October 5, 2011

Mainsail; some small projects; route planning

By Kris

The clock is ticking and in just a couple weeks I’ll be heading up to Langkawi to haul out and start major refit work.  In the meantime I’m still working on a bunch of little tasks.

Over the weekend I unfurled the decrepit old mainsail to try and get it hauled up as well as possible — it started sagging last year in Tioman and I hadn’t gotten around to dealing with it since.  The real problem is the tiny little halyard that is supposed to hold the whole thing up: it has to be small since the sail furls around it.  It tends to sag a little and the sail slips down 6″ or so, which causes furling problems.

I found that cleaning and lubricating the track on the boom made a big difference in the ease of unfurling the sail; a little less so with refurling.  The sail is a mess:

The obvious ugliness is the missing sunbrella that we had to cut off in Tioman.  There’s also some yucky green stuff that’s built up where water infiltrates the sail during rainstorms, since the furling hasn’t been very snug.  I didn’t get around to it last week but I should be able to just scrub that away with some soap and water.  It’s not worth doing any real repairs to the sail, since I’ll be getting a new one (and eliminating the furling system) in a couple months.

Anyway, a couple trips up and down the mast to attach and remove a real halyard, plus some cranking, got the sail where it needed to be and now it’s snugly furled.

I spent a bit too long cutting, filing, and sanding some teak standoffs for the electrical panel; the standoffs will go on either side of the panel, with hinges on one side and a latch on the other, for a simple acrylic cover to protect the panel switches.  It has been a bit too common of an occurrence for us to lean over to reach into the fridge and accidentally flip a switch on the panel — including the autopilot on a couple occasions.  This will prevent that from happening.  Anyway, here are the standoffs — I only need three but I made a fourth smaller one to try it out:

I also bought all the hardware for that project; just need to get an acrylic panel cut and then I can work on mounting it all.

I’ve been working on some stuff for installing lee cloths (sea bunks, basically) in the salon.  I’m adding a tight PVC-coated lifeline between the two main bulkheads above each settee; that will provide the upper support for the lee cloths.  I picked up the lifeline with some snap shackles spliced on last week, and bought some hardware for bulkhead mounting, and installed all that last night.  Here’s the wire over the starboard settee:

It fits almost perfectly: I need to go pick up a couple extra oversize washers to add as spacers.  The snap shackles are just clipping to an eye-bolt through the bulkheads:

I like the whole arrangement even without lee cloths attached since it provides a nice pseudo-handrail and/or clothesline.

Last night I installed a new shower head — actually, a bidet spray head which minimizes wasted water.  The old one had sprung a leak.

I’ve been taking more showers in the boat lately, I guess because I’m always in a rush and the trip up to the marina facilities and back — while not exactly a “trek” — still gobbles up a lot of time.  I tried the new shower head this morning and it was decent enough.

A couple other recent acquisitions: 7m of 8mm galvanized proof coil chain for use with the secondary anchor rode (still need to figure out a good way to store it, maybe just a bucket); and a nice Racor RFF8C filtering funnel, which I used last night to filter ~110L of diesel I had in jerry cans.  It worked like a charm and kept quite a bit of particulate crap (and a little bit of water) out of my main fuel tanks.

Earlier this week I put together a basic route for the trip up to Langkawi.  I’ve been playing with the NGA charts that were recently released and have been set upon by the open source community for validation and georeferencing.  They’re really good, particularly as a supplement to electronic charts.  Anyway, here’s a screen capture from my planning:

The trip from Singapore to Langkawi is really very straightforward on a map: you’re just following the coast NW for 450 nm or so.  There’s only so much route planning to be done.  What’s actually complex about it are the dynamic obstacles enroute, since the Malacca Strait is one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world and also happens to be scattered with zillions of fishing nets laid everywhere but the main shipping lanes.  This time around, since I’m expecting to be mostly under sail, I’ve also been doing some tidal analysis in hopes of navigating the tidal currents for maximum benefit (by being closer to shore during ebb tide, when tidal current is to the NW) and minimum detriment (by being farther from shore during flood tide, when tidal current is to the SE).  Time will tell if we actually feel like bothering with that, or if we’ll be too busy avoiding submerged nets and supertankers.

