No Chebacco....

So, I didn't want to come here and say this, but I felt the obligation for anybody who might have read it up to now, and was waiting for an update.

The Chebacco plans came in June, straight from Payson's. But now that they're here, I'm kind of sad to say that I won't be building one after all.

Here's the tale of how this came about:

Father's Day, 2008. My wife and daughter have me open presents and cards. A new Black & Decker corded drill is the big gift, and the card plays the Jack Sparrow theme when you open it.

This drill was meant to spend hours upon hours in my hands building Chebacco. It was just what I wanted. The plans were on the way already, and I was about to go buy the wood.

But that same day - the very same day I got the new drill - Father's Day, my wife hit me with a rather large and ominous statement which will have effects for years. The immediate effect was that my dreams of Chebacco building were in the trash.

She told me to go after that other boat. She wanted the big one. She wasn't content to go camp-cruising and gunkholing on a Chebacco.

"Find us a boat that can go anywhere, with the three of us."

Wow, so after giving up the idea of the 'dream-boat' as I earlier discussed, I am told that this is exactly what I must accomplish. This was no small order she made, it was a huge deal.

I quickly had to reshuffle my priorities. There was no thought of a huge boat, or an expensive one. To bring it from dream-land to reality, it woud have to be one of two things:

1. Very old and cheap.
or
2. Very very, VERY modest

I began looking at hundreds and hundreds of used boat listings. I know every sailboat for sale ofer 26 feet on the US East Coast. I saw them cheap and I saw them dear. The cheap ones were mostly objects which would entail massive amounts of work and money to restore to use, only to have an average 30 year old boat under my family. There were one or two gems in the mess, but still, there was another big problem - I could not think of a way, once buying one of them, of having it any where near close enough to repair or restore, without paying the boat's price again to have it transported to West Virginia.

I'm not driving 200 miles every weekend to work on an old junker boat which is sitting in someone else's lot (which I am also paying for) or in an expensive marina slip eating my meager earnings, going "om nom nom nom' to my paychecks. I have 3 acres right here, a workshop, storage for free under my bedroom window. This is the beauty of West Virginia, it's main saving grace.

No, option one would not work for us, so on to option 2, which had now been modified from my experiences with #1.

A. Very very modest
B. Very seaworthy
C. Can transport without a trucking company
D. Can store at home.
E. Three of us can cruise and sleep aboard for reasonable lengths of time.

There are not many boats that exactly fit this bill, and as the saying goes, every boat is a compromise. The field is narrowwed further by some more discussions with my wife to include

F. Shoal Draft

...and that, really, only leaves about ONE boat to chose from, ONE boat that meets every requirement listed, and it's not Chebacco.

It's this:




So long Chebacco, hello Wharram Tiki 30.