154: Cost OF UPGRADING A CHARTER BOAT & EQUIPPING WITH TOOLS & SPARE PARTS; 2015 Leopard 44

Welcome to the Blown Away channel. Oh, and before we get started, how about this haircut? First time I've ever cut hair. I think she did a pretty good job. She did have to touch it up once. Okay, a little divergence. That's what I'm all about. Go ahead, babe. All right, so this is our third in our three video series, and we actually have a bonus episode for you, and we'll tell you why in a second. But the first episode was celebrating our successful one year on the water. The second one was answer to the question, would we buy a charter boat? And this video is going to be split between two videos. This week is going to be the cost of upgrades and changes to our boat, and the cost of boat tools, equipment, and spare parts. Next week is going to be other than boat upgrades and outfitting our boat, what were our boat expenses for the year, and what were our living expenses for the past year? We're gonna break it out into two so that we can put more granular detail in there so it's more helpful to you. Okay, jumping into a few things about this week's video. First of all, you can do this on any budget. Everybody's situation is different. We are taking our boat, which was a charter boat, needed a lot to get it to be a world-class cruise and crab marina to certainly navigate with, totally off-grid. We're living on the boat full-time. Those are all the things that we want to do with it, so that cost a lot of money. And we also have a 10-year horizon, so we are all in with all things, and along the way, we found out new things, which we will share with you. That's one of the reasons why we kind of went over our budget. We prioritized living off the grid and convenience over the budget. Anything that we talk about that we have installed includes not only the price of the item, but also the installation or labor costs. We paid for a lot of work because we didn't have the skill and the time to learn the skill. Listen, if you like stuff like this, go ahead and click that subscribe button. Click the like button. Also, please leave us comments. We'll get right back to you. We love our viewers, and we also love our patrons, and these are people who have chosen to donate to help us out, and we really appreciate you all. We love you, patrons. Yep, and look at the end where we recognize each one of you by name. All right, babe, let's talk about living off grid. What does that mean, really? Basically, that means being completely independent. We are our own floating city, and all of our upgrades and improvements were made to do just that, to live off the grid. So we're gonna introduce these upgrades to you in four categories, safety, independence, convenience, and necessity. So let's go ahead and start with safety, which is absolutely paramount when you're on a boat. We're gonna start with radar, and this is not the character on MASH, okay? It's not that radar. This radar enables us to see things that are not marked on AIS, buoys, fishing boats, and also squalls can give us advance notice. The next thing is AIS and satellite. For those of you that don't know what AIS is, it's a black box that emits a signal to boats that are in the area and also receives AIS signals from other boats. You can tell where the boats are located, how long till impact, what their names are, so you can call them up on VHF. All these essential things. Satellite is also very important. Notice the satellite communications like Iridium Go. We have an SOS signal on there. We can make voice calls, instant messages, and emails. We have tracking information. So when we're offshore for extended periods of time, it's essential to keep in touch with family, and if you're in trouble and out in the middle of nowhere, people will find out about it. It also allows us to download small weather files to keep us updated on the changing winds or the changing conditions out on the ocean. And the next thing is chart plotter. We upgraded our Raymarine Axiom Plus from a six-inch, which is crazy super small, to a 12-inch. Another upgrade that we have done is we've moved our life raft, and we have put it on a rack on the back of the boat. That allows us to have access to it in the event that it needs to be deployed. We also added a hydrostatic release in the event that the boat sinks. The hydrostatic release will deploy the life raft for us. Having that extra rack that's out there not only made it safer, but it also freed up all that really valuable space. For storage. Yeah, for storage. Absolutely, that's a great point. An upgrade that's also a repair was our gooseneck, which is where the boom meets the mast, and that had worn away quite a bit, and the erosion of the metal needed to be fixed. And the next thing is our new anchor. We wanted to jump up to the best anchor possible, and that's an M1 Mantis anchor. We have a new bridle. This is a Mantis bridle. The purpose of the bridle