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September 28, 2011

A lot of random little progress

By Kris

I haven’t been focusing on any one big task lately since my todo list before shipping up to Langkawi next month is just full of a zillion little things.  My plan now is to head up to Langkawi to begin the repower and a bunch of other refitting around Oct 20 with Wayne (and anyone else who has the time and inclination) as crew.  I’ll fly back to Singapore in November sometime to return to work, but the boat will stay in Langkawi until mid-December; then Charlene and I will fly back and sail her up to Phuket, and we’ll leave her there and fly back to Singapore until mid January.  And then, finally, it’ll be time for us to head back up to Phuket, finish a last bit of refitting, and start cruising!  The boat will probably be back in Singapore for a few days in late February or early March before we head East.  In the meantime: thank goodness for budget airlines.

Did a few tests of the good old Westerbeke recently and it’s still running fine aside from the transmission leak.  Need to stock up on ATF to keep it lubricated on the trip to Langkawi.  Last night I broke out some wrenches and tightened up the engine mounts as best I could — they were pretty loose, which was causing vibration, which was probably the cause of the whole transmission leak in the first place.  The engine alignment is probably a little out of whack but it should be fine for light use over a few days.  All in all it’s still a fine engine and could probably last another 50 years — with a level of care I’m unable to provide, unfortunately.

Supposedly the new engine should arrive in Malaysia today, and in Langkawi not too long after.  We’ll see.

Last week I picked up a Lifesling — or rather, a European equivalent, which is what was available in Singapore:

Here’s a fun little video from a decade or two ago explaining the concept.  I don’t have an accompanying lifting block and tackle but I think between the sling itself, my boarding ladder (soon to be replaced with one with more rungs) and all the various halyards and sheets lying around, getting aboard isn’t as big a concern as getting back to the boat in a MoB situation.

I’ve also been planning the installation of some lee-cloths for the settees in the main cabin.  The particulars of Oia‘s layout have me planning an approach similar to this guy’s (scroll halfway down the page): running some PVC-coated lifeline between big eye bolts through the bulkheads fore and aft of the settees, and tying off the lee-cloth to that.  (The other secure option is bolts through the deck, which I don’t want.)  There are added pseudo-handrail and pseudo-clothesline benefits to the lifeline idea.  I may put the eye bolts and lifelines in place before leaving Singapore, but I probably won’t get the lee-cloths themselves made here.

Over the weekend, Charlene was in an organizing mood and she ripped through the boat like a little tornado shifting things around, demanding explanations for mysterious items (many of which I had no good explanations for and ended up in the trash, including about five bottles of mysterious Thai household cleaners), measuring cabinet and cubbyhole capacities, and so on.  She’s also started shifting some stuff from her house over to the boat, so a little more of Oia‘s vast storage capacity is finally being put to use.

I’ve been having a tough time edge gluing teak boards into bigger planks, which I want to use to make an enclosure for the chartplotter.  I’ve been using a simple PVA glue so far, with the process going something like:

  1. Sand the joint faces with 80G
  2. Rub some acetone into the joint faces to clean them and repel the oil in the wood, which would inhibit adhesion
  3. Slather a bunch of PVA on one of the joint faces, line it up with the other face, press together, and slide back and forth to spread the glue
  4. Clamp using spacers and a couple bar clamps
  5. Clean off the excess PVA with a damp cloth
  6. Wait patiently.

One thing I’ve learned is you really have to wait patiently and also be gentle when cleaning off the excess glue.  Last night I laid up the same pair of boards four times because I’d clean off the excess glue on the top of the lay-up; wait a little while; flip it over to clean the excess from the bottom; and make the whole thing fall apart.  And, a few hours has proven not enough time to wait before removing the clamps; pretty much I need to leave them in place overnight.  I think the humidity here is a factor, and I’ve ended up with a couple of planks where the glue line is visibly porous after drying despite lots of excess when first laying up.  Anyway, I think I’m going to switch to epoxy for the rest of the lay-ups.

Yesterday I finally soldered and crimped together a huge N-connector on the lead for my omnidirectional wifi antenna I built a while back.  I also picked up an N-to-SMA connector so I can hook the antenna up to most USB wifi adapters (including the one I have), struggled with Linux kernels for a few minutes, and then tested the antenna out.  Looks like I get a pretty consistent 5-6 dB gain over the smaller antenna that ships with the wifi adapter — decent, and about what I was expecting.  I think I may epoxy coat the antenna (to protect against corrosion), enclose it in some small-diameter PVC pipe, and mount it over the stern pushpit near the solar panels.

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September 26, 2011

We moved!

By Kris

We have moved our blog to its own host and given it its own domain: aroundtheglo.be!  This will make it easier for us to do all sorts of fancy stuff, some of which will pop up soon.

