plans in that direction and had bought a house the previous year. When the internet service provider for which I worked as a marketing manager changed hands, I was given a modest sum to quietly go elsewhere. A sensible person would have shovelled the sum at the mortgage, but I decided by August 1999 to buy a sailboat of my own. Silly human!

Valiente, a 1973 Ontario Yachts Viking 33, hull 32, was named for an author we admired who diedon the day we bought her.

While my wife had grown up on boats, her familiarity was scanty in terminology and aspects of docking. She would happily go on the foredeck, however, to douse the sails in appalling conditions, which was good as I seemed to be able to steer pretty quickly. However, this was more "vintage hot rod" than "starter boat", and at 10 metres and 4 tonnes in weight, was interesting in terms of the learning curve. Also, we have never owned a car; I've owned a chainsaw and a moped, but I never took "shop" classes in high school, which was insufficient prep for dealing with a sailboat's auxiliary motor. The fact was this: I was woefully unprepared to own a boat, and mistaken, as is said, were made that led to a few scraps, a few repairs, and the rebuild of the engine. Twice.

Eventually, we got better, driven both by an urge to learn and, very quietly at first, the idea that one day, after the house was paid off and the baby grown, we might sail away to see the world. Not in the 33 footer, of course, but in a more suitable cruiser capable of taking on the ocean.

Like this steel Subrero Petit Prince 40 ketch

We had some guidance, which led to some preferences. My high-school buddy Matt Phillips had owned (and still owns) a beautiful Goderich 40 ketch in steel since the 1980s and we were keen on the perceived advantages of a ketch in terms of sail handling for a (as of the mid-2000s) shorthanded crew. Because our son was just a nipper at the time.

Unfortunately, while we did like the looks of that boat, we did not like its upkeep and it looked rough in terms of corrosion and general maintainence. While constant vigilance and a willingness to fix things are the foundation of any successful small-boat cruise, this is particularly true with steel boats, which can and do dissolve over time in salt water. The answer to these problems are attacking rust when found, and preventing rust in the first place. As this is a rather multi-faceted and deep topic, I will direct the interested to my "boat-fixing/refitting" blog, which goes not only into the technical side of cruising, but my years-long process of changing Nearly Every Damned Thing Aboard in order to bring the boat we did eventually buy fit for the purpose of cruising our big blue marble.

We paid off our house thanks to having tenants in the nicer half, not owning a car, not taking vacations and a lot of macaroni dinners in about seven and a half years. The bubblicious Toronto housing market allowed us to remortgage it a second time, which gave us a boat and a refit budget we judged to be adequate. As carefully built steel yachts (there are many home-built boats of varying grades of amateur skills) between 36 and 45 feet in length are pretty scarce, I thought I would have to fly ourselves and a surveyor to one of the many "cruiser graveyards", such as Panama, to see acceptable boats made available through disinterest or divorce. Because it's a sad fact that some couples do not realize that the reality and the dream of sailing don't match up as expected. Sure, there's the travel and the interesting people, but it's unrealistic to think that the "boat repair in exotic locales" will stop or even slow down once underway. For us, that's just the price to pay for the freedom to cruise, which is allied to the high levels of competence we feel we now possess. But it's too much for some, and there's boats ready to go at certain crossroads around the world priced to move.

Our first view of the place, nearly 15 years later, we call home.

So it was with mild surprise we came across a suitable candidate in our home town. Alchemy is a 42 foot LOA pilothouse cutter motorsailer in steel. Built in Kingston in 1988 as a custom project, we are her third owners, after the man who commissioned her from Phil Friedman, N.A. from his 1982 design, and from Chris Barrington, who fitted her out with decent gear only to find his life circumstances changed and a world cruise was not in the cards.

Comfort over speed, but who's in a hurry?

At circa 16 tonnes, Alchemy is no racehorse and her sail plan and full keel suggest a leisurely, if comfortable, lope around the world. But our budget did not allow for a "performance cruiser", but rather a boat that could carry us safely and self-sufficiently was what we sought. And, in June of 2006, she is what we got. And a fresh mortgage, paid off by 2018.

I was able to speak by phone and email to both the designer and to the man (Prof. B. Jones) who had what is clearly an ocean-capable vessel built for him more than once. Mr. Friedman was kind enough to send me copies of his original drawings (the real Alchemy as built unsurprisingly departs from these in some minor aspects. Mr. Friedman liked the results so much that he built himself a sister ship with a canoe stern; these are the only two vessels built of this type. Prof. Jones never found the time to sail her to salt water and she was a Georgian Bay cruiser for over 15 years. His loss was our gain, as she's got very little in the way of corrosion in her, which is the death of many a steel custom sailboat, and, as her surveys have determined, would cost nearly a half-million dollars to build today.

That's not what we paid.

Alchemy in 2015 underway with a full hoist. Photo (c) J. Cangardel

To some people, the idea of a custom, one-off boat is daunting. There are no owner groups, nothing is standardized and the damn swatches don't match. For us, however, dedicated to having the boat we needed, not the boat built to sell to sailors with different goals, having a steel boat has given us a free hand to change things to our plans and liking. The bones were sound, but we've done a lot of cosmetic surgery. In the process, we feel we've gained necessary skills in boat handling, repair, servicing and keeping the whole effort intact. We now look to transfer those years for a five-year (or more) voyage. Feel free to tag along. We leave next week (circa July 13, 2020).

The author, on an RYA course in Brittany in 2013, reviewing French nautical terms.