is to take the weight of the chain off of the windlass. We also went from 150 feet of chain. To 300 foot of chain to be prepared for anchoring in the Pacific. To protect ourselves as we go overseas, we have installed pirate lights, which is a security system that detects motion on the boat. It has both an alarm and lights that go off. And then we had engine work done. So we had rear main seals put in place. The bellows, our sail drive bellows, we changed the engine mount blocks. We wanted to just make sure that our engines were ready for us to be out for the next couple of years before we haul out again. Along with the engine and sail drive work, we also made a change to our rudders. We changed the bearings and the rudders, which if you've been around long enough with Leopard, you know that this is a weakness. The bearings seize. So we changed from an aluminum shaft to a fiberglass shaft. And then we changed the bearings. These are encased in PVC. So there's no galvanic corrosion that's gonna take place with the bearings or the shaft. Two upgrades we made that were already paid dividends to us are holding props, which means that underway our props fold in and there's far less drag. And we have gained about a knot. We have an extra blade. We've gone from a two blade to a three blade. That's right. And then we also added rope cutters, sharp edge bracelet that goes on the folding prop. And it's like a serrated knife. And it will cut anything that comes anywhere near those props. And the last safety upgrade that we made was in rigging. And we changed out our main halyard shackle was bent. We are going to change out our main halyard. We actually have it on board and just haven't had the chance to go up in the Boson's chair to do that. And we have changed out our two reefing lines to Dyneema core and they are amazing. So let's talk about things that make us independent. What upgrades have we made that allow us to be our own floating city? All right, the first one is a water maker. With a water maker, we're able to use reverse osmosis to convert salt water to fresh drinking water. And this is really important when traveling to remote places because there is normally not water. And if there is water, it's going to be expensive and you don't know what quality you're going to get. Our water maker also uses 12 volts so we don't have to crank our generator. Next thing, solar panels. I had no idea how much I would appreciate this form of renewable energy. The reason why we have a sailboat is so we don't have to run our engines all the time and we can go from country to country using the wind. Well, now we can really power up our boat and all of our appliances and instruments using solar which is like a gift the sun gives you every single day. We have a separate video coming out that focuses just on the solar panels in a few weeks so make sure you see that. And one of the great advantages of having a catamaran is you have lots of room for solar panels. And we also built an arch which enables us to put four of the biggest solar panels that LG makes. And what do you use to store this energy? We use lithium batteries. We have three 300 amp hour batteries. We also have a Victron Quattro inverter. It takes all the 12 volt energy that's created by our solar panels and stored in our 12 volt batteries and it converts it to AC power so you can charge your phone, you can run appliances, run the air conditioner, dehumidifier. I mean, this is a big deal having one that's big enough to accomplish all your needs. The last thing I wanna talk about for independence is our Halo Wi-Fi extender. This allows us to connect with Wi-Fi on land if we get close enough. So those were all the items that allow us to be independent. Now we're gonna talk about convenience. There are some things that we have put on board so that we can have convenience. Whoa, life is good. And the first one was a mandatory demand. First one was to have a catamaran. Monohull wasn't gonna do it for the Admiral. Second is a washing machine. So having a washing machine on board really makes a big difference. And really, you don't need a dryer because they don't tell you this, but these boats actually come with drying lines all the way around them. Just like they don't tell you, it comes with a swimming pool. And what would we do without that Dometic? So Dometic is a company that sells off-grid devices. This particular one is a refrigerator freezer. And why do we need this? Because you'll love the fresh stuff, right? Another upgrade we have made because we love to scuba dive is we have bought scuba tanks. And in our rack in the back, we have a place for all of our tanks. And we did that because we wanna be able to dive and not have to worry about borrowing or renting tanks. Next thing is a high-pressure deck wash. 12 volts, 60 PSI. The reason we have this is so that you can just wash using fresh water from your tanks. You can wash your deck. Or the anchor chain, if it comes