-Kris

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September 19, 2011

Rigging; cleaning; etc

By Kris

Last Thursday I finally got off my butt and gave Oia a good scrubbing to get rid of the accumulated filth of a few months in the marina coupled with various recent dusty projects.  She’s looking… decent.  I still can’t wait for a new paint job, particularly on the deck, which is in dire need of it.

I also finally got around to cleaning the track and car on the boom (with turpentine) and liberally applying some Sailkote to smooth out the operation of the furling mainsail.  Sailkote is pretty great stuff, and it definitely helped, but unfortunately the only thing that’ll really solve the problems with the furling mainsail is getting rid of it.

Toward that end I spent a good part of Friday taking photographs (easy) and measurements (hard) of the rigging, to send to David at Precision Shipwright in Phuket so we can start planning the overhaul.  Here’s an overview of the current rig:

Compared with a lot of other boats these days, Oia is pretty simple: your basic sloop rig, no inner staysails and so no running backstays, only one set of spreaders, etc.  There are a few things I’ve identified that I want to work on:

  • Replacing the furling mainsail with a standard slab-reefed one
  • Pulling the mast and boom, giving them a good paint job, and inspecting/replacing hardware as necessary
  • Getting a rigger to go over the standing and running rigging and make sure it’s all okay, replacing where it’s not
  • Installing some lazy jacks so the new slab-reefed main is easy to deal with
  • Re-routing some of the running rigging along the deck and through the hard dodger, and probably adding at least one winch atop the cabin next to the companionway
  • Improving the purchase and the routing of the traveler lines: this was definitely an annoyance during previous trips
  • Adding a solent stay with a highfield lever, which seems like a great idea mainly based on Lee and Rachel’s experiences with theirs.

So far I’m mostly thinking about the details of the mainsail overhaul.  The gooseneck was rebuilt to incorporate a furler:

After the furler is gone, the whole gooseneck will need to be cut down which will bring the boom quite a bit closer to the mast.  That seems complicated but probably isn’t such a big job: just some cutting and welding at a machine shop.  The worst part of the furler modifications made by the last owner is what they did to the boom:

The forward 1/3 or so of the boom is untouched and still has the usual inset groove in which the foot of a slab-reefed sail is inserted.  But the aft part of the boom has been modified with a raised track and car installed.  It doesn’t look like it’ll be easy (probably not even possible) to remove:

Not only was the track bolted on (and maybe welded, it’s hard to tell), but the inset groove was filled with a sealant that probably can’t be removed.  It seems my best hope of not needing a new boom altogether may just be to install similar track on the forward section of the boom and then modify my slab-reefing main to attach to the track somehow.  I’ll wait for David to advise me on that.

The PO also removed a portion of the external sail track on the mast.  There are two: mainsail track and trisail track.  I still have all the track sections that were removed though, and re-riveting them should be simple.

When we were sailing to Tioman and back Doug suggested some modifications to add purchase to the traveler, which is really hard to control under any kind of load.  In thinking about that I also decided the traveler lines should probably be routed back to the cockpit, probably just under the dodger.  The current traveler is just a raised SS tube with a car on it.  It actually works just fine, except for the difficulty in adjusting it under load:

Looks like I ought to give it a good polishing sometime soon though.

I’m also planning to get some new sails made in Phuket, so I measured the whole rig as precisely as I could and was up and down the mast a couple of times for that.  I ended up with some rough diagrams that need some cleaning up:

I’m happy to have finally gotten the ball rolling on getting rid of the furling mainsail.  It’s actually the last major project in the pipeline before I feel we’re ready for some serious cruising: there’s light at the end of the tunnel!

I also spent a little time working on edge gluing teak planks so I can build a box for the chartplotter.  Here’s my makeshift clamping contraption:

It’s working pretty well so far, but it is definitely hard to get the two planks lying perfectly flat when you start to tighten the side clamps.  Also, I’m going to need some bigger bar clamps to finish the job.

Last but not least, I put on my scuba gear Sunday and went for a dive to do some bottom cleaning while Charlene supervised from above.  It’s certainly a lot easier with scuba gear than with a snorkel, and it’s nice to be able to take some time to inspect the hull, through-hulls, prop, zinc, etc without running out of breath.

My dive tank is a little small: it ran low just as I was finishing scrubbing the hull.  I’m hoping to stick to a 2-3 week schedule of bottom cleaning to cut down on the messiness of the job.  After about a month the barnacles really start to stick.

