s/v Silver Heels' Homepage - A Cruising Sailboat's Homeport

There is a popular saying among sailors about planning boat projects: Make your best conservative estimate, then double the cost and triple the time. In my experience that is an understatement.

When I bought Silver Heels she was 29 years old, structurally sound but sparsely equipped and generally neglected by her former owner. I must confess, refitting her turned out to require more money, time and plain hard work than I had anticipated, in spite of my years of experience messing around with boats. Even so, this being a true labor of love (nothing else could justify it), I am happy with the process and gratified by the results. I say "am" because, even though we have now set sail and are cruising, still the refit work continues along the way. Indeed, it will never be "finished."

I began working on Silver Heels in December of 2006, while she was on the hard in Indiantown Marina and before I even owned her, fixing little problems as I found them during my personal, week-long survey of the boat. Of course, the work kicked into high gear as soon as the purchase was completed a few days after Christmas and it has not stopped since.

When we arrived at Green Cove Springs Marina in late January and got to work in earnest on the refit, I had a pretty extensive list of what I intended to do. At that time I was still clinging to the illusion that I'd get most of it done in the next 4 months so that I could spend the summer cruising. At that point, I wasn't even remotely close to grasping the reality of it.

I hired an old sailing buddy, Captain Ray Jason, to help me get started. Ray left his lovely sloop, Aventura, in Panama, flew up to Florida and moved into my RV here at the yard. During the next 3 months, he logged about 500 hours working side by side with me, 7 days a week. Ray did virtually all of the new paint work on Silver Heels, and a long list of other jobs large and small.

In the course of an almost month-long spell in dry-dock, I also employed Jerry Evans, who has a boat repair shop here in the yard. Jerry is a master craftsman with fiberglass. He closed up the 7 or 8 holes that I opened in Silver Heels' bottom during my campaign to reduce the number of thru-hull fittings in the boat. He also effected a very strong re-glassing of the propeller strut, and he re-sealed the rudder and skeg after I had drilled them open to drain absorbed water from their innards. A few other select craftsmen have contributed their special skills to this project from time to time, mostly in the mechanical line. And just recently, I hired bikini-clad Renee to scrape, clean and oil the exterior teak, which otherwise would still look horrible, cosmetics being pretty far down on my personal to-do list.

Virtually everything else done on the boat I've done myself. I don't mean all this to sound onerous. On the contrary, I have grown to really enjoy this work most days. It is endlessly challenging and wonderfully gratifying. Besides, I don't really have anything better to do than mess around with boats.

For those of you interested in details, click these links for partial lists of (1) the work done as of end of November, 2009, and (2) the projects still remaining to be done. These tend to mention only the key assignments. In between I've done hundreds of smaller jobs that I didn't bother to list. The never-ending, routine maintenance chores common to all boats are similarly omitted. What's left gives some small indication of the scope of the refit. Even so, those of you who have never had the pleasure of doing this kind of work can scarcely imagine how deceptive are simple phrases like "re-plumb and re-wire bilge pump" or "icebox compartment insulation upgrade." In that sense these lists are brief to the point of misleading. Every job on a boat takes longer than you ever dreamed possible, and each one begets 5 more that you never anticipated. The good news is, the "to-do" list is now much shorter than the "done" list. Silver Heels is sound and there is ample time to simply enjoy her.