up completely covered in mud. And then another thing that we have is the fresh water tank manifold. Now, manifold is something that diverts water from one location to the other. This boat came with three water tanks. They just use hoses to fill up these water tanks. Now, we can use water from the water maker and we can choose which of the three tanks that we want that fresh water to fill. The last convenient upgrade that we made was we bought a parasailor and we had rigging installed so that we could run the parasailor. Some of that included adding two winches on board. We also changed the blocking at the top of the mast to make sure it was strong enough. We love our parasailor and that has been a great addition to our sail inventory. And if you're ever interested in getting an Oxley parasail, which we would recommend because it's two thirds the price of the parasail, make sure you put in the comments what your boat model is and also your email address and we'll get right back to you with floats and also delivery times. All right, moving on to necessities. What were some upgrades or changes that we had to make because they were necessary? And the first one I'm gonna talk about is the davit system. We bought a much bigger dinghy than was originally by factory created for the davit. So we needed to make some adjustments like we needed to change the bridle. We needed to change the dyneema which pulls the dinghy in using our winch. We needed to move our D-rings on the davit system out farther to keep the dinghy stable. And then we had to change the davit bushings because again, the same erosion occurred on the davit system as did the gooseneck. Also, we had cushions made. It's wonderful to have these because they look good. They're comfortable. And also if you have a man overboard situation these are also a safety device because you can just throw these out in the ocean and get a nice debris trail. They're floatable with high density foam. So whoever went overboard can grab hold of one of these and you can better backtrack until where they're at. And also we have a helm enclosure. There's a lot of wind and rain up there. You do not want to be without this. It's also safer for night passages too. And it's a lot more enjoyable and we're into this to do it because we like it. We also had some issues with leaking hatches over our engines. And that is a problem, freshwater or saltwater. So we changed those out. It's really important that your boat has a good bottom job. What we did was we had all the paint stripped down to the gel coat. And then we had three coats epoxy anti-osmosis barrier coat added on. And then two coats of really high quality bottom paint that has three biocides in it to make your boat go faster. Also to cut down on fuel in case you're motoring. And most of all having to go down there and scrape barnacle growth and slime off of your bottom all the time. Another upgrade that we made was to our vitrofrigo which is our refrigerator freezer combination. We needed to change the gaskets because they had gotten old and moldy. And then we also changed the glides on them because our charter company replaced a glide that was not original and it actually didn't allow the draw to close. Diggy, this is your car. We got the biggest one in the series and then we got a 30 horsepower motor. It's a two stroke. We didn't go into a lot of detail in the specifications of these upgrades just because of frankly how much information we have to share. If you have interest in reading about them you can go to our website which is listed below and you could go back and view some of our old videos about our upgrades. So just know that even though we didn't talk about the specifics you can find those out very easily. Okay, we're gonna transition now from upgrades to what it costs us to equip our boat with tools, with spare parts, with all of the things to run both safely and efficiently. And we're gonna do that by showing you what we have. Time to work a little magic. Versus us telling you what we have. So let's go down below where we have it all pulled out and we're gonna do that now. We did not have any tools or any equipment when we first moved on board and we're gonna now tell you about all of the things that are in these boxes and what they cost. All right, the first thing I wanna do is talk about this blank table. No, I am just kidding. We're gonna talk about hand tools. But where are they? Pow, here they are. We're into these all the time. Sometimes we just leave it out all day because we know we're gonna be getting into it all day. These are electric tools or battery operated. We love the DeWalt 20 volt battery system with the lithium batteries. We have a Dremel, heat gun. Don't leave home without it. Battery chargers, bits, circular sander, buffing wheel. Oh my goodness, a 12 volt wet vac. Probably one thing that we use the most of everything. All the time. And then this, we're really getting in a lot of trouble. This