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September 6, 2011

Hatches; Langkawi; Phuket

By Kris

With some scrambling, I managed to finish installing all three new hatches before we left town for Phuket last Thursday.  They ended up looking pretty nice and passing all my leak tests.  The only issue was I was a bit impatient with the paint, so it’s not as tough as it should be.  Not a big deal since I just needed to get something in place until the deck is repainted in either Langkawi or Phuket.

I haven’t been back to the boat since returning to Singapore earlier today, but here’s hoping they really were leak-proof while we were gone.

I learned that thanks to the engine shipment delay and some pre-existing travel plans of my engineer in Langkawi, the trip up there and the repower job will have to be delayed until near the end of October.  That’s pretty disappointing, but at the very least the engine should have arrived by then.  In the meantime there is always plenty of stuff here to keep me busy.

In Phuket, between lounging on beaches and gorging on green curry, we zoomed over to Boat Lagoon and met there with David Samuelson of Precision Shipwrite Services to talk about Oia‘s rig.  The main things I want to work with him on are getting rid of the ridiculous roller furling mainsail (reverting to the original slab-reefed main), and a general inspection/update of the standing and running rigging.  We also talked briefly about lazy jacks, solent stays, and sailmakers in Phuket.  We had stopped by Rolly Tasker‘s warehouse but didn’t manage to talk to anyone there.  The general opinion of just about everyone in Phuket, though, is that a company called Local Sails run by a guy named Ket is the much better option for cruising sails.  I didn’t manage to talk to Ket while we were in Phuket but I got his contact details.  I’m tentatively planning to have a new mainsail, a new (roller reefing) genoa, and maybe a solent sail made.  Like my engineer in Langkawi, David has some scheduling constraints that don’t quite line up with my original plans, so it looks like the rigging work can only really happen around the end of January.  My next steps there are to snap some photos and take some measurements for him so we can work on an initial plan.

Also in Phuket we stopped by East Marine and I picked up a new Singapore courtesy flag (cheaper than in Singapore) and a couple local charts.

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September 1, 2011

Charlene: Long weekends on S/V Oia

By Char

Another post from First Mate Charlene!

Seeing as it was the long weekend, with the Presidential Elections and Hari Raya holiday, we spent quite some time on Oia. When I spend a longer time on the boat, it affects my sea sickness less. So all in all, it was a wonderful weekend semi-relaxing on the boat with Robot!

However, what made the weekend awesome was that we finally went out sailing!  Unfortunately not on Oia, but on S/V Malaika – our neighbors’ boat.  Owen and Jessica were the sweetest in inviting us out on their wonderful boat.  It was a really nice day out and sailing was a breeze (no pun intended)! It was windy, hot but not overpowering and generally the wind direction didn’t change that much. As such we were slowly pushed along by the wind and circled around some islands.

I love this picture of Malaika‘s sails!

And also this lovely one of Jessica and I!

We looked really happy in the picture above. Mostly because we were!

It was a wonderful day to be out; in fact this was one of the best days that I have been out on a sailboat ever! There was wind but not too much, the boat wasn’t heeling over too much, the waves were also cooperating and not bumping my butt up and down too much. Owen, Kris, Fion and Wayne were manning the boat, and Jess and I could just chill and float around happily, occasionally posing for a picture like the one above.  Ahh, sheer bliss! That, my friends, is what ideal boating life should be!

At the end of the sail, we even managed to squeeze in a boat party with the most happening dock in One 15 Marina, the folks on the M-dock, where there is a party almost every night. Met some very interesting people, boaters with a different story to tell. Will talk about them some other time, after I gather more intelligence!

While on the sailing adventure, Jess was sharing some galley tips as well as pointing me to some blogs that talked about cooking aboard. I must say it’s almost as important as having a working engine. After all, you would not want your food to run out or get infected by pests on a voyage. That got me googling other boat blogs and researching galley ideas. I finally have something useful to do! That’s going to be my little project on the boat: Project Anti-Starvation! To make Kris’s mom happy, I am going to add healthy foods as a subset of my main project: cook with less salt and more spices, more fresh vegetables and fruits whenever possible.

The freezer is also something I must look at, considering how important it is to be able to freeze and store fresh food. We have a top loading fridge with a good freezer. I use the term “good” loosely, because it serves its purpose very well, when you keep it running with shore power it pretty much is able to freeze stuff permanently. The problem now, however, is maximizing it when we occasionally turn it off while sailing to save on battery power. I’m not sure how efficient it might be, simply because the freezer compartment is at the top of the lid. There is also some ominous greenish algae at the bottom edge, which is an awfully hard place to reach to clean. But there is nothing a little bit of ingenuity cannot solve, and after all if I can sort of see it, I’m sure I can sort of clean it. Being slightly obsessive compulsive about organizing, I am still racking my brains about the best way to store food so that I can easily access the stuff I need all the time, while ensuring I’m maximizing all the space inside the fridge to the best of my ability. One important task is to store items that require varying degrees of coldness as efficiently as I can, while ensuring that stuff doesn’t leak, get squashed, and get banged and destroyed when the boat is on its way. Also, I need to compartmentalize and store things in such a manner that they won’t roll around or squash the more delicate items. I need to freeze items in small packets too so that it’s easier to cook our meals without unfreezing an entire slab of meat. Label expiry dates on ziplock meals to ensure nobody has stomach issues. Make sure things don’t leak, because it would be a pain to remove everything to wipe off chicken blood/orange juice at the bottom of the fridge. YUCK!

To put things in perspective, it’s like having a big box and trying to play UNO stacko whenever you need an item, but ensuring that the other blocks don’t fall. However it is more like an UNO stacko expansion set, because:

  1. Everything is odd shaped
  2. The boat is in constant motion.

However, I accept the challenge. I have also spent 300+ words on the freezer alone, and that my friends is a testament to my dedication to organization!

So that was what I spend time looking at and researching, while Kris was poking around the boat this weekend. In between we managed to squeeze in some time to have a date at Bakerzin! We had Spanish ham pizza, which was awesome. Here’s a picture to prove it:

And here’s the two of us, happily in love to end the post, somewhat abruptly, until next time folks!

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August 30, 2011

Busy rainy weekend: hatches; socializing

By Kris

We had a busy weekend at the marina.

I accomplished a few fixit-type tasks.  My main goal for the weekend was to get all three of the old small cabin hatches replaced with the new ones.  Things started out well on Friday.  I pried out the old hatches carefully.  I found the best approach is to slowly work your way around the hatch, tapping a flathead screwdriver under the hatch flange with a mallet to slowly separate the sealant.  You really don’t want to violently rip the sealant since it’ll probably take the deck off with it.  Two of the hatches were easy; one took some patience.  But I got them all off, then used a metal brush bit to clean up the excess sealant left behind.

The new hatches have a plastic flange and are slightly too deep for the existing cavity.  Doug’s idea with the hatch we replaced before was to just cut the hatch itself down by about 8mm to avoid having to redo all the trim inside; that worked really well.  Once I got the hatches out I measured (all still about 8mm too deep), and then zoomed out to town to get Mr Loo at Royal Star Plastics to cut the hatches.  Back at the marina later I filled the old screw holes with liquid epoxy, waited a while, and then laid down some epoxy putty around the openings.  Saturday I ground that down, then added a tiny little bit more putty to better fair a couple patches, and that’s where things stopped because it started raining.

Everything is fairly well covered and sealed, but it’s been raining during optimal boat-work-time for a few days, so I didn’t get the hatches finished.  I’m still hoping to wrap them up over the next couple of days before we take off for a long-weekend trip to Phuket Thursday night.

I ended up hiring Amir to do some bottom cleaning after running into him on the way out of the marina.  I was planning to do it myself, but the fact of the matter is he does a great job for a good price whereas once the barnacle infestation gets to a certain level, I’ll probably end up ruining the antifoul if I’m scraping everything off myself.  I’ll have to try to emulate Owen on Malaika and clean every week or two from now on to keep things easier.

We got a few easy things done despite the rain: Charlene helped me finish tightening all the bolts on the dodger windows; I replaced some wire ducting on the underside of the dodger that I’d removed during that job; and I bought a bunch of nice containers and organized various tools and parts.  I’m noticing some sagging of the sealant on the side dodger windows, and I can only assume it’ll get worse, which is really disappointing after everything I did to avoid it.  Cosmetic perfection is really hard to achieve.  C’est la vie, it doesn’t affect the functionality of the windows and you only notice it if you’re up close.

I heard from Beta Marine that the new engine won’t be shipping according to the original schedule and will only be arriving at Port Klang in Malaysia on Sept 28.  Still trying to figure out when it will actually arrive in Langkawi.  I really hope the contractors I’ve lined up will still be able to take the job after the schedule change; if not that’d throw quite a loop in things.  Either way, there’s a little less immediate pressure to have everything ready to sail up there.

Lastly, on Sunday Charlene and I went out for a sail with Owen and Jessica on Malaika, along with Wayne and Fion, a couple that’s interested in living aboard who’d gotten in touch thanks to this blog.  Charlene is working on a post about that.  We had a great time and it was a perfect day for a sail — and then, back at the marina later, we found a party happening on the dock near Oia and joined in there for some socialization.  Nice to finally meet and chat with a bunch of the other folks I’m always seeing puttering around the marina; as they rightly point out, I should spend more time socializing and less time grinding and sanding and so on.

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August 20, 2011

Dodger windows: finally done

By Kris

With some help from Charlene during the critical seal-and-bolt phase of work, the dodger windows are finally done today.  (Okay, still need to tighten some bolts in a few days, but that doesn’t count.)  I am really happy with how everything turned out, although it was a pretty crazy amount of work:

Here is how things look from inside the cockpit now:

You sort of feel like you’re in a tank with all the bolts and bulletproof glass.  But it’s crystal clear and extremely secure.  In the end this project was almost as complicated and probably almost as time consuming as redoing the electrical system.  But it makes a huge cosmetic and seaworthiness difference, so worth the effort.  Here’s hoping it lasts a while.  I’m planning to get some new awnings made sometime soon, which should help minimize UV damage.

Here’s one other picture for the heck of it, of the new horseshoe buoy, with the nice hardware from the old one spliced on:

I like it, but I think I’m also going to pick up a Lifesling sometime soon, as almost everyone seems to think it’s a great safety device, and it’s not too expensive.  Looking forward to doing some MOB drills sometime after the new engine is installed!

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August 20, 2011

Guest Blogger: the Missus, on living aboard

By Char

My fiancée Charlene read my last post and decided she wanted to get in on the action too.  She’s Singaporean and so she can provide some interesting perspective on why living aboard in Singapore is just not that common — and also on what it’s like when your gung ho American fiancé leaps full steam ahead into buying, working on, and living on a boat.

Hello everyone!

This is my perspective on living on a boat, and I have broadly divided it into 3 phases.

Phase 1: Scouting/Shopping for a boat/Dreams

This is a rather cool idea!  I’ve always liked to be unconventional and this really seems to be such a neat idea.  My understanding of what boat living is all about involves mental pictures of me sipping mocktails on the boat, BBQs on the deck, wind in my hair, lazing around in a hammock as the boat rocks gently along. Bear in mind that this image is from someone who in the past has only been on:

  1. Mega-ass cruise ships where you pay money to be treated like royalty;
  2. Speed boat tours in Thailand where the waters are crystal clear and you mostly just sit there and try to look pretty.

Phase 2: The Reality

It started out nicely because when Kris got the boat he was excited like a little puppy (ahem, I mean big strong greyhound), and its always nice to see the people you love enthralled with their latest purchase.  Cough shopaholic cough.

However, reality sank in after a while.  Singapore is hot and humid and whenever there was work to be done (not that I did much) it was just excruciating. The space on the boat was small, two puny cupboards (which to this day still stink of mothballs) and no space for me.  And c’mon, a girl needs space, right?  So it wasn’t the most welcoming home for me.  Compared to the shiny new apartment that Kris moved out of, it was like going from a mansion to a kampong in some ways.

At the same time, the boat was also like a new LEGO expansion pack of some sort, and Kris would spend all day and night talking about it, and boy did that make me annoyed after a while.  However, over time I began to be less of a whiny annoying girlfriend and decided, hey, I need to just suck it up, because if it’s something he loves and enjoys I should try to be positive and supportive.  So I tried hard to make adjustments.

I’m afraid Singaporeans aren’t used to the do-it-yourself culture: almost everyone in my country was brought up in a fashion whereby hard labor is done by somebody else, and if you want anything fixed, you call someone.  Sometimes it seems that according to Americans, it’s like a wimpified culture of people who can’t do crap.  Kris has very strong opinions about this issue, and of course being the patriotic Singaporean that I am, I get ultra defensive about it.  Someday maybe I’ll talk about cross cultural relationships.  Anyway, back to the boat: the point that I am trying to push across is that having a boat was a  difficult transition for me in quite a few ways!

Also, I guess it didn’t help that all the boat repairs took such a toil on Kris and there were many days where he was just grumpy, angsty, and thoroughly frustrated.  (Rightly so I must add, and if you read his other posts you’ll understand.)

Phase 3: Acceptance and Excitement

Now I believe I’m in the third phase in my relationship with Oia.  After finally accepting the fact that she is here to stay, I can say that I do enjoy the boat now (well, most of the time)!   It’s quiet, the waves rock you to sleep and it’s a place where I can just spend quiet time with Kris, even if sometimes that means I nap/read/mark papers on the boat while he works outside like a rugged man!  At the same time, I respect his sheer patience and determination in getting things done despite the difficulties.  I’m also extremely proud of his electrical work, spanking new windows, installation of stuff up the mast and all the new things he has learnt while fixing and meddling with stuff.  (Very handy for our future house! Wahahahahaaha!)

I’m also extremely excited about our upcoming adventure: sailing to Canada in 2012! Its like something a Singaporean city girl never dreams of doing when she grows up! I love traveling and exploring new places and it’s such a treat to be able to do it with relatively low expenses, since transport and lodging is covered aboard Oia. And since it’s a sailboat, hopefully nature will blow us along smoothly!

I know very little about sailing though, and I’m kind of “princessy” in some ways.  But I’m sure when push comes to shove, I’ll get my act together and be a valuable crew to Kris. When I make up my mind about something, I will get it done! So don’t worry Kris, I promise not to nap too much and to be useful! Cook, clean, man the helm!  But I won’t climb the mast, because dear God, I hate heights with a vengeance!  It’s morbidly embarrassing, the extent of my fear; someday, I might get rid of it, but not yet.  Anyhow, my goal in this sailing adventure?  I eventually want to be a more rough and tumble kind of girl, a competent crew and a supportive fiancée!  Help Kristopher fulfill his dreams, and take a long holiday from work while at it!

 

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August 17, 2011

Living aboard a boat in Singapore — Part 1: Why?

By Kris

These days, thanks mostly to this blog, I get one or two emails a week from people interested in living aboard a boat here in Singapore.  There are tentative “is this possible” type queries; “I’m on my way to Singapore in my boat right now” ones; and everything in between.  Most commonly I hear from people (usually but not always expats) who are seriously considering living aboard for some mixture of reasons that often include financial and lifestyle factors.

I try my best to give my honest advice to everyone who asks.  Just based on the level of interest apparent in the emails I receive, it seems it may be useful to publish some thoughts about living aboard in Singapore for those who are thinking about doing it.  As always I’m happy to have a more personal discussion — just email me at beevek at gmail dot com and, if you’re in Singapore, maybe we can even get together for a chat over coffee.

There is of course one big caveat: everyone’s situation is different, but my advice is specific to my own experience.  So pick and choose from what I have to say but by no means think of it as authoritative!

Reasons to live aboard in Singapore

Around the world, people live aboard boats for a huge variety of reasons.  A sense of adventure or the desire to do something just a little different seems to be an overarching commonality.  You’ll need that sense of adventure to live aboard in Singapore, because despite what seems to be steadily growing interest, there are as best I can tell fewer than 20 people living on boats here.

I think Singapore has a unique set of circumstances that has kept the number of liveaboards fairly low despite its tropical island setting.  The culture here is decidedly un-adventurous.  Singaporeans themselves rarely seem to consider living anywhere but an HDB flat (as the less desirable option) or a condo (as the more desirable one).  To be fair, living aboard is never presented to anyone as a viable alternative.  When I first arrived in Singapore in mid 2008, I was looking for an apartment to rent.  I told my agent I wanted a short term rental because I was planning to buy a boat and move aboard soon.  She just laughed at me.

I also think the proclivities of Singaporeans are not well suited to affordable boat living.  Singapore is a place of the shiny and new, clean and polished.  Recently my fiancée rented space at a flea market to try to clean out her closets.  Most of the customers who showed up were foreigners.  Singaporeans don’t like used stuff.  And if you’re not super-rich, it’s all but impossible to afford a shiny new boat suitable for living aboard.  When I tell someone here I live on a boat, the assumption tends to be that I must, indeed, be super-rich — because the picture that pops into most peoples’ heads is of a shiny, upscale, celebrity-style mega-yacht with all the accouterments thereof.  Oh, how I wish.

Perhaps by extension of the above point, Singapore is not a good place for do-it-yourselfers.  Instead it’s more of a place for hire-someone-else-to-do-it-for-youers.  As someone who’s coming from a land where Home Depots and Lowes and similar hardware shops are nearly as common as grocery stores, the frustrations of maintaining and updating a boat in Singapore can be pretty grueling, and more often than not when I walk into a shop asking about some part or tool or whatever, I get the feeling the shopkeeper is thinking “what on earth is this crazy ang moh up to?”  There are, however, the rare but occasional shopkeepers who are genuinely excited and want to help.  I try to keep track of them.

These preferences of Singaporeans go a long way to explaining why most live aboards in Singapore are expats.  My proclivities, as opposed to those apparent in a lot of Singaporeans I meet, tend toward adventure; a willingness to put up with some mild discomfort and annoyance in order to do something different; a whole lot of patience and willingness to slog through tough, complicated, and downright dirty tasks as long as I’m learning something new along the way; and, frankly, less of a focus on “face“.  Do I care that living on a rough and tumble, 40+ year old boat is less prestigious than living on a shiny new 80 ft mega-yacht in the eyes of Singaporean society-at-large?  Not even remotely.  And if you do, you probably shouldn’t think about living aboard in Singapore unless you’re ostentatiously wealthy.

As an aside, don’t take all of the above as an indictment of Singaporeans.  By and large, they simply have different priorities in life than I.  That’s true of most Americans too.  Most anybody, really.

Ironically, the apartment I rented three years ago from the agent who laughed at me cost more per month in rent than I have spent monthly, on average, on berthing, maintenance, new equipment, repairs, fuel, and anything else boat related since I moved aboard.  And I haven’t exactly been sitting idle.  One of the biggest reasons to live aboard in Singapore is cost.  Rental and purchase prices of flats in Singapore are astronomical already, and are rising meteorically.  From Q4 1998 to Q1 2011, private property prices in the core central region of Singapore have risen about 105%; outside central Singapore, they’ve risen 84% (per the Singapore Department of Statistics).  Residential HDB prices over the same period have risen 99%.  Over a slightly shorter but still illustrative period in the US (Q1 2000 to Q2 2010), property prices have instead risen just 42% (according to FHFA).  The going purchase rate for small 1-2 bedroom private condos (expats can’t buy HDB flats) looks these days to be north of S$800k (~US$660k); it is perfectly normal for me to hear a 28 year old say he just bought an S$1M flat (with a 50 year mortgage, of course).

In the past, I have done some cursory cost comparisons between living aboard in Singapore and renting flats.  I found living aboard my boat to be slightly lower in cost than renting a tiny studio flat in a new-ish condo.  Not super cheap, but not expensive either, relatively speaking.  And I find it vastly more palatable to spend my money fixing up my boat, tinkering and learning along the way, instead of pouring it into the black hole of a landlord’s wallet.

I grew up in a small, quiet place.  Only in recent years do I find myself in cities: first Boston, then New York, and now Singapore.  Singapore’s density is on a whole other level from anything I’ve encountered before.  In fact, Singapore is the third densest country in the world after Macau and Monaco.  And oh, how nice it is to go home to a quiet dock, a cool sea breeze, rocking to sleep away from the traffic and shouting and dragon dances and even cock-a-doodle-doo-ing roosters that would interrupt my sleep every night when I lived in the city.  Peace and quiet and a little separation are a great reason to live aboard in Singapore.

Everyone will have their own reasons for living aboard.  Maybe the most important reason I have for doing so has nothing to do with Singapore at all.  Sometime, long ago, maybe when I was six or seven or at least less than ten years old, the crazy idea popped into my head that it’d be fun someday to live on a boat.  Where the idea came from I don’t know.  That idea never went away, it stuck with me, nagged at me, and came back in full force when I realized I was coming to Singapore, which on a map at least looks like a perfect place to live on a boat.  I have a troublesome habit of sticking to my guns when it comes to childhood aspirations: that’s pretty much the same reason I trudged through grad school long enough to get a PhD.  And now here I am, living on a boat.  Who knows what other latent childhood fantasies will come to light later in life.

Be it childhood fantasy, or more adult considerations like money or solitude or life meaning or learning, or better yet a healthy mix of them all, I think it’s important to have a good reason to live aboard if you’re thinking of doing so in Singapore.  It won’t be easy, but it can be rewarding if you’ve got the right attitude and enough motivation.

I’m planning to follow up on this post with a few more about topics like buying and bringing a boat to Singapore; technicalities of living aboard here; some rough cost of living analysis; and anything else that comes to mind.  If there’s a topic you’re interested in on which I may be able to provide some insight, let me know.

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