A little context

So, I confess to being a tad overwhelmed.  

This past summer, my wife and I became the owners of a 1983, 28 ft. Sirius sloop sailboat.  I had sailed a fair amount growing up in Nova Scotia but was never a boat owner.  Well, actually I did own a boat, but rather than the 26 ft sloop I fantasized about, it was a 8 ft 9 in row boat that I purchased with the proceeds of a paper route.  While the boat never enabled me to explore the high seas, it did enable be to row over to the Royal Nova Scotia Yacht Club where I could crew on all types of sailing craft.

Many years later, after moving to Ontario and getting wrapped up in the challenges of day to day life for 30 years or so, I decided I wanted to get back into sailing.  We had just moved to Etobicoke to a condo with spectacular views of Lake Ontario and 2 yacht clubs. It wasn't long before I was taking the Basic Keelboating course at Humber College as a refresher and drooling over the yachts I was watching from my window.

We couldn’t just go out and buy a sailboat though, because we had no idea whether my wife would like sailing or not and it would totally suck to buy a boat that my wife refused to set foot on.  I put an ad in Kjiji offering to pay the docking fees in exchange for shared access to a sailboat.  Sure enough, in a couple of weeks, I had a deal and we were off sailing!  I didn’t like the boat (a CS 27), but it got us out into the lake and as it turned out, my wife took to sailing like a duck to water.  She loved it!  Time to buy our own boat….

In July 2011, we purchased a 28 ft Sirius Sloop.  It seemed an ideal layout with the head to aft and my internet research indicated that it was a good sea-worthy boat despite only a few hundred having been made before the Ontario sailboat manufacturing crash in the 80’s. We knew, going into the deal, that there was some work needed on the boat but having dealt with housing repairs for 30 years, I figured I could poke away at these projects while cruising off into the sunset on a broad reach with my wife at my side.

Problem is, some of these issues had to be dealt with right away and I was faced with a  plethora of mysterious systems that I find totally confusing, and all kinds of interesting challenges for which I had no preparation to deal with!  One of the things I didn’t know to start was that every sailor I talk to has a different opinion on how to deal with the issue AND, if you put the word “marine” in front of any product, it automatically doubles in price!

This blog is about our adventures owning a boat, figuring the nautical world out and generally becoming part of the Lake Ontario boating scene.  Consider it therapy for me as I lay awake at night figuring out how to replace a “thru-hull” in a fashion that doesn’t eventually sink my boat.

Getting ready to bring her home!