is a grinding wheel and we can grind off our rigging if we have a mass that falls. Okay, safety equipment is really important for our boat and so we have gotten ourselves some PFDs that will inflate if we hit the water. They also have bungees that are connected to them. That can connect to our jack lines which run the full length of our deck in the event that we are out to sea to make sure we're always attached to the boat. We have binoculars, VHF radio and E-PIRB which sends a message, an emergency beacon up to the satellite and it will tell a local boat or the coast guard that we are in distress and come help us. We have a ditch bag. This bag goes with us if we leave the boat and use our life raft to get off it or our dinghy. This is filled with essential equipment for survival and then this is one of our med kits. Thank you to Paul and Linda. It is a fantastic med kit. We have a huge box downstairs as well filled with meds but this is a simple one that we can grab if we have to leave the boat. We have also outfitted every one of the berths with a carbon monoxide and smoke detector and we have also purchased additional fire extinguishers that we've mounted all around the salon and downstairs for easy access in the event of a fire. Rigging is really important. We only have a few things out right now just to show you some of our spare or redundant pieces. We've got dock lines. We have many of these. We've got regular lines that can be used for anything including tying a fender. These are important for protecting your boat when you go into a marina or you're at a dock. We have different kinds of blocks. These will run lines through them. We have different kinds of shackles. We have shackles made of Dyneema. We have shackles made of stainless. These are used to hold the block to something or hold two things together. We have a bosun's chair which Brown loves to go up the mast in. Essential piece of equipment. Yes. Here's all of our engine stuff and this is the regular Yanmar engines and the generator which is a diesel engine. We have fuel, primary fuel filters, secondary fuel filters. We have oil filters. You gotta carry lots of oil with you and coolant because you need to do your own oil changes and you never know if you're gonna need extra oil in case you get a oil leak. We've got belts in here, spare injectors. We have impellers for the engine that keeps the raw seawater coming through. Keeps your engines cool. And then diapers. No, these are not baby diapers. These are engine diapers and the unique thing about these, they do not absorb water. They only absorb fuel and oil. Very specific here and that's why 3M gets paid the big bucks. Here's all of our dinghy stuff. You've gotta have this for your dinghy. We have a anchor right here. This is mainly used for when we go up on a beach. We have a repair kit for our Orca Hypalon inflatable material. We have a spare prop for our outboard engine. Really important. You don't wanna get stuck out in the middle of nowhere after you've propped this on a piece of coral. And then here's a siphon for fuel. There's a gasket for our outboard motor in case we need that. Spark plugs. This is called a clamshell and this way you can do a freshwater flush. Put the hose right there and flush all that saltwater out. Very important. We have another anchor here which will enable us to do a two anchor for additional stability. A foot pump to pump up the dinghy and then we even have an air valve wrench. Here is all most of our hauling supplies. The fluids have to have a place to go and let's have electricity for this. This is a lot more convenient. This enables us to have flushing toilets. This is a macerator right here and this chops up all the muffins basically that come out of your body. And here are little gaskets along with a joker valve. This is no joke by the way if you know what that is. We're not gonna go into all that. We have bilge pumps all right and you need a switch for these. So this says that the level of water is too high and sends a message to this saying start that motor and suck that water out. These are for engines. These are for the bilge areas. Hose clamps. All the hoses what they fit to. This right here is the shower pump. That's just some of it. Welcome to our plumbing world. This is the world of electricity. Probably the least comfortable category in terms of fixing things. It's voodoo magic. Some of the things that we've had to purchase, extension cords, wires, different gauges of wires. We had to learn how to use a volt meter which we now know how to use. We have different circuit breakers and fuses in here. This is all to replace our Raymarine, our air conditioner, our wind instruments. We have transducers in here. That's what all of this is. We've got a blowtorch which allows us to heat shrink. To make creme brulee. Our splice connectors. And we've got extra lights that go in various places on the boat. Steaming light or navigation light plus conduit of multiple sizes. Bam! Here we have our tapes, our adhesives, our sealants. This is probably some of the most valuable things that we have on our boat. I wanna put in a little plug for this guy because he looks a lot like me. He's very handsome. Mr. Gorilla. But this patch and seal tape, it's thick, it's weatherproof, it's awesome. Asking tapes, Loctite. Red is like steel. It's not coming off unless you add heat. We have epoxies. These are resins that mix into parts that have a catalyst. You can fix just about anything with this. We have silicon adhesives we fixed. Hatches with this. 3M products, 4,000. With UV, without UV, 4,200. 5,200. Where are these are supposed to be used? They've all got a purpose. Some are white, some are black. Caulk removal. We've got emergency type stuff, toughened epoxy that's fiberglass based here. Fiberglass resins with fillers that we have that I don't even have out here where you can do bonding. If you get a hole in the side of your boat, you can lay up glass and literally repair the hole. Bam! Here's our fishing stuff. Trolling lines. One thing that we're really successful with are these hand lines. Here is a little belt. You wanna get super serious, you put this around, stick this into here, and you've got like a little makeshift fighting chair. A net. This you can use to pierce the fish and bring along the boat also. Man, we have got so many things here. Just like ways to do your own rigging, your own leaders, multitudes of bait. Cleaning a boat takes a lot of time, believe it or not, even though it's small, there is a lot to clean. So we have a lot of things to clean with from brooms to scrub brushes for the outside of the boat, mops, cleaning supplies. This is one of probably 30 bottles that we have. We have shop towels. We have regular rags we go through. This is normally full. There's so many that are dirty right now. Often you wanna wash them and use them over if you can, but cleaning is a major part of what you do. I can't even believe how often we have to clean to keep the boat heat and tidy. So these are just some of the things we have. It's really important to take care of your boat inside and outside. Come with me where we keep all kinds of other cleaners and things on our boat. This is where the life raft, see where it's at right now, used to be. We have fabric guard, oil, cleaner wax. This is Meguiar's premium marine wax, boat soap, acetone, stainless cleaner, uranic acid right here, buffing wheels, respirator, West System stuff that I was talking about, funnels, two-stroke synthetic motor oil for the dinghy, stainless cleaner, protectant, Scotch-Brite to use on the hull to clean things or just wherever, like magic eraser type things. The last category is miscellaneous and literally encompasses everything. If you find a piece of wire or a piece of wood somewhere, we keep it. It's the craziest thing because you just never know when you're gonna need it or a piece of rubber, just be able to jam into a place. So this is the box that has the weird stuff in it, but then it also has really important things like our Lumar maintenance kit, screws and different types of bolts and nuts, zip ties. And all different colors, sizes, strengths. We use them for everything on a boat. We've got sail repair kits. We have a rigging kit with cotter pins and different kinds of clevis pins. We have 600, 800. 180, 60, all different types of sandpaper. Loose odds and ends. We have an endoscope that we can look in places where we can't actually get to. Velcro, splicing kit and a mouse trap and a sail repair kit, a fabric kit and then stainless steel seizing wire. These are the top 15 things I pulled out of the box. The rest of the box is full of more miscellaneous items like this. Absolutely essential. We use this box all the time. Since this is such a tight space, I'm going to leave these bins in here. What do we have in this box? A Davit windlass, life vest cartridges, our Oxley bladder, a tarp, an Eno hammock, two fans, a windlass remote and a mantis bridle. And we've got a box filled with scuba equipment, bocce balls, dehumidifier and all of our pumps and our noodles. Wow, that was a lot. No, and you didn't see half of it because we just have too much. We didn't want to put you through all of that. We put you through enough. But hopefully some of that helped you understand what it's like to equip a boat, to be prepared for any situation off the grid. And that's what we want both in our upgrades as well as the materials that we carry on the boat to ensure that we are safe and have what we need. So stay tuned for next week where we talk about the cost of living expenses and the cost of boat expenses that doesn't include what we've just gone over. Let me tell you, if you're thinking about getting into this, you need to know everything and go into it without those rosy glasses on. That's why we do these videos is to help you guys out because we love you. Thanks so much